This Month’s Installment :  The Missing Ring
You may have heard the story of Omar Knedlik from Coffeyville, Kansas, who invented the ICEE in the late 1950’s. The owner of a Dairy Queen, he didn’t have a soda fountain, so would freeze bottles of soda and serve them instead. As it turns out, his customers preferred the frozen sodas to regular fountain drinks and kept coming back for more. It took Knedlik five years to build the first ICEE® machine, but by the mid-60s about 300 ICEE® machines had been manufactured.
What you may not have heard is the tale of Edna Smiley, one of Omar Knedlik’s first customers, who was changed forever by her first ICEE experience. She was thirteen years old when she walked into the Dairy Queen that day. She’d been there many times, but had never had the soon-to-be-famous ICEE. She ordered a burger, fries, and a small water, and sat down at a booth in the corner.

For two days, Edna had been plagued with worry. She’d borrowed her great-grandmother’s diamond ring from her mother’s jewelry box, and had taken it to try on. A couple hours after putting it on her finger, she looked down to find it missing! It had slipped off without her noticing while she played. She felt distress as never before in her young life. She’d lost her great grandmother’s ring, her small town family’s most valuable possession. The ring, which had been handed down through four generations, was worth a lot – in both sentiment and value.

Edna sat, slowly eating, and preparing a speech of how to tell her mother the ring was gone, when a restaurant clerk approached. She looked up to find an ICEE in front of her on the table. The clerk said, “on the house,” winked and walked away. He was hoping to cheer the serious girl with this gesture.

She took five or six big, fast gulps of the frozen, carbonated soda. Instantly, her whole head rushed with sensation. Her brain rang with the piercing cold; her back teeth felt ready to explode under the pressure of ice. She had a vision! The toothbrush cup! She’d taken the ring off and dropped it into the toothbrush holder before she’d washed her hands. The ICEE headache was an omen, a message from above! She sucked down the rest of the ICEE and ran home as fast as she could. She put the ring in her mother’s jewelry box, safe and sound, back where she’d found it.

Edna Smiley has had an ICEE everyday since. Legend has it that the “ring vision” was the first of many. To this day, people line up at Edna’s door to ask her advice as she sips her ICEE. She’s turned her gift into quite a prosperous business. All around her, people gather in hopes of sharing (or at least witnessing) the metaphysical power of the ICEE.