Seasonal spots set for summer

Cruise down a Lafayette street this time of year, and you might see cars end to end waiting for ice cream.

You’ll smell hot dogs fresh off the grill. Hear kids squeal as they jet down water slides. They’ve been waiting for this season.

And so have the bigger kids in red, with a whistle between their teeth.

Memorial Day weekend unofficially rang in the summer with a long weekend and the resulting short week that follows, but it also brought area high schoolers out of the house for summer jobs and opened some area establishments up for the business that sustains them.

Tropicanoe Cove

Tropicanoe Cove is one of these. Its slides stand as colorful plastic landmarks 50 feet in the air in Colombian Park, overlooking Loeb baseball stadium. The water park opened Saturday, after months of preparation for the gates to finally swing open and the summer fun to begin.

“We start at the end of January, posting jobs,” said Jon Miner, Director of Operations for Lafayette Parks. “Pretty soon after that, we start interviewing and hiring. We have about 170 seasonal staff just in aquatics. 80-85% of those are high school students working their first jobs.”

Miner said every new hire needs to be onboarded by the middle of April, and that the process starts with college-aged managers being hired early on to conduct interviews.

After that, emails are sent to the new hires’ parents with a checklist of instructions and employment information the HR department needs. Miner said getting that information back is the hardest part.

“We try to stay on it, ‘Like get your paperwork in, get your paperwork in.’ And most of them do, sometimes 14, 15-year-olds who have first jobs, they don’t have bank accounts,” Miner said. “So mom and dad have to take them to get a bank account, and mom and dad work, so they can’t get to the bank until Saturday morning.”

While all the hiring is going on, the three public pools Miner oversees are being power washed, filled with water and chlorine treated.

Then there’s the matter of training a diverse group of teenagers and young adults, with ages that range from 14 to 22, showing them how to cook in the poolside kitchen or getting lifeguards experience in the water.

“We’ve got kids from Benton Central High School to Delphi, Carroll and Seeger, so they’re becoming friends with people they might have never met if it wasn’t for this job, right? And so for me, that’s a really neat thing.”

Miner said he knows of former lifeguards who have gone on to room together in college, and one former lifeguard – the manager of Castaway Bay in Armstrong Park since 2016 – has never left Lafayette Parks, working as a lifeguard through high school and college and coming back each summer in her offseason as a school teacher.

“She’s essentially grown up here,” Miner said, “and this ‘summer job’ has been a big part of her life.”

Cora Rich, a lifeguard at Tropicanoe for four summers now, said she got into the gig by following in her older brother’s footsteps.

Rich said it’s been a convenient way to get a tan, and one of her favorite parts is seeing the small children and young families that regularly visit. Teenagers are tougher to deal with, she said – they tend to ignore whistles.

Rich plans to join some of her coworkers at Purdue next year, some of whom are 20 to 22 years old that she would otherwise have a slim chance of meeting.

“I’ve made lots of relationships and friends that I’ve kept throughout the year,” she said. “You spend all the time together, and you’re always bonding over the heat and whatever is going on.”

Original Frozen Custard

Around the block from Tropicanoe, or a cannon of a baseball’s throw over Loeb is the white-painted brick of “The Original” Frozen Custard, where a half-circle canopy about the size of the building beneath it proclaims the custard shop’s history: “Lafayette, Indiana Since 1932,” the sign reads in blue slanted script.

Frozen Custard first opened for the season in April and expanded to its full, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. business hours over the weekend, according to manager Alex McGlothlin. He’s worked there for six years, in which time he’s gotten to experiment with the custard in the back.

“There’s like a cookies and cream that I like to make every so often,” he said when asked about his favorite menu item. “If I really want to make a peanut butter and chocolate custard, I’ll take like half of the peanut butter, half of the chocolate and kind of twist it in as I’m putting it into one tub.”

His favorite item on the “solid menu,” as he referred to it, is a shake. He’s a simple man, he said.

Running the place from summer to summer is a bit like coaching a high school sports team for him, with a small, often rotating group of area teenagers.

“This past year, we probably had maybe like three or four kids come back,” he said. “I think this next group is going to be like our group that we kind of ride on for the next few years and then, boom, they’re gone. So we got to build a whole new group.”

McGlothlin said a good summer at the walk-up-to-order custard shop is one of variety. Some days it’s problems in the kitchen, others it’s placating a customer while someone else mixes more of the flavor they ordered that’s just run out.

“When it comes to like busy, busy days, like Memorial Day, or like a Mother’s Day or July 4, it’s always super busy,” he said.

“It’s interesting, because some of our kids don’t know how to work the heavy, heavy days yet. Once it starts getting nicer, the heavy start hitting harder, they start to understand,” he said, picking up his voice and making small circles with his hands, “’We gotta get going.”

As he talked, a few couples sat under the shade of the awning. A woman with a dog on her lap in the car had just taken her foam dish of custard. The hand that produced it ruffled the dog’s ears before waving goodbye.

“This is definitely slow,” he said after a look around. “Yesterday, I had a line down the patio and wrapped around the drive-thru. That would be a busy day.”

“But once the Aviators games happen, people will start coming around.”