GRETA ANDERSON: "It's been a busy life and a wonderful life."
Anderson's Queen Greta: In praise of custard’s 1st stand
Business founder celebrates her 90th birthday
Western New York’s queen of frozen custard turned 90 Tuesday.
“It’s been a busy life and a wonderful life,” said a smiling Greta Anderson, who along with her late husband, Carl, squeezed out countless Anderson’s Frozen Custard cones after launching their family business on Kenmore Avenue post-World War II.
Anderson is still busy. She can’t help it. It’s the way she has been for her whole life, her kids say.
She spent Labor Day throwing a family dinner for 15 and serving up her homemade Swedish rice pudding, oatmeal cookies, brownies and — of course — Anderson’s signature frozen custard with hot fudge sauce.
“She’s not a 90-year-old who sits,” remarked daughter Holly Anderson, who now runs the family-owned business along with brothers Nels and Keith.
These days, Anderson splits her time between Florida and a family cottage on Grand Island.
She serves as the family business’ cheerleader, her daughter says, and still insists on pulling weeds at almost all of Anderson’s eight locations to keep things tidy.
So far this summer, she hasn’t made it to the Cheektowaga store. And she’s feeling guilty about that.
“They’re going to think you don’t love them anymore,” her son, Nels, chided her affectionately Tuesday.
Carl Anderson used to hunt pheasantS along Sheridan Drive in the Town of Tonawanda, back before an Anderson’s Frozen Custard opened there in 1953. Greta and Carl dreamed of building a place there that would someday accommodate hordes of custard lovers who lined up all the way out to the street.
And it happened. Carl Runfola, a City of Tonawanda resident who has been a faithful Anderson’s customer since the Sheridan Drive location opened, can verify those shoulder-to-shoulder crowds waiting for a cold, sweet treat on hot summer nights.
Runfola began bringing his daughter, Dana, to Anderson’s from the time she was knee-high. Tuesday, he sat outside the Sheridan Drive store watching a third-generation customer — his 6-year-old grandson Sammy — as the boy enjoyed a birthday party with friends.
Back in the 1950s, Holly Anderson’s most vivid memory of her mother is this:
At 6 p. m. nightly, a homemade dinner landed on the family table. At 8, the family phone would ring exactly once. It was Carl’s signal for his wife to walk from Belmont Avenue to the Sheridan Drive store to begin serving the rush of hungry customers who wanted custard, beef on weck or Greta’s famous homemade butterscotch.
At 11 p. m., the couple brought home piles of food-stained linens, including aprons Greta Anderson’s mother once made by hand for the store. As the washing machine chugged through cycles in the basement, the couple would count the evening’s receipts together.
These days, Anderson’s Web site says, the business dispenses 4,000 custard cones per week. But Anderson remembers that the first time she tried using those newfangled soft-serve machines instead of dipping the custard by hand, it was no piece of cake.
“It was the day we opened the Sheridan store,” she recalled, smiling slyly. “The machines didn’t work! We had to call an electrician.”
Disaster was averted, and the rest is custard history.
