Four decades ago, Aurora residents Randy and Lisa Brown had the dream of working for themselves by selling ice cream and other dairy treats in Aurora, a mom-and-pop success story that this week may be coming to an end as the couple contemplate retirement.
Back in 1983, the Browns opened Banana Split on the edge of Aurora’s East Side neighborhood, Pigeon Hill. It has become an iconic ice cream shop with a long-established footprint in Aurora.“We opened this 40 years ago and we never thought four decades would go by. I can’t believe it. The time has gone by in the blink of an eye,” said Lisa Brown, 61, a week before the scheduled closing for the season this Thursday. “I never had an ending in my head and thought we’d do this for 10 or 20 years.
He said “if we’re back, we’ll give it everything we’ve got. There might be a step back from us. Maybe selling isn’t the direction to go right away. Maybe we’ll have some managers take over and take on some of the responsibility. We’re hoping not to be working seven days a week.”Lisa Brown said she “married into the ice cream business as Randy had worked for the originator of Dairy Queen.”
“If we hadn’t done that we never would have met the number of people we know from the North Aurora and Batavia area,” she said. “It was a lot of work with no extra income ... but we learned a lot and it gave me the lesson that I never wanted to be under someone’s else control with a rent.”“You learn from your mistakes and you go around to other ice cream stores on vacations and you sample a lot and come up with some things that might be similar but tweak them in your direction,” she said.
The Browns say one of their greatest accomplishments has been “taking on first-year employees and turning them into great future employees for somebody else down the road.”
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