Here in St. Helena my grandpa, Maurice Gilbert, has dozens of rare ice cream scoops. He’s been collecting these scoops for 50 years and still is.

He has a banana split disher from 1928 and a Hamilton Beach No-Pak scoop from 1925.

The rarest in his collection, from 1926, is the “cold dog.” It’s a long tube for a special cone.

He also has the Dan Dee ice cream sandwich dipper from 1920, the profit scoop from Thrifty Stores where ice cream cones sold for 5 cents, also a Dover, N.H. 1927 scoop with a unique cut-off feature that sliced the ice cream, and a tower of ice cream scoop dating to 1940.

A variety of the ice cream scoops are arranged in an ice cream cone-shaped cabinet that he made. The cabinet also contains scoops from the late 1800s that dispensed ice cream by turning a key which operated two blades on the inside of the scoop to release the ice cream on the cone.

He still searches out other rare scoops he knows are waiting to be found.

(Editor’s note: Lisa Butala is a fifth-grader at Howell Mountain School. She is proud of her grandfather, who operated the Big Dipper soda fountain on Oak Avenue with his wife, Esther, the shop’s founder, from 1980-2004.)