December 6: Thirty-One Flavors

Irvin Robbins, who launched an ice-cream empire with his bar mitsve money, was born in Winnipeg on this date in 1917. His parents owned a dairy and ice-cream store in Tacoma, Washington. He and his brother-in-law Burt Baskin combined their business sense and resources in 1948 to create Baskin-Robbins (so named in 1953), which quickly became a franchise chain featuring 31 flavors and little pink spoons for tasting them. When the company was sold to United Fruit in 1967, there were some five hundred stores; today there are more than five thousand (as well as more than a thousand flavors) and the company is merged with Dunkin’ Donuts (founded by William Rosenberg in 1950). Robbins’ only son John, according to his website, “was groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps, but chose to walk away from Baskin-Robbins and the immense wealth it represented to . . . ‘pursue the deeper American Dream . . . the dream of a society at peace with its conscience because it respects and lives in harmony with all life forms.’ ” He is the founder of Earthsave International.
“On our first date, I treated her to the finest ice cream Baskin-Robbins had to offer, our dinner table doubling as the curb. I kissed her, and it tasted like chocolate.” —Barack Obama