by John Briggs

THE THANK YOU notes to Washtenaw Dairy, for donations of donuts and coffee and ice-cream and ice-cream bars, pile up. Co-owner Jim Smith puts the letters in a cardboard box as they come in.

“We put them in the box, and when it gets filled, we put it in the attic,” Smith said.

He carried an overflowing box downstairs recently to take a look at what it contained: letters from the U-M Dental School and Salvation Army, a card from Luke, grade 1, neatly printed in pencil, his own drawing of a blue and red ice-cream cone on the front:

“Dear Washtenaw Dairy,” it read, “Thank you for donating the donuts for our walk.A.Thon we raised a lot of money for school programs thanks for your support.”

Others were from Food Gatherers, and from the Ann Arbor Police and Fire Departments, Bethel AME Church (“Your store’s contribution of milk, egg, and butter was of tremendous benefit to 135 families in need…”, the Dexter Fire Department, Arbor Hospice, the Kiwanis Club, St. Paul Lutheran Church & School (from July 1, this year: “Thank you very much for your extemely generous donation of twenty $2.00 Washtenaw Dairy certificates for our Ice Cream Social in June,” St. Paul’s note said. “You made many winners of our all-school sack races VERY happy!”).

The Dairy gives as a matter of course. Smith held up a note from the Dental School, which does a free clinic, “for kids,” he said, twice a year. “We give sugar to the Dental School,” he said ruefully, “so they can take care of the kids, but it’s a great thing they’re doing, taking care of kids, you know, for free…  We’ve been doing that for a bunch of years….”

And the Fire Department?

He shrugged, smiling at another hand-drawn card, this one with an ice-cream cone in pink and brown from MARiAna age 6. “Fire?” he said. “There was a big fire. Someone needed something. So we sent it over. They’re going to be there all night.”

Jim Smith in his early 60s, a burly, genial man, and “getting tired,” he said, though over the course of an hour with him on a sunny September morning, he didn’t show it. A reporter found him standing on one of the planter benches outside the Dairy, fitting an owl decoy into the tree branches to intimidate birds who’d been sitting there and fouling up the bench. “Hope it will work. Maybe,” he said.

He detoured on the way to the attic to look at one of the big walk-in freezers. It had failed over the weekend, and no one had noticed until Monday. They lost $5,500 worth of product, and their insurance company, so prompt with bills, suddenly became distant, “like they never heard of you.”

He shrugged.

A Dairy scrap book he lent to The Ann Arbor Independent has pictures of him eating a cone at the Dairy at age three and one of him  at  nine, helping his dad, Jim Smith II, scoop cones. He has spent much of his life in the concrete building at Ashley and Madison, a business that was a city institution when Frank Sinatra still had his original hair.

It hasn’t changed much. It still has clean-cut ice-cream scoopers, teenagers sitting outside on benches licking the big cones (nearly 50 flavors, among them the daunting Mackinaw Island Fudge (“Vanilla ice cream with chocolate fudge chunks and swirled with chocolate fudge”) and tables inside populated by gray haired regulars, sipping coffee and talking about construction projects and local schools and neighborhoods or the rising, falling fortunes of the football or basketball teams. They also talk about national politics. The regulars were featured in a book 10 years ago, Talking about Politics, by University of Wisconsin political science professor Kathy Walsh, who sat in on the morning talks for three years.

Smith’s office walls are papered with autographed pictures sports figures such as Bob Knight and John Wooden, and a littered shelf behind his chair has game balls from Michigan Rose Bowl appearances, autographed by Bo Schembechler. The Dairy isn’t as big as Michigan Stadium, but for long-time city residents and visitors, it’s as well known.

The building itself, though it’s spruced up and tidy, looks much as it did early in the 20th century, when it housed Drugcraft, a manufacturer of elixirs (“High Grade Pharmaceutical Preparations,” says an advertising flyer from that era, “High Grade Toilet Preparations”). The front door, a picture from the Daily Times News of Monday, September 16, 1918, shows, used to be on the Ashley Street side.

At some point a second door was added that straddles Ashley and Madison.

The present business is pushing 80 years old.

“We don’t change,” Smith said. “We never change that much. It’s familiar for everybody and they come back, and they like ice cream. They like big cones and our donuts…everyone loves our donuts.”

And the Dairy gives back. Smith pulled down a stack of receipt books from 2011, filled with the numbers for each donation. It was an attempt, he said, to get a handle on how much they gave. He flipped through the top book and its many pages and laughed. “I gave it up,” he said. “I never added them up.”

Why do they give so much? Smith seemed nearly puzzled at the question.

“We’re part of the community,” he said. “I mean, it’s just good business. The community comes out here and supports us and we support them.”

He continued though the box of thank you notes, frowning and then remembering. “Here’s one, Bach School, they’re just up the street. They did a small walk-a-thon. Here’s St. Thomas. Twenty-five kids who needed something….”