BELLEFONTE, PA — At 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, Wes Hatmaker unlocked the service window of the Allegheny Street Tastee Freez for the first time since October 12, and the eleven people who had been waiting in the parking lot since 9:40 moved forward as a single quiet body without anyone saying anything.
The Tastee Freez, which has operated on a March-to-October schedule since 1974, reopens each year on a date Wes selects “by feel” and announces via a paper notice taped to the window approximately 48 hours in advance. This year’s notice went up Sunday afternoon, roughly twelve hours after the clocks moved forward, and was photographed for the Bellefonte Centre County Buy-Sell-Trade Facebook group at 5:11 p.m. by a woman who has since deactivated her account.
First in line was Eileen Tassler, 62, who said she had not specifically intended to be first but had arrived at 9:40 to find no one there and felt it would be “rude to leave.” She ordered a small vanilla cone with chocolate sprinkles. The temperature at the time of the transaction was 41 degrees.
Wes, who declined to be quoted but later told a regular he was “moved,” prepared 47 cones, 12 sundaes, and three of the seasonal Peanut Butter Wave Blizzards in the first forty minutes of operation. By 11:43 he had sold through his entire weekend allotment of rainbow sprinkles and was sending his youngest grandson Tyler down to the IGA for more.
Roger Klinedinst, who runs the unofficial Bellefonte weather page on Facebook and had taken a half day from the County Assessor’s office to be in line by 10:15, called the opening “the only date on the calendar that means anything between Christmas and Memorial Day.” He ordered a butterscotch dip and ate it standing up next to his truck.
Not everyone left satisfied. Donna Wertz, third in line, had driven in from Pleasant Gap specifically for a Peanut Butter Wave Blizzard, which sold out four customers ahead of her. She accepted a chocolate-vanilla twist under what she described to her sister on the phone as “protest” and was observed eating it in her Buick with the heat running.
The opening also drew Karl Heberling, 78, who has been first in line in eleven previous years and who arrived Tuesday at 10:52, having misread the notice. Karl was given a free cone by Wes without discussion. The two men shook hands across the counter and Karl walked back to his Oldsmobile, where he sat for some time.
By 1:15 the line had thinned and Wes was leaning in the window with a coffee, watching cars pass. A motorist honked twice. Wes raised the coffee. The forecast for Wednesday calls for snow.