Memory Well: Summertime A&W

Roger's hometown has an actual A&W stand, with the carhop service and picnic tables down by the creek.  They send out specials on Facebook, and today's brought on a wave of nostalgia to Roger, Daniel and I.

I miss having an actual A&W around - the combo KFC/Taco Bell/A&W is an abomination and doesn't count.  Aunt Sherri worked at the one in St George when I was a teen-ager, and I used to love to visit her at work - get a Mama Bear and a Root beer Float in one of their classic glass mugs.  When you get the root beer float just right, you get the ice crystals forming around the edge of the ice-cream, where it's half ice cream, half root beer and all delicious...  And the foot long Coney Dogs.  I have no idea what was in the coney sauce, but I still crave it, 30 years later. 

And the statuary from 70s fast food places - Mama Bear, Papa Bear from A&W, JB's Big Boy, the huge rotating bucket of chicken on top of the pole at KFC...  I miss tacky architecture.  We do have the Brown Jug on Sandy (a strip club where the whole building is shaped like a jug of moonshine), but for the most part, we just don't have odes to bad taste anymore.  Although the Portland Building does resemble a really tacky box of chocolate, so that's something...