This 1953 Chattanooga Free Press photo shows the former Dairy Gold restaurant on Hixson Pike back when soft-serve ice cream and hamburgers hot off the grill were the bee's knees.
A sign in the window touts a special for the month: Burgundy Cherry-flavored malts, shakes and sundaes. Yum.
A mid-20th century newspaper advertisement for Dairy Gold offers this mouth-watering bargain: "two delicious hamburgers plus a thick, creamy chocolate or vanilla shake" for 39 cents.
Locals may recognize this intersection of Hixson Pike and Dorchester Road as the center of a still-bustling retail and restaurant district in the Riverview area. Some of the houses in the background at the corner of Worthington Street and Hixson Pike remain there 67 years later.
Presently, the space that was formerly home to the Hixson Pike Dairy Gold is occupied by Il Primo Italian Restaurant in a building that was, before that, a Greenlife grocery location.
Newspaper records show that Dairy Gold Inc., under the management of proprietor John N. Klein Jr., opened a restaurant at the intersection of Brainerd and Germantown roads in 1949. Klein was said to be related by marriage to the family who operated the local Kay's ice cream store chain.
By 1963, an ad in the Chattanooga Daily Times noted that there were five Dairy Gold locations in the Chattanooga area: 4903 Brainderd Road, 1750 Dayton Boulevard, 3116 South Broad St., 1112 Hixson Pike and 2220 East Main St.
John Klein Jr.'s, 2009 newspaper obituary notes that he was an Air Force veteran and 1949 graduate of the University of Chattanooga, the precursor of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
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In a 1959 newspaper ad, the Dairy Gold chain put out a call for "neat, attractive curb girls" to work at the Brainerd Road location, which occasionally offered "buy one get one free" ice cream cones.
The Dairy Gold location on Dayton Boulevard in Red Bank was operational until the mid-2000s, according to media reports.
This photo by photograper Bob Sherrill is part of a collection of Chattanooga Free Press photos at ChattanoogaHistory.com, a web site devoted to preserving vintage photos of the city curated by history buff Sam Hall.
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Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com.