Editor’s Note: As has become a summer tradition, the Echo presents a selection of short fiction from Princeton-area writers featuring people and places familiar to all Princetonians.
The Princeton Project
By Jan Gottlieb
All of the memories came flooding back to me when I went to pick up my daughter from her job at Thomas Sweet. It was Valentine’s Day, 2017.
“Next group in line!” Came the cry of an ice cream scooper adorned with Valentine’s gear, a red and white striped bow tie clipped to neckline of his gray Thomas Sweet t-shirt. Since I always wait until my daughter is free to prepare my amaretto-mango blend-in, I stepped aside so the next group could be served. Walter Matthau-playing-Einstein smiled down at me from his picture on the wall, and I glanced at myself in the fun mirror, amused at the distorted image that made me look like Hyacinth Hippo from Fantasia. In an instant the flashback came, a memory I had apparently suppressed for almost 40 years because it was too crazy to share with anyone. What I am about to tell you is a true story that I’ve never quite been able to put into words…until now.
The year was 1979. I was a freshman in high school, procrastinating on a social studies project that required us to pick any building in town and delve deep into its history, as far back as books and records could take us. The assignment was due in two days. I hadn’t even picked a building.
Chronic procrastinator that I was, I decided that reading over the project assignment sheet was enough work to warrant an ice cream break, so I wandered over to Thomas Sweet. If I couldn’t seem to start this project, I figured I’d make some headway on the personal project I’d started a few months ago on the day Thomas Sweet opened: to try every permutation of blend-in. I walked the 10 blocks to Thomas Sweet, anticipating which flavors and toppings I would have. As I waited in line, shielding my face from Ken the ice cream scooper who happened to be my physics lab partner and intense crush, I marveled at my squat image in the fun mirror that was a recent addition to the store’s already whimsical atmosphere. Curious to see if my shape would change the closer I got, I went right up to it, my nose pressed up against the glass, and that’s when it happened.
Suddenly, I was sucked into the mirror nose-first, traveling at high speed through what felt like a Palisades Amusement Park slide, with sharp turns and stomach-churning drops. It was somehow terrifying and fascinating all at once. I whizzed past old cars and fashions, and music from the ’70s, ’60s, ’50s, the scent of ice cream pervading the air, until I suddenly jerked to a stop inside an ice cream shop that vaguely resembled Thomas Sweet.
Was it a dream? I figured there was only one way to find out. I walked over to the counter, climbed onto a red and white striped stool, and examined the ice cream selection.
“What’ll it be today, little lady?” Asked the ice cream scooper looking snazzy in a crisp white button down shirt and red and white striped bow tie. He thankfully, was not Ken, although he very much resembled him.
“What’ve ya got that’s real sweet?”
“Well, we’ve got your vanilla, your chocolate, your strawberry, and a brand new flavor … prune whip!”
He must have noticed my grimace, because he laughed heartily and gave me a chocolate cone.
“On the house,” he winked.
If this was a dream, it sure was realistic. Cone in hand, I spun on my stool and noticed a table of old men who were immersed in hushed but intense conversation — besides eating ice cream, eavesdropping was my favorite pastime — and, leaning in for a closer look, I squinted to read the nametags on the men’s lapels. To my astonishment and delight, these men were none other than Dr. Albert Einstein, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, and … did that tag say Dr. Thomas Sweet? This dream was getting interesting!
“Let’s put the design for the machine and our favorite recipes in a container,” Einstein excitedly said, “and see if Jack will let us bury it in the back of the building! When we are long gone, maybe they will find it and put our plans into practice!” They all giggled with delight.
Emboldened, and still convinced that I was dreaming, I marched over to the table.
“Whatever you’re talking about sure seems real important.”
They looked at each other, then back at me.
“Und…who are you?” Einstein asked, tugging at his white mustache.
“My name’s Jenny, and I gotta say, I’m a big fan of all of you!”
“Even me?” Dr. Sweet asked incredulously, “What do you mean?”
“Oh, well I’m actually from the year 1979. I fell through that fun mirror in an ice cream shop called Thomas Sweet, and I ended up here somehow.” Dr. Sweet’s jaw dropped.
Albert Einstein slammed the table. “See, I told you that time and space are relative!”
“Albert, we know, we believe you,” Oppenheimer said. “Jenny, can you keep a secret?”
“Of course I can, I love secrets!”
“Three years ago,” Einstein said, “when we were all feeling very discouraged about the state of the world and the cold war we decided to start coming here for ice cream. Week after week as we ate our ice cream we felt much happier. Scientists that we are, we started to observe how happy everyone seemed to be when they had ice cream at this shop, but we noticed it was mostly teeny boppers who came in. I asked my most esteemed colleagues, ‘What would it be like if this was a place where families, scientists, faculty and people from all walks of life, and different cultures could come together to talk, discuss philosophy, tell jokes, hear what’s going on in town, even play music together?’”
Recalling his homespun bit of wisdom, Einstein opined, “A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?…. A bowl of ice cream, as it turns out!” He slapped his thigh and they all laughed.
Then Dr. Sweet, continuing with the story, said “Don’t tell Jack, but I was getting very bored with just 4 flavors of ice cream.”
“I hear ya,” I interrupted.
He resumed, “And I pondered, what would it be like if this shop served new flavors of ice cream all the time, flavors that anyone would like, no matter what part of the world they came from!”
And Einstein said, “Und if fresh fruit or home baked cookies like my muti used to make could all be blended into a magnificent scoop of ice cream! How happy would everyone be!”
Dr. Oppenheimer chimed in, “So I asked some of our colleagues in the institute: chemists, sociologists, philosophers if they’d like to work with us in a secret lab, in our spare time, to design a device that could blend everything together.”
“Acch!” Einstein exclaimed, “we had so much fun tasting dozens of ice cream recipes using the world’s best flavors, didn’t we?”
Dr. Oppenheimer continued, “We called it ‘The Princeton Project.’”
“’The Princeton Project: My Happy Place,’” added Dr. Sweet. “We really do believe it will be a great way to bring everyone together and promote peace and happiness in the world!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing as I ate my dull scoop of chocolate ice cream.
In a serious voice, Oppenheimer said, “We knew this would be huge, revolutionary, but, then Al, Tom and I realized we did not want to be known for inventing an ice cream machine, and we surely didn’t want our funders to know what we’d been doing! We thought it best, that many years pass before the inventors are revealed . Let a future generation of ice cream lovers discover our design and make the machine. Let our legacies be secure in history before the real inventors are revealed. Promise us you will keep this secret until at least 50 years after the last of us has died. Then, you are free to tell our story.”
Fact check:
Spoiler alert: Thomas Sweets’ blend-in machine was not invented at the Institute for Advanced Study. What was happening there in the 1940s was John von Neumann’s Electronic Computer Project, a drive to create a post-war tool for scientists that would perform complex mathematical operations at high speed. But that project was not a secret — progress reports were disseminated widely — and copies of the machine built at the Institute could be found around the world.
The original blend-in machine, in fact, came from a nursing home in Buffalo, New York, where founders Tom Grim and Tommy Block bought the used model for a few hundred dollars. Block and Grim had met as students at the University of Buffalo, where they ran a small fudge-making operation. They brought their chocolate skills to Princeton in 1979, when they opened their chocolate shop on Nassau Street. They did well, but their landlord — Princeton University — thought that what that block really needed was an ice cream shop. And so Thomas Sweet Ice Cream — and the blend-in — were born.
After nearly three decades, Thomas Sweet was sold to Marco Cucchi. Block, now the founder of Naked Chocolate in Philadelphia, sold his half in 2005. Grim, the founder of Nomad Pizza in Hopewell and Princeton, sold his half in 2008.
Pap – His Own Self
By Ed Leefeldt
You may have heard of me if’en you have read a book called “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It’s a long book with a lot of unnecessary words in it, but you can try out one of those short books by a guy named Clift Note that all the college students like, and get what little there is to larn from it.
Anyway, I’m in that thar book, but I only got a short part and I am supposed to get kilt somewhere in the middle, which don’t seem fare since I was just getting’ rollin and coulda been a major character instead of being dead in the corner of a floating house, so the book claims.
But as that Mark Twain fellow says, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” And speaking of that Twain fellow, I have a few choice things to say about him. Did you know he deserted from the army? And Mark Twain wasn’t even his real name. He operated under an alienist! He must have had something to hide.
Yessir, I could tell you a lot about that man, and it would all be truer than what he said about me! Why, I never whipped my boy, at least not with nuthin harder than an axe handle! And don’t let Huck tell you no different, neither. All I ever did was ask for my propers as a good dad, and maybe a little corn likker on the side.
Now as you know, my ungrateful son run off and left me for some no-account con men that swindled folks up and down the Mississippi. That part is true. So, I just hung out on that houseboat that I ’leggedly died on until one day two fancy-pants guys come up the gangplank and ask if I am the father of one Huckleberry Finn.
Now I’m thinkin’ “Uh-oh, this must be Child Protective Services again.” But they give me their white callin’ cards which say they are professors at some amusement place called Princeton Universal. And they want me to teach a course on this Twain book, which they say is one of the great works of American nobelisks, since I supposedly got a bead on the subject matter better than anyone else.
Wal, I say “Sure, if your money’s good and I can bite on one of your gold pieces.” But they say, “No, now we use bitcoin (whatever that is).”
So that’s how I come to be here in this town, which is all right cause the school grits is good and the ’commodations are better than a leaky boat anyway you look at it. I just have to teach one course called “Competitive Ligature of the 19th Century,” and I don’t have to no much, neither, just about my book and two others.
One is this yarn about a crazy guy with a pegleg who’s trying to spear a big fish, ’cept the fish gets him first. The other is about this woman who has an illegible child and the rest of the book is about trying to figure out who the father is. Turns out it was her preacher! Don’t that beat all? But I hope I didn’t spoil it for ya.
Anyway, my class is full of students. They came pouring in as soon as I gave out the word that they could all have “A” if they showed up for class, and a solid “B” even if they didn’t. But just as I’m getting used to this soft life, they told me I have to skedaddle at the end of the semen-ster because I don’t have something called “ten-year.”
I told the dean that I already have “one-year,” so why can’t I get the other nine? I told him I had looked around and seen I was as im-potent as any of them. And he said, “You may be, but you ain’t got that ‘ten-year,’ and you ain’t gonna get it.”
So I got to find somewhere else to go to. I was thinkin’ about Hollywood. I hear tell my son is out there tryin to be a screenwriter and tell his story the way he thinks it was. I’m hopin he leaves me out of it. But if it’s a success, I want in on the money. He still owes me for last time, and I still have a piece of that axe handle waitin for him if he says he don’t.
Ed Leefeldt is a contributor to CBS MoneyWatch and the author of “The Woman Who Rode the Wind,” a novel about early flight.
Fact check:
Princeton University is not known for hiring and granting tenure to professors like Pap Finn, but the school has played host to visiting literary greats over the years, including Finn’s creator, Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. He spoke in Richardson Auditorium in May, 1901, following an invitation from a student in the Class of 1902.
His correspondence is part of the archive at Mudd Manuscript Library. In a letter dated February 7, 1901, Twain wrote:
Dear Sir:
As long as one would only have to talk + note have to talk long, nor make preparation, I know I should like to do it one of these days — a talk on patriotism, for instance — but I couldn’t in March, for I shall be yatching (which is my way of spelling it) in the Southern Seas all that month, with a probable lap-over into April.
Very sincerely yours
S.L. Clemens
True to his word, Twain appeared on May 9 with little fanfare or advance notice. “I feel exceedingly surreptitious in coming down here without an announcement of any kind,” Twain said, according to the next day’s report in the New York Times. “I did not want to see any advertisements around, for the reason that I’m not a lecturer any longer. I reformed long ago, and I break over and commit this sin only just one time this year, and that is moderate, I think, for a person of my disposition. It is not my purpose to lecture any more as long as I live. I never intend to stand upon a platform any more unless by the request of a Sheriff or something like that.”
The Daily Princetonian also reported on his appearance: “Mr. Clemens first related several adventures which he met with in his native town on the Mississippi River. One of these recounting the theft of a watermelon which turned out to be green, was especially amusing. He then narrated numerous incidents occurring in Carson City, Nevada. He gave an account of his experience with a horse which he had purchased in the belief that bucking was a good quality in a horse. The speaker’s manner of telling his trouble in staying on the horse was very humorous. Mr. Clemens then told the well known story of the old ram, contained in ‘Roughing It.’ This story was loudly applauded by the audience. Mr. Clemens ended the evening’s entertainment by reading the account of his efforts to learn German, together with a story illustrating the difficulties of the language.”
Twain, whose visit was partially precipitated by his friendship with Laurence Hutton, the former Harpers editor and writer who became a lecturer at the university, became quite enamored of the town during his visit, which he shared in a letter to Hutton that has since been immortalized on a wall at Frist Campus Center. “Princeton would suit me as well as Heaven, better in fact, for I shouldn’t care for that society up there.”
