The Lost Lingo of New York City’s Soda Jerks

Author: Natasha Frost / Source: Atlas Obscura

Soda jerks served sundaes and malts in white caps and jackets.

Throughout the 1940s, during the post-dinner lull, students and staff at Columbia University would make a beeline for Friedgen’s Pharmacy up on Amsterdam Avenue. There, they’d tuck in to strawberry floats, marshmallow sundaes, and chocolate malts, all served up by Thomas Foppiano, “a small, squat, balding man who likes to laugh,” the New York Times reported.

Foppiano was a “soda jerk,” one of half a million employed at tens of thousands of soda fountains across the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. They had white coats, swift fingers, and even swifter tongues—indeed, their linguistic concoctions were as much of a draw as the sweet treats they served up.

Foppiano himself, the paper reported, got a special shout-out in a university English course on American colloquialism after a professor ordered a large cherry coke and heard him shout back: “Stretch one, paint it red!”

Soda jerks became known across the country for this kind of esoteric slang. They were often virtuosic wordsmiths, with a gift for puns and riffs. And, at a time when the United States was nuts for all things ice-cream, they were at once “consummate showmen, innovators, and freelance linguists of the drugstore stage,” writes Michael Karl Witzel in The American Drive-In. “America’s soda jerk became the pop culture star of the Gilded Age.”

Throughout the 1930s, Americans were eating more ice-cream than ever before: In 1938 alone, the New York Times reported, Americans consumed some 275,000,000 gallons of frozen custard: “We now have the peculiar blessing of a national ice-cream week, ice-cream murders, and a dog ice-cream-eating championship, last won by a pup called Shiver II.”

All over the country, Americans were tucking into ice-cream sodas.

Nowhere was the cold stuff more popular than in New York City. That year, 20,000,000 gallons of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry glugged down the gullets of New Yorkers, served up at drugstores from Mott Street to Harlem.

Customers would sit on swiveling stools and order serving after serving of ice-cream sodas. (Despite a gamut of flavors, consumers tended toward the conservative: About four dishes out of every ten were vanilla. About seven out of ten were vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry.)

Behind the counter were the soda jerks. Their responsibilities were many—breaking and draining eggs with one hand, carving chicken, remembering orders, pulling the correct spigots and spindles on the drugstore soda fountain. But most of all, the Times reported, “the prime requisite of their station is the ability to bandy words.”

In 1936, English professor Harold W. Bentley conducted a full-scale investigation into the cabalistic mumbo-jumbo of these young New Yorkers, publishing his findings in the journal American Speech. They were so semantically inventive, he wrote, that they had become a tourist destination in their own right, skillfully “serving colorfully named concoctions [and] providing an attraction much stronger than stone and concrete piled high. To foreigners in search of local American color, the soda fountains are as good as made to order.” (In fact, soda jerks were slinging lingo all over the country—though many of the terms Bentley described are specific to the Big Apple.)