Dairy Queen President John Gainor (far left) talks to a crowd at the Joliet Area Historical Museum. From right, Councilman Larry Hug, Councilman Don Fisher, Curly mascot, Rebecca Barker, Joliet media and communications manager. (Mary Owen/Tribune)

More than 20 Dairy Queen officials, including the president and the granddaughter of the man who started the first franchise 71 years ago, visited Joliet Friday to commemorate the start of the soft-serve ice cream legacy.

In November, the Joliet City Council granted local landmark status to the nondescript, whitewashed building at 501 N. Chicago Street, where cones were first peddled for as little as 5 cents. (Now the building is used as a church.)

On Friday, everyone ate free Dilly Bars at the Joliet Area Historical Museum. Nearly 100 people  turned out for a short program and the presentation of historical plaque for the building. Afterward, the crowd walked about five blocks north on Chicago Street to the original building. Curly, the Dairy Queen soft-serve cone mascot, led the group.

“It’s really exciting to come back to the original store,” said John Gainor, president and CEO of Minneapolis-based Dairy Queen International, as he walked with the group up Chicago Street. Gainor, who is in Chicago for the National Restaurant Association conference at McCormick Center, said the company didn’t know that the original building was still standing until Joliet officials started to contact them.

On June 22, 1940, Sherb Noble opened a Dairy Queen there and grossed a whopping $4,000 in revenues his first season. He made $88 on his most profitable day at the shop, which sits along the historic Route 66.

His granddaughter, Jennifer Rintelman, who now lives north of Milwaukee, said Noble would never have imaged the product would be so famous for so many years later.

Dilly Bars were distributed to attendants. (Mary Owen/Tribune)

“If he were here today, he would have been humbled by this gesture,” said Rintelman, whose family owns seven Dairy Queen franchises in the Kankakee and Aurora area. “Nothing gave him more pleasure than handing a perfect cone to a smiling customer.”

However, Noble did not invent soft-serve ice cream. That designation goes to J.F. McCullough, who believed that ice cream at zero degrees Fahrenheit “froze your taste buds,” said Dean Peters, a Dairy Queen spokesman. So he found someone who could build a machine to dispense ice cream around a slightly warmer 22 degrees.

In the 1940s, the neighborhood around the Joliet DQ was primarily made up of Slovenian families. Now, it’s primarily Hispanic. Even the sign on the building now says “Jesus Christ is the Lord” in Spanish. In 2006, John Georgouses, who owns a downtown institution, the Joliet Family Restaurant, bought the building, and three years ago the church moved in.

The Dairy Queen in Joliet closed in the early 1950s, and over the years the building has housed a lawn-mower repair business, furniture store, motorcycle shop and plumbers, said Bob Nachtrieb of the Joliet Historic Preservation Committee. He said the historic designation granted it by the City Council would give the building a measure of protection from being torn down or altered.

In a city best known for its prison, limestone quarries and steel mills, the significance of Dairy Queen has been often overlooked.

John Hickman, chairman of the Joliet Historic Preservation Commission, with Jennifer Rintelman, granddaughter of Sherb Noble, outside the original Dairy Queen. (Mary Owen/Tribune)

“I think there was some low-grade knowledge that it had been a Dairy Queen, but most people are not aware,” Nachtrieb said when the landmark status was granted.

Tony Contos, executive director of the Joliet Area Historical Museum, said that inquiries about the Dairy Queen location has grown in the last year as the news has become publicized.

Jonita Ruth, who grew up a few houses down from the Dairy Queen, said Friday that she remembers when the Dairy Queen opened on the street and visiting it frequently with friends and family.

“We were so happy when it opened,” said Ruth, who was about 10 years old when the shop opened. “They don’t make ice cream like that any more.”