Vintage 1950s–60s Ice Cream Counter Menu 🍦 NOS | Unprinted Americana Diner Decor

Remember the Ice Cream Counter? 🍦 Vintage 1950s–60s NOS Unprinted Menu

Size: 13" x 9 3/4"

🍨 A big slice of apple pie with a scoop of vanilla melting down the side, and menu in fat old-time letters across a green panel with a yellow scroll border. This is a stock menu cover from the ice cream trade, never used, and the inside is still completely blank.

🔍 What's On It

It's one sheet of glossy card that folds into a menu folder, with the same picture on the front and back: white menu lettering on green, the pie à la mode on a turquoise-rimmed plate, and a yellow border with little scrolled corners. The inside is plain. At the foot of each panel in tiny type it reads LITHO'D IN U.S.A. IC 2150 and © THE WEILLER CO. PHILA. PA.

🖨️ The Weiller Co., Philadelphia

Weiller made point-of-sale advertising for the ice cream and dairy business. The firm started in 1927 as Lavenson & Weiller, Inc., and that October Eugene and Herman Weiller were in Cleveland showing window displays and signs at the Dairy Industries Exposition. By the late 1940s it was The Weiller Co. at Castor Avenue and Amber Street in Philadelphia, selling what it called "SELL-A-VISION" displays, with an agent up in Canada, and the dairy trade directories list Weiller for menu covers in 1956 and "menu covers and menu sheets" in 1966. It was still making displays in Philadelphia into 1990.

Here's how these worked. Weiller printed the stock cover, a dairy put its ice cream brand on it, and the restaurant or soda fountain printed its own menu inside. A copy at the University of Alberta still has the Crystal Ice Cream name on it and a Calgary fish-and-chips shop's menu inside. Weiller's other ice cream pieces carry the same kind of IC number, IC 539 on a Better Maid ice cream menu and IC 1634 on a set of sundae displays. This one never got a dairy's name or a menu, so it's just the picture.

Collectors who carry this same cover put it in the 1950s and 60s, and the same pie-and-ice-cream photograph turns up on a die-cut store sign that one dealer dates to 1953.

🥧 Pie à la Mode

And the dish itself has a story. The legend goes that in the 1890s a professor named Charles Watson Townsend ordered ice cream on his apple pie at the Cambridge Hotel in Cambridge, New York, a fellow diner called it pie à la mode, and he later ordered it at Delmonico's in New York City and the New York Sun ran with it. The story only shows up in print in his 1936 obituary, though, and "apple pie, a la mode" was already on printed menus by 1893. Either way, it's been on ice cream counter menus ever since.

📏 Details

• Vintage Weiller Co. stock ice cream menu cover, IC 2150, Philadelphia
• Pie à la mode photo, green and yellow border, same design front and back
• Blank inside, never imprinted, New Old Stock
• About 13" x 9 3/4" open
• You'll get one menu like the ones shown

🖼️ Frame it for a kitchen, a café or an ice cream shop, or use it the way it was meant to be used and write your own menu inside.