HOLLYWOOD CELEBRATES MILWAUKEE-AREA HIGH SCHOOL SOCIAL STRATIFICATION.

That's incidental to a story about lost Milwaukee-area custard stands.  Several of the stands share a genealogy, either as family members set up their own shops, or as employees of established shops or chains went into business on their own; and the expression "butter burger" probably cannot be trademarked.  The article also offers an opportunity to remind readers of an important summer message.  "During the 1980s and ’90s, Steve Kalt operated his own eponymous custard stand in a former Boy Blue on the city’s northwest side – at 5653 N. 76th St. – after having learned the business from nearly two decades working at Kopp’s."  Boy Blue took ownership of a number of Carvel stands, after that chain retrenched to its ancestral East Coast haunts.  There's some confusion among people who aren't familiar with frozen treats.  Both custard and soft serve come out of mixing machines, but there are major differences in how they are made, and both are different from ice cream.  There's no way to swirl custard into a cone, it has to be scooped.

It's the now departed Milky Way custard stands that made the big screen.

One of three Milky Way restaurants opened by Arthur Richter, the Port Washington Road Milky Way is the only one that has something of an international profile. That’s because Tom Miller, who graduated from nearby Nicolet High School in 1958, was a regular at the drive-in. And when "Happy Days," the TV show that Miller created, launched on ABC-TV in January 1974, it brought Arnold’s (later Al’s) Drive-In into homes across the world.

Though some in Milwaukee claim Leon’s was the inspiration for Arnold’s, others say it was the Pig’n Whistle. Both are wrong.

On the north shore, there were enough hangouts that the cliques didn't have to mingle out of school.

"According to Miller, it was the Milky-Way (sic), and only the Milky-Way. And that’s only logical, because the Milky-Way was the place where all the North Shore 'kaleeges' (high schoolers bound for college) congregated. Miller was one of them. Across the street next to the old Clark station was the Redwood, where the 'hoods,' the ducktailed, leather-jacketed guys, hung out."

That was the social atmosphere in which Miller spent his teen years, and it was those experiences that he drew upon when he concepted "Happy Days."

"Arnold’s is really a compilation of everybody’s recollections of the drive-in of the ’50s," Miller told the Journal in 1977. "It’s just that the Milky Way was closest to me when I grew up on Bay Ridge (Avenue)."

It couldn't be Leon's, near Pulaski High School, because if that had been a hangout, the hoods and the kaleeges (terminology that was still current into the mid-1960s) would have clashed, the way the latter day greasers, freaks, and jocks tended to do at the Big Boy haunted by Milwaukee Hamilton students, as well as West Allis high schoolers who lived just the other side of Oklahoma Avenue.