Keaton Johnson is not too familiar with ice cream history, but he does know that if he doesn’t keep black walnut and butter pecan ice cream in stock at Ken’s Ice Cream parlor, he’ll be read the riot act by Grandma Wanda Johnson-Pope, the original owner, and the ice cream parlor’s longest termed fans.
“This is something you’re going to find down South or down in the Midwest. If you want something special other than vanilla, strawberry, or chocolate, it’s going to be black walnut and butter pecan,” Johnson said during an interview with Random Lengths News.
Grandma Wanda came from an era where Black folks from southern states still recalled not being able to purchase vanilla ice cream except for July 4.
“I run out of black walnut and butter pecan weekly if not almost daily.
At 29 years of age, Keaton knows what he is talking about. He has easily spent half his life working, managing, and operating Ken’s Ice Cream Parlor, a business started by his grandmother in 1980. As a result, he knows which of the 32 flavors of ice cream are most popular.
Keaton said he hoped to one day offer their house-made ice cream.
When Grandma Wanda first launched, Ken’s sold Thrifty’s ice cream, a drugstore chain that began selling ice cream at at-cost prices to keep customers buying while shopping at Thrifty’s from the 1950s forward. Thrifty’s ice cream became so popular that the drugstore chain spun it off as its own entity that provided freezers and other equipment for ice cream parlors that sold Thrifty’s ice cream exclusively. In time, Grandma Wanda branched to include Carnations and a variety of vendors for their sherberts such as Fosselmans and Crystal.
For three decades Grandma Wanda provided great ice cream, excellent service, with good advice and conversation on the side.
“You come here, you’ll feel at home. She’s going to tell you right … tell you if you’re wrong. No matter how she tells you, you’re going to feel good coming out of that conversation with her,” Keaton said.
Generations of local children learned the value of a dollar in her ice cream parlor, resulting in those children growing up and returning to the ice cream parlor with their children. This level of intergenerational connectedness was critical 20 years ago when the ice cream parlor’s landlord at their former location down the street, on Avalon where the 99 Cents Only store is located, tried to muscle them out of their lease at the behest of Baskin Robbins.
If “God doesn’t like ugly, and He’s not too fond of cute either,” was a situation, it would have been when Grandma Wanda’s plight became common knowledge, and Carson residents rose up in her defense and launched a boycott of Baskin Robbins and picketed the strip mall in protest of the landlord’s actions.
The ice cream behemoth had come to Carson just after Anschutz Entertainment Group had developed the then-controversial Dignity Health Sports Park (known then as the StubHub Center).
At the time, a franchise business owner in the same strip mall as Ken’s Ice Cream was quoted saying, “The city promised us the stadium would help the small businesses here, but it turns out Wanda is the first casualty.”
Less than a month later, the Anschutz Entertainment Group hired a law firm on Grandma Wanda’s behalf and agreed to pay the bills. AEG chief executive at the time, Tim Lieweke, was quoted as saying:
“We think she has been put into a very unfair position. She was wronged. This is our community, too, and we think Ken’s should be a part of the neighborhood for years to come.”
Keaton, who was about 9 years of age, remembers.
“My brother, my parents, my grandmother, myself, and my friends were all out there picketing,” Keaton recalled. “We’re screaming at the top of our lungs to protest and try to beat the system that was trying to get us out after being there 20-plus years.”
Grandma Wanda got to keep their lease, but it wasn’t exactly the end of the shenanigans. Ken’s Ice Cream moved to its current address after the lease was up.
Ken’s Ice Cream Origin Story
Recounting the history of Ken’s Ice Cream, Keaton noted the ice cream parlor was supposed to be an arcade.
“Initially, we had the permit and everything,” Keaton said. “The plans for the city were like, ‘You know what, an arcade sounds great, but we don’t want all these students being truant and skipping class.’ So, even with the permits, you can’t do the arcade here.”
The next viable alternative was an ice cream parlor.
Grandma Wanda, Ken’s Ice Cream Parlor’s original proprietor, migrated to California from Midland, Texas to become a legal secretary. It was after this move that she met Keaton’s grandfather, who worked in the aerospace industry. She became a homemaker after giving birth to her son, Kenneth.
Keaton noted that his grandmother opened the ice cream parlor partly to give her something to do. Ultimately, the ice cream parlor opened while Kenneth was in high school, a star track and field athlete at Banning High School at the time. Grandma Wanda thought Ken’s Ice Cream sounded better than Wanda’s Ice Cream parlor.
Though Kenneth helped out at the ice cream parlor from time to time, the passion to continue the ice cream parlor was passed on to Keaton, who’d worked off and on there since he was in grade school.
Keaton explained that in 2014, after nearly 35 years of service, Grandma Wanda was ready to retire.
“She got me at a good time. I was finishing up JC [junior college] … I transferred to Dominguez Hills and [she] asked me.”
At that time, he was just a young man going to school trying to figure out life. He had to determine if going to school and earning a degree to join a big corporation was going to be his life’s path.
His grandmother planted the seed of running his own business, noting that he couldn’t get fired from his own business, other than closing it down himself.
After deciding to work part-time and then full-time to learn the business, he’d encounter longtime customers who’d come in for a scoop of ice cream and recount their appreciation for Grandma Wanda and Ken’s Ice Cream. It turned out that many of them were once children themselves who came to enjoy the creamy cold deserts or got their first paycheck scooping ice cream within the four walls of Ken’s Ice Cream parlor. When they got older and became parents themselves, they introduced their children to Ken’s Ice Cream.
Keaton admitted It made him feel good to be a part of an institution that brought smiles to the faces of Carson residents.
“People think it’s easy. You just scoop it and put it into a cup. But there’s a small science to it,” Keaton said. “You don’t go to an official school until you come here. We teach you how to do that. And that’s our Ken’s ice cream scooping school because we’re sticklers. If you don’t do it right, you do it again because it has to look pretty by the time it goes out.”
Keaton and his business partner Daylin Norris plan to open a bakery next door under the Ken’s Ice Cream brand producing sweetbreads, cobblers, pies, and cakes. Specifically, they aim to open a space outfitted with a professional kitchen so that Carson’s patissiers can have a platform from which to launch.
“That’s what we do,” Keaton said. “We support small businesses.”
Keaton concluded his interview with RLn by saying:
“Y’all [the community and City of Carson] have been supporting us all of these years. All we’re trying to do is give back to you and make sure that we can all come together as residents. If we don’t look out for each other, who else will do it for us?”