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August Greetings from The Franklin Fountain!
As we head into the sweltering meaty center of the summer, we have a HOT topic to discuss:
Sweat! After enduring a battery of complaints about the heat, sidling up to scoop amongst the soda jerks on seven hour shifts and constantly running up and down four flights of our 19th century building to and from the office, something emerged from the hazy heat {and it wasn’t just perspiration}…The Virtues of Sweat:
I. Let us not forget that we homo sapiens are just another species of animals, which biologically must excrete all sorts of fluids, with transpiration (also termed ‘perspiration’ in some universities) being the most elementary example.
II. Transpiration is a signal to let others humans know that we are feeling a particular way, especially under warm conditions when the anti-arid action is accelerated.
III. Male sweat is thought to contain pheromones that trigger physiological activity in females, increase brain activity in women and peak arousal.
IV. Transpiration contains mainly water, so as the body drinks it up, it must release it in various ways.
V. Sweating shows that we are working. The harder we work, the harder we sweat. This is not to be underestimated or under-exaggerated.
VI. What is the term “sweat equity” without sweat? True equity requires physical output or work to create wealth; otherwise it is hollow materialism.
VII. When we are perspiring together, sweat lubricates the situation.
VIII. Benjamin Franklin penned “No Gains without Pains” and, in particular, promoted
athletics to keep the body trim. Whilst sweating is a sign of our efforts, Dr. Franklin
patented a unique “disposable Underarm Sweat Shields” to absorb the effects upon
others. Don’t believe us? Just check the searchable engine.
A COUPLE OF PRETTY PEACHES
On a more refreshing note, we now are featuring Fresh Peach Ice Cream at the Fountain! A marathon shift including Iryna and Davina, our product managers witnessed the pitting and blanching of over 300 pounds of plump yellow peaches from Green Meadow Farm in Gap, Pennsylvania (that’s Lancaster County for you city folk). The resulting ice cream show the fruits of their labor and sweat of their brow. There’s no purer embodiment of summer than the perfect peach ice cream!
MODERN IMPROVEMENTS
On the other side of the coin, to cut down on the slippery sweaty steps, we’ve installed some ‘improvements’ to make the office run smoother. Earlier in the spring, we bought a pair of early oak intercoms out of the back of a beat-up VW microbus from a local dumpster diver named Neil. After a trip to the antique telephone doctor in Wisconsin, Patrick ran the wiring and these polished beauties {manufactured from the Connecticut Telephone & Electric Co. circa 1915} now ring between the Fountain & the Office.
Picked out of a central New York antiques shop, another contraption was languishing in Ryan’s loft as an object d’art and finally found a use. What was probably once a fishing line winder now functions to lower down messages and checks from the office to the Letitia Street sidewalk. After some experimenting and design tweaks, we’ve found the system actually takes longer than walking the correspondence downstairs but exercises the lesser-used elbow area muscles instead. Not to mention the extreme delight of passersby who might be taking pictures of the 1940s fisherman sign painted on the side of the building. Fish on!
In the Fountain, be sure to turn around and check out the time on our unique Seth Thomas store clock circa 1910. We’ve had our good friends at Alexander Horn & Co. of Wynnewood coordinate the beautiful gold-leaf eglomise advertisement of Franklin to the glass door. Now we just need to remember to wind it every 8 days. As he sent us on our way, Alex told me a little-known historical fact of horology: move the pendulum UP to “speed up” the movement or move the pendulum DOWN to “slow down” the swing, hence the popular phraseology.
BOTTLED BEAUTIES
After some intensive searching and telephone persistence, Iryna was able to source some additional old-fashioned sodas for the Fountain. A Manhattan Special is 7 oz. of carbonated caffeinated coffee bliss, made in Brooklyn since 1895. Try it chilled with a scoop of Maple Walnut on top for an “Old Curmudgeon” ice cream soda. {www.manhattanspecial.com}
Coca-Cola can now be had in three forms at the Fountain: in syrup form drawn from the tap or in two take-home bottle varieties, one the cane sugar version hobble-skirt from Mexico, the other a special limited edition 1910 diamond bottle. All give a quaint and somehow tastier experience than that 64-ouncer in the plastic stein one obtains at the local convenience shop!
