A crowd gathers for the opening day at one of the first Dairy Queens. This year, DQ celebrates 62 years of Dilly Bars and dip cones.

Every time the mercury hovered near the 100-degree mark on the thermometer outside the kitchen window, a three-block trek to Dairy Queen to relieve the relentless heat was our summer ritual. Life in Selma was pretty uneventful, so the Dairy Queen was our Taj Mahal — an oasis that added a flurry of exhilaration to pointless afternoons. Times were different then, and during the 1960s, there weren’t too many black folks venturing into white territory for an ice cream cone. The serving window marked “Colored Only” was consequently rarely occupied, which only fueled my impatience as an eight-year-old waiting in line with a dozen other white people.

Dairy Queen ice cream was more fun to eat than “store-bought” because it was much softer; no bending of stainless steel spoons (or breaking your mom’s antique silver) while attempting to scoop from a carton, or crumbling a cone while trying to load it with supermarket ice cream. DQ vanilla or chocolate dispensed into a cone or Dixie Cup and crowned with a trademark curly-cue (often resembling a pig’s tail) made long walks on hot days worthwhile. Even more amazing than the soft texture was the hard shell created when the cone was dipped into chocolate. (This treat was eventually put on a stick and called a Dilly Bar.) The menu at the Dairy Queen was too good to be true: hot fudge sundaes, peanut butter parfaits, banana splits, foot-long hot dogs laden with an avalanche of onions and kraut, and a strange, brain-freezing drink called a slush.

In 1940, J.F. “Grandpa” McCullough introduced soft serve ice milk in his fast-food restaurant in Joliet, Illinois, a dairy joint that he guaranteed would be the “queen of the dairy business.” When the United States entered World War II, there were 10 Dairy Queens in the country. By war’s end there were 100, which grew to 2,600 a decade later. Today, there are 5,900 restaurants worldwide.

Everybody in Selma, including our dog Timothy, swore by Dairy Queen ice cream. It was common for Timothy to climb the backyard’s four-foot chain link fence during summer’s hottest days and disappear for the afternoon, though we usually knew where to find him: three blocks away, lounging around the cement tables outside the Dairy Queen, watching people eat ice cream with the hope that someone would buy him a cone. Sometimes they did, and Timothy didn’t even care if it came from the counter marked “Colored Only.”