Chapter 3

GROWING UP FOUR SEAS

Stories from Members of the “Four Seas Family”

Four Seas Ice Cream isn’t just unique because of the way its ice cream is made or for its ability to stand the test of time and remain an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, from its flavors to its decorations. Ask many customers and they’ll tell you the ice cream is nice, but what makes Four Seas truly special are the people who work there year after year, serving up a smile with the sundaes and cones. And employees will tell you that the traditions that have been carried through the decades make Four Seas just as memorable of a place to work as it was decades ago.

It wasn’t for nothing that Richard Warren became known in the ice cream retailers’ community for his hiring practices at Four Seas Ice Cream. His practices are still used to this day at Four Seas and were perfected over the decades. Though unorthodox, they’ve led to loyal employees who return summer after summer, some through both high school and college. They’ve led to decades-long friendships between employees, a special bond between the owners and the teens who serve the thousands of ice cream cones every year—and even to marriages. Several couples have met while working at Four Seas and eventually married. Others met their spouses when one was working at the ice cream store and the other was a customer. And much of the camaraderie and bonding that goes on each and every summer can be traced to the unique hiring practices of the Warren family at Four Seas.

ONLY THE BEST

In early spring, still months from when Four Seas Ice Cream officially opens for the summer season, employees are already being considered for jobs behind the counter, in the sandwich kitchen and ice cream room and as cleaners and dishwashers. And while many employees are considered for their jobs based on résumés listing past experience, Richard Warren—and now Doug Warren—always turned to a different piece of paper to determine who would be best to work at the bustling Four Seas every summer: a notecard. Each year, a member of the Warren family visits Barnstable High School to bring notecards to the teachers of sophomore honors-level courses in every subject. The goal isn’t to find out who might be good at math, for example, or an accomplished public speaker in drama class. Instead, teachers are asked to nominate the three male and three female students in their classes whom the instructors believe would be best suited for the fast-paced job. In the nearly three decades when Richard Warren was an English teacher, speech and debate coach and guidance counselor at Barnstable High School, he would simply deliver the index cards to his fellow teachers in their classrooms. Doug Warren, who substitute taught and later taught full time at the same school, did the same during his years as an instructor.

An employee tradition is for employees of over three summers to write their names on the wall above the dishwashing area. Photo by Jennifer Badalamenti/Roots Workshop.

But their lack of a full-time presence at Barnstable High School hasn’t diminished teachers’ enthusiasm for helping pick Four Seas’ next employees. At this point, veteran teachers know to expect the notecards every year, and new teachers are quickly made wise to their arrival and participate enthusiastically (they also receive a few quarts of ice cream as a thank-you). They look for special qualities that Four Seas employees need to have in order to be successful at the job, mainly: a hardworking attitude, outgoing personality, excitement about learning new skills and the ability to multitask in a very bustling setting. Students who work at Four Seas have also always been required to keep honor roll–level grades, and many of them do that in honors and college-level classes while fulfilling roles in the school play or acting as president of their chosen club or church group. The nominated students are then called and, if they’re interested in the job, are invited for an interview.

In the past two decades, since Richard Warren retired from education in 1988, the selection has expanded to include some students who don’t go to Barnstable High School. With students starting school earlier on Cape Cod than in previous years, the store needs its employees to continue working into September, and typically only those from private schools or schools in other regions are able to do so. Many of these employees are longtime summer residents of the Centerville area and grew up going to Four Seas as a special summer treat. There has never been a lack of interested students. “There was a little bit of envy among my friends and the friends of other people who worked there. Working at Four Seas was kind of a status symbol,” Dave LeMarbre, an employee from 1967 until the late 1970s and longtime friend of Richard and Linda Warren, said. But in order to make the very popular jobs accessible to other students than those at Barnstable High, a few “résumés”—typically, a handwritten, heartfelt letter detailing why they’d like to work at Four Seas and why they would be a good match for the job—are accepted every year. But even those students must prove they’re the right type of person for the job—and in a very specific way. According to Linda Warren: “Parents would call and ask how their kids could get a job. And Richard would tell them to have the child write a letter and he would get back to them then, and only then. And if no letter came, they didn’t get considered for a job. And if the parents wrote the letter or accompanied a student on an interview, they didn’t get the job.”

But though the types of employees hired have changed over the years, the expectations for them have not. The job, Douglas Warren said, just isn’t for everyone. “If you aren’t willing to work, you’re not going to do well here,” he said. To explain that sentiment, Richard Warren often shared a favorite quotation with employees struggling to find the motivation to work hard. “My dad always said, ‘If there’s time to lean there’s time to clean,’ and we still remind the kids of that all the time.”

An employee suits up to stock the store’s freezers with quarts and pints. Photo by Jennifer Badalamenti/Roots Workshop.

Four Seas employees are expected to do much more than many teens with summer jobs. Until the past few decades, all employees worked double shifts several times a week, meaning they arrived early in the morning, took a short break for dinner and returned to the shop later in the evening to stay until closing. Doug remembers:

There were only four people on a shift, and you would work with the same group. And there were literally ten people working there in the early years. You would work three days, then two nights, then have a day or two off…Everybody worked mega amounts of hours. The managers were expected to work fifty hours, and you didn’t get paid overtime.

The number of employees working at Four Seas each summer has grown exponentially. Even today, many employees practice the same work ethic, picking up extra shifts for one another and staying late to make the shop spotless for the next crop of workers coming in the morning. The work expected of employees—who range in age from fourteen to college-aged twentysomethings who have returned to work at the store for years—begins nearly two months before Four Seas Ice Cream opens for the scooping season. In early April, employees begin spending their weekends working in the shop, preparing it for the summer, and many spend their spring breaks doing the same thing. “Preseason” jobs are messy and unglamorous—sanding down walls, waxing windows, painting chairs and scrubbing freezers are par for the course, often for hours at a time. The work goes on, usually, until just hours before Four Seas opens for the season the Saturday before Memorial Day, as it has opened since the days when W. Wells Watson operated the shop.

It’s a good introduction for the employees, and it isn’t the last time they’ll spend hours scrubbing from floor to ceiling. Each evening after Four Seas closes, employees stay at work at least an extra half hour in order to prepare for the next morning. And once a month, the practice known as “chest cleaning” occurs, as it has since nearly the beginning of the store’s inception. After the ice cream store closes for the night, usually around 10:30 p.m., all of the store’s employees gather at the store to scrub everything from top to bottom, dragging chairs out to be washed, scrubbing floors—with toothbrushes sometimes—and generally erasing the grime that thousands of feet attached to thousands of customers can create. A late night, employees usually return home in the early hours of the morning, with many up just a few hours later to begin their regular shift the next day. And again at the end of the year, Four Seas finishes up with a “closing day sale”—and yet more cleaning to ready the store for the vacant winter ahead. “You just really get down to cleaning, get dirty and disgusting with all these other employees,” Doug said.

In Warren’s days, chest cleaning nights were capped off by parties at the store. “My dad basically turned a blind eye to us having a few drinks at the store. We would just sit there and play games, talk, just help each other out. Chief trusted us, and nobody ever broke that trust. It was a simple time,” he said. Employees are no longer allowed to spend after-hours time at the store. But though Four Seas no longer serves as a party spot for employees, employees are rewarded in other ways for their hard, sometimes grimy, work. Throughout the summer and even into the winter, employees are provided with incentives to work hard and come back each year, beginning with the annual after-hours pool party midway through the season, followed by a closing-day party the weekend after Labor Day when the fountain officially closes for the winter. That tradition was started by W. Wells Watson, who took his employees out to a fine dining restaurant each year in appreciation. According to Doug:

In the middle of the summer, when people are getting stressed out and the days are long, the employees need something to get them laughing and enjoying themselves again. So we have a pool party to share stories about work and customers, and to have time to commiserate with each other. And then the closing day party is also special. There’s a big hoo-rah when you sell the last quart, and then you leave at 5:30 and at 6:15 you’re expected to be ready and at the restaurant. There’s such a transformation. We see these kids all year long in ponytails, no makeup, no jewelry, no frills. And then all of a sudden we get to see everybody as they actually are.

The employee incentives don’t end there. Every year, the first weekend in January, employees are treated to an all-expenses-paid ski trip to New Hampshire as a thank-you for their hard work the previous summer. The tradition began in the 1960s, after Richard and Georgia Warren purchased a small cabin near Gunstock Mountain Resort, a longtime favorite ski destination for the couple and their young growing family. For over three decades, the ski “camp” served as home base for the Four Seas employees who came up to ski during the day and enjoy dinners and movies together in the evening. As Richard became more interested in skiing ever more difficult mountains, he and wife Linda made the decision in 1998 to sell the camp. “He didn’t want to ski up there anymore. It was too little. He wanted to ski the big mountains, so we sold it and he’d stay at a hotel near the places he wanted to ski,” Linda said. But it wasn’t the end of the ski trip for employees. Today, Doug and Peggy Warren still rent a cabin near Gunstock Mountain in the town of Gilford, New Hampshire.

As a thank-you to their employees, Four Seas Ice Cream owners take their employees on an all-expenses-paid ski trip in the winter. Courtesy of the Warren family.

MAKING FRIENDS AND KEEPING THEM

There is a phrase bandied about frequently among Four Seas Ice Cream employees and former employees: “You know you’re a Four Seas employee when you wake up the morning after your shift stuck to your sheets with hot fudge.” But the silly sentiment extends much further than that; it also applies to the friendships and other bonds formed by hard work and long hours at the ice cream shop, as well as the time Four Seas employees spend with one another outside of work. Because of the closeness of working behind a cramped soda fountain counter for hours on end, employees become very close very quickly and often spend their off-hours enjoying the Centerville area’s beaches, restaurants and outdoor activities like kayaking and swimming. Many employees also keep in touch between summers while they are away at college or in different high schools—in the earlier days by letter and today frequently by online means. “My favorite thing about Four Seas is the camaraderie, watching the kids just blend together no matter if they would have hung out outside of work. They would be there in a second if you needed them or if they needed each other,” Linda Warren said.

That closeness also means employees are very comfortable with one another—and comfortable poking fun at one another too, in the form of pranks and “initiations” that have taken place every summer nearly since Four Seas’ opening in 1934. “It’s kind of a ‘welcome to our club’ sort of thing. It means now you’re one of us, now you’re part of the team, the Four Seas family,” Doug Warren said. Those welcomes have included everything from dousings with water and flour to employees being soaked in water and thrown in the freezer—though it’s done at the end of a person’s shift so they can promptly go home and change, Warren said. Recently, the Warrens themselves have gotten in on the fun, helping more experienced employees play a good-hearted prank on younger ones by sending them to the motel across the street with a three-gallon tub of ice cream “to go.” They’re sent to various rooms with the ice cream but are then relieved by older coworkers and told it’s been a joke. “Somebody ended up in a trash can once, somebody else in the sink. But it really creates this sort of community,” Four Seas co-owner and Doug’s wife Peggy Warren said.

Employees scoop up summertime treats. Photo by Jennifer Badalamenti/Roots Workshop.

Sometimes, employees team up to play pranks on one another or even other members of the community. There have been fights played out with whipped cream, buckets of caramel and spoonfuls of ice cream on rainy, unpopular early season days. Employees’ cars have been covered in marshmallow cream and silly signs, and once, a particular customer who insisted on parking his boat in the parking lot on especially crowded evenings received a dose of the same medicine. “There was a kid who would park his boat in the parking lot, and it would always be dirty and smell of fish. And this guy would just always give Chief a hard time and throw parts of the fish he’d cleaned into our dumpsters. So we decided that if he was going to stink up our parking lot, we would do the same to his boat. So we put fish in a plastic bag on a Friday afternoon, and he didn’t use the boat until a week later. He called the police, but we just had such a laugh. But we didn’t tell Chief. That was the kind of crazy stuff we did,” former employee Dave LeMarbre said.

An employee goofing off in the 1970s. This employee’s two sons also went on to work at Four Seas. Courtesy of the Warren family.

Though much of the Four Seas camaraderie centers on good-natured pranks and jokes, it has taken a more serious, romantic turn in the past. Richard and Georgia Warren were not the only couple to meet at Four Seas, fall in love during their summers working together and eventually get married. By the Warren family’s count, there have been at least four other marriages that have occurred because of a bond created at Four Seas. For years, employee Saunie Chase, who began working under W. Wells Watson in the summer of 1957 at age thirteen, had giggled alongside other Four Seas employees when handsome young men came into the store. She and the other girls would create special sundaes and frappes for their favorite customers, packing as much ice cream and as many toppings into their concoctions as they could under Watson’s watchful eye. But in 1962, when Chase was eighteen, she finally caught the eye of a customer she had paid special attention to since she began working at Four Seas. Saunie Chase Canuso remembers:

In the summer of 1962, Marshall Reilly came in and wanted to know how old I was. I told him I was eighteen and he said, “Now I can date you.” I’d been waiting for that for five years! We were married in December of 1962, and had two daughters. One filled in at Four Seas before school ended and the other worked at Four Seas for two or three summers.

Dave LeMarbre and his wife, Trisha, didn’t meet at Four Seas Ice Cream, but it’s where their love for each other—in addition to their love for Cape Cod and the Warren family—blossomed. In 1966, LeMarbre was a recent transplant to Cape Cod from Marlborough, Massachusetts, when he was asked by Richard Warren to work at Four Seas. He started at the bottom, in the position of morning boy. At later points in his time at Four Seas, he was in charge of making ice cream and helping out one day each week making sandwiches at lunchtime. By the time he left for college at Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville in 1970, LeMarbre was established at Four Seas as one of Warren’s trusted nighttime managers, who oversaw operations on the store’s busiest nights. It was there that he met Trish, who was also attending the college to study education. LeMarbre continued to work summers at Four Seas, but by 1973, he and Trish were inseparable and planning to marry that December. Trish worked just a few weeks at Four Seas that summer, but the couple returned the next summer and again in 1975, when they were off summers from the teaching positions they had secured in Tennessee. That was the year that the LeMarbres got really close. Trying to save money and help out Richard Warren, they elected to spend the summer living in the Crow’s Nest, the attic space of Four Seas. “It was kind of neat for two reasons. The price was right, Chief didn’t charge me anything. And he felt a little bit of security because there was always somebody there if something happens,” Dave remembers. Trish has a few other memories about the experience:

It was crazy. And it was hot as the dickens up there. We had just the front room, and you can barely stand in there. There was a shower up there, but we had to go down to the store to use the bathroom. But David was there almost all the time because he was managing and making ice cream, so it made sense. And every morning the morning boys would stick their heads in the door when they came upstairs to get supplies for the store and would make a joke out of it and yell, “Everybody decent?” as loud as they could.

Nevertheless, it didn’t give the couple negative memories of Four Seas. They and dozens of other Four Seas alumni keep in touch years after they worked at the ice cream store. It’s a testament to how Richard Warren ran the business: as the patriarch of a family, not the head of a bustling summer business. “He was a father figure not just to me but to a lot of kids,” Dave LeMarbre said. Richard and Georgia Warren went to LeMarbre’s wedding to Trish in Tennessee, and the couple in turn visited Cape Cod the year Randy Warren, their son, died. Rather than wane after years and miles separated them, the bond the two families forged while at Four Seas grew stronger. “We would always visit Massachusetts because Dave’s family was there. And we would visit Chief and Linda for the weekend. But Chief would say, ‘If you’re just coming for the weekend, don’t bother coming.’ So it would get longer and longer,” Trisha said. When Dave LeMarbre’s father moved to New Hampshire and eventually fell into ill health and passed away, Chief became an even bigger part of the LeMarbres’ life. The two men began visiting each other frequently, with the LeMarbres bringing their two children to Cape Cod and Richard going to Tennessee to spend time at their home there. And Dave began visiting the Warrens in Florida, where they chose to retire. Like working at Four Seas, those experiences were done at Warren’s pace, Dave said:

One time I visited him in Florida to play golf for a few days, and his arm was in a sling. He’d cracked his elbow rollerblading. The doctor in the emergency room told him that when he walked into the examination room, he was shocked to find Chief, not some teenage boy. Another time, my sons and I went golfing with him. They were in great shape, so the three of them walked the course. And I’m in the cart looking like a wuss. But after a little while, I thought those boys were going to die. It was ninety-something degrees, tons of humidity. But he just kept trudging along. And later at the beach, we were done. We just stretched out to nap. But he hopped in the water for a four-mile swim. We were amazed. Who was this guy?

That spark for life and dedication to fostering relationships kept Four Seas employees in touch with one another and with the Warren family over the years. “I kept in touch with Dick and Georgia over the years. We played golf together, and they would visit me in Florida. And every time I am on the Cape to visit family, we make it a point to go into Four Seas to say hi and have some ice cream,” Saunie Chase Canuso said. In fact, Richard made it a point to visit as many former employees as possible in his travels for speaking engagements, the Successful Ice Cream Retailing course and on his treks to various skiing and golfing destinations across the United States and several other countries. If his travels came even vaguely close to where an alumnus was attending college or living, you could be sure Warren would do his best to visit. And high school students living just a few minutes from him were pretty much guaranteed a very loud, enthusiastic fan at their sports games. The employees have returned the favor, especially in the last few years as the local high school has started its academic year earlier. When this occurs, former employees—from those who just graduated college to many who worked at the ice cream store in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s—return to work in the same positions they worked as teenagers. “To have people in their thirties, forties and fifties drop everything to come back and work for you and love it, it’s unbelievable. It’s amazing that they care so much to help like that,” Linda Warren said.

In fact, one of Richard Warren’s greatest memories of Four Seas involved the bond he and his Four Seas “family” forged over the years, Linda said. In 1987, the Warrens spent months tracking down “every single” employee to invite them to an alumni reunion, Linda said. The weekend-long event included family picnics and softball games, as well as dinner-dances at a golf club in the town of Sandwich, just a few miles from Centerville. Of course, the event featured Four Seas Ice Cream and two ice cream cakes made by Doug Warren. And neither she nor her husband could believe the enthusiastic response, she said:

The response was marvelous, just to a note we sent asking if people were interested. And so we planned our reunion. Out of 133 alumni from the time Richard had run the store, 129 came. That doesn’t include their spouses, just the alumni. Only 4 couldn’t come. Isn’t that amazing? And they came from all over the world. And Richard was right in his glory. My God, if you could see him! He was dancing up a storm, talking up a storm, and there were people all over the place. They came back for Chief and because of the memories and the friendships. And that’s pretty special.

It wasn’t the only time that hundreds of Warren’s friends, family and supporters gathered to fête the Four Seas patriarch. In 2004, the ice cream store celebrated its seventieth anniversary, and another party was planned, this one to celebrate both the store’s seven decades of business as well as Warren’s retirement. And in true Richard Warren style, the party made him the center of attention, with speeches “roasting” him and his quirks, as well as a parade of former employees dressed in some of the uniforms Four Seas employees wore over the years. As a final touch, three alumni—including LeMarbre—donned prosthetic bald caps, white pants, aprons and a particular style of vintage Four Seas T-shirt to visit tables dressed as Chief. “He was getting made fun of, but it was so touching. You could tell it was really nice to be able to enjoy that and have that moment. It was his extended family from across the years and he just loved them all, whether they were joking with him or not,” Doug Warren said.

Former employees dressing in Richard “Chief” Warren’s signature vintage T-shirt and apron combination, which he wore every morning to make hundreds of gallons of Four Seas Ice Cream. Courtesy of the Warren family.