Four Seas Ice Cream by Heather M. Wysocki

Author:Heather M. Wysocki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

Four Seas Ice Cream current owners Peggy and Douglas Warren. Courtesy of the Warren family.

From left: Richard “Chief” Warren, son Doug Warren and daughter-in-law Peggy Warren celebrate Four Seas Ice Cream’s seventieth anniversary and Richard’s retirement. Courtesy of the Warren family.

Peggy arrived that August with her daughter and the family’s two cats, having traveled cross-country in a Jeep packed with the rest of the couple’s possessions. She began learning how to handle the bookkeeping and accounting for the ice cream store, as Linda Warren had done since the early 1980s. Finally, the couple’s long-planned wedding occurred. After a week of forecasts predicting a possible hurricane that weekend, the couple instead woke on September 18, 1999, to a beautiful, sunny day. They were married on Craigville Beach, “just a quarter mile from Four Seas in the place that Chief would swim a mile a day,” Doug said.

The struggles surrounding Four Seas weren’t over for the newlywed couple, however. The family had decided on a purchasing plan for Doug and Peggy Warren to use to take over the ice cream store. In the first seven years of their ownership, the couple would pay off the purchase of the name “Four Seas Ice Cream” and the store’s equipment and then spend the next seven purchasing the building itself and the land it sits on. Doug and Peggy Warren became co-owners of the business, with each taking a 50 percent share. While that agreement was cordial, convincing a bank to provide such a large loan to the recently relocated couple proved challenging. Doug initially thought that approaching a bank Four Seas had used for decades would mean the exchange would “essentially be a handshake deal. And if anything should be a handshake deal, this should have been,” he said. But with no collateral and a hope to purchase a home in the near future as well, a bank Four Seas had used for decades as its main financial institution said no. Several other banks did as well. Several days later, Doug and Peggy had arranged to borrow the money from Linda when the bank called back to say it had reconsidered because of the company’s long history of serving Four Seas. But the deal was done, Doug said.

With the transition came the decision of how to announce to family, friends and current and former employees that Richard Warren, who had been at the store since the mid-1950s, and his wife Linda, whose presence at the store began in the mid-1980s, were no longer running the ice cream store. Though the store stayed in the family, there was still some concern that without Chief in the building, many longtime customers would worry about changes for the negative with a younger owner. And the younger Warren couple felt the concern was warranted. “There are plenty of businesses where sons or daughters take over the business and run it into the ground or make so many changes it becomes unrecognizable. That certainly wasn’t something we wanted to do, and we didn’t want our customers to worry about it.

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