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Handel’s serves up special thanks to Valley customers
By SEAN BARRON
YOUNGSTOWN
Perhaps the only thing sweeter for 10-year-old Ceara Rasley than her chocolate-cake-batter ice cream on a cone was the price.
“My friends told me that if you go to Handel’s, they’re having a $1 ice-cream sale,” the Boardman girl said, referring to Saturday’s customer-appreciation day at all eight Mahoning Valley Handel’s Ice Cream locations. “It’s also nice on a hot day like this.”
David Rasley found out about the $1 special from Ceara, a Glenwood Middle School fifth-grader who listed chocolate-chip cookie dough and chocolate cake batter as her two favorites. The elder Rasley’s pick was mocha chocolate chip.
“If you can’t drink your coffee, eat it,” he said with a chuckle.
Father and daughter were among those who stopped by the area’s first Handel’s store, 3931 Handel’s Court near Market Street and Midlothian Boulevard on the city’s South Side, to take advantage of the one-day offer.
On Saturday, all eight Handel’s sites sold ice cream on sugar and regular cones for $1 to thank customers for their patronage, noted Danielle Dietz, manager of the Youngstown store, which opened in the mid-1940s.
Lines started forming behind the business’s two main sliding-glass windows early Saturday afternoon, but employees were anticipating the largest volume of customers toward evening, Dietz said.
Before returning to their El Paso, Texas, home today, Hank and Barbara Parisi couldn’t resist biting into cones topped with chocolate almond — and part of a longtime Youngstown tradition.
“I read about [the appreciation day] in The Vindicator,” said Barbara Parisi, an account manager for an El Paso charter-school district and formerly of Hubbard.
“We were driving by and I said, ‘Look, the original Handel’s is still there.’ They always have good ice cream,” said her husband, formerly of Struthers, who works as a controller for Packard Electric in Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso.
Hank and Barbara Parisi, who came with their daughter, Lisa, said they first patronized Handel’s when they were kids. The couple was in town visiting family, they said.
“You have to do a few things when you come home, and Handel’s is one of them,” Barbara Parisi added.
To prepare for the expected increase in business, the store planned to open seven or eight windows simultaneously and have more product on hand, noted Dietz, a nine-year Handel’s employee.
“We’re just going to have to keep up, but it won’t be hard because we have good workers,” Dietz said, adding that she also appreciates the familylike atmosphere of the business as well as how it helps the community.