Ice Cream Maker Faces Churns in the Road

A Kirkwood man has raised thousands of dollars for charity and helped promote foster parenting with a decades-old ice cream maker he picked up on a whim.

The machine has churned out hundreds of gallons of rich, creamy frozen custard and made Ron Gaus a popular guy at fairs and festivals around the area.

“I can’t tell you how much fun and pleasure this machine has brought to me and my family over the years,” Gaus said. “The neatest thing is the people that visit our booth and remember us from year to year. It’s so much fun.”

But now his moneymaker has fallen out of favor with the county health department. And that means the groups he has been supporting may feel the pinch.

“It’s very disappointing,” said Sandra Hoffmann, Gaus’ neighbor and secretary of a nonprofit group that helps needy children in Nepal. Gaus has raised more than $3,000 for the Mitrata Nepal Foundation for Children, she said.

Gaus, 62, bought the ice cream maker back in 1990 when he found it on a list of surplus state-owned equipment up for auction. The outdated machine had been used at a boys’ home in northwest Missouri.

Gaus had bid $112 with the idea he might like to open an ice cream shop one day. But first, he had to get the huge thing home to Kirkwood.

There turned out to be two massive ice cream machines, each weighing about 500 pounds. He had to hire a truck to haul them home because they were too big to fit into his minivan.

Then there were the unforeseen repairs and complications, starting with the fact that neither one actually worked. After a repair company finally got one of the four compressors running, electricians and plumbers had to be called in to hook the thing up on Gaus’ covered back porch.

But it was all worth it once the custard started to flow, Gaus said. His customers agree.

“It’s good stuff,” said Mike Fox, who first tasted Gaus’ frozen custard a few years back at the annual Chili Bowl Cook-off, which raises money for the Kirkwood School District Foundation. “When you know his story, it makes it taste even better.”

Gaus and his wife, Sandy, call it Foster’s Frozen Custard – a nod to their support of foster parenting. Over the last 12 years, the couple has fostered dozens of children, from babies to teens.

It’s not uncommon for the older children to pitch in when it’s frozen custard time.

The extra hands are always welcome. In the last 10 years, Gaus estimates, he has churned out roughly 600 gallons of frozen custard and raised about $10,000 for various groups.

A batch of 40 gallons takes 12 hours to make and produces about 1,000 scoops. And it’s not as simple as turning on a switch when you’re dealing with such an aging machine.

“You have to baby it through,” Gaus said. When the machine starts making a certain knocking sound, he’s the one who knows which lever to pull, which one to push.

Family and friends have gotten first dibs on new flavors through the years at block parties and family events.

“He experimented with many, many flavors,” Sandy Gaus said. “Bailey’s is the best. Or Key Lime Pie. I take that back, Key Lime Pie is the best.”

Several years ago Gaus was ready to go as usual with 40 gallons of his top sellers — vanilla, banana, cinnamon and Bailey’s — for the Mitrata booth at Kirkwood’s Greentree Festival.

That’s when the county health department stepped in. Inspectors said that because his back porch was not an approved manufacturing facility, he could not sell the frozen custard he had made.

“Instead they suggested we move the machine to our Maplewood church and re-make the 40 gallons in our church kitchen,” Gaus said.

That worked for a few years, until last year when the health department withheld approval for the church unless costly upgrades were made.

Gaus didn’t want the charities he had been supporting to lose out on profits they were anticipating, so he resorted to purchasing ice cream and re-selling it to the public.

But it just wasn’t the same, Hoffmann said. “Nothing could be as good as his,” she added.

Gaus hopes this is not the end of Foster’s Frozen Custard. He hopes another church in the area with the proper facilities might welcome the addition of a 500-pound aging ice cream machine.

“It’s frustrating,” Gaus said. “We don’t want to move it again, but we’d like to use it.”