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Pittsburgh Magazine July 2004
Lucky thing for Raymond Klavon he's been employed at the only two occupations that would befit a man sporting a corkscrewing, gravity-defying, hula-hooping brush of a moustache.
As an instructor at Grandview elementary, he spent 30 years teaching children to finger-paint before "retiring" in 1998
to spend 73 hours a week shoveling ice cream at his namesake family parlor on Penn Avenue in the Strip District. Such a smile-capping thatch of facial hair would be too jocularly inappropriate
on the mug of, say, an accountant.
"Oh, my father wanted me to be an accountant," moans Klavon, 55. The mere mention of the profession is enough to make Klavon's face wrinkle up in the distinctive wince of a man
whose nostrils have just been invaded by something foul-smelling. "For me, that would have been awful. I can't imagine going every day to a job you hate."
It's the only time you'll ever see anyone, customer or employee, sporting a pained look in Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor.
Klavon (rhymes with "glove-ON") earned a D in the one community-college accounting class he took before his father calculated the boy'd be better off in art.
There is much complicated talk during the advancing presidential campaign of deficits and religious and political divisiveness, but the former accounting student says he has a sweet solution to all the bitterness inflaming
the world: Eat more ice cream. "Ice cream's such a happy treat, and most people forget what a pleasure it is," he says.
"We have people come in all the time and say, 'I can't tell you how many years it's been since I've enjoyed an ice-cream soda in a glass on a doily.' Every once in a while,
all of us should remind ourselves what a pleasure it is to enjoy some ice cream."
The whole parlor, with it candy counter, art-deco design, Coke-bottle-cap barstool seats and old-fashioned soda fountains, is evocative of simpler summers.
And the place is a ringer for Gower's Pharmacy from It's a Wonderful Life. Understandably so: From 1923 to 1979, the site at
Penn and 28th was, indeed, a local drugstore run by Klavon's grandparents, the late James and Mary Klavon. Today, Klavon and his family
are celebrating their fifth year in business as a destination ice cream parlor, where children are encouraged to use their straws to make
symphonic slurping sounds to summon the servers when it's time for more. It's a happy, lustful sound, one that makes the former art teacher know he's rich in
ways accountants and calculators cannot compute.
"I get to work here with my sisters and cousins and my nieces and nephews, and everyone who walks through the door has a smile on their face,"
he says. And what of the fringe benefits? Coincidentally, during this heated political season, Klavon says his favorite is Reinhold's White House,
vanilla mixed with maraschino cherries. And yet he exempts himself from his dessert-for-everyone prescription: "But if the place
were suited to my tastes, we'd be selling platters with gravy, cheese fries, that kind of stuff. I don't really like ice cream or chocolates.
I'm not a sweets person."
Klavon's a wise man when it comes to proper career choices that lead to a life fulfilled, but he's a bit delusional when it comes to his
mean-and-potatoes self-evaluation. Clearly, they don't come any sweeter than Ray.
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