Hot dog dances once more as iconic sign is reborn
For a period of about 20 years, if you were a kid growing up in Sioux Falls, riding in the back seat of your parentsâ car, and their route took you down East 10th Street, you never missed the chance to crane your head out the window to see the dancing hot dog.
Truth be told, even adults looked forward to seeing the jaunty sign: an outsized sausage, feet dancing over flickering flames, his right arm putting on a top hat and taking it off in a never-ending welcome.
âDrive-up window,â the sign also announced. âRoasted hot dogs.â And between the two, the alluring name of the dancing hot dogâs home: Frosty Treat.
David Huber, his three brothers and his sister grew up, metaphorically, in the shadow of the dancing hot dog sign. And though the sign has been gone much longer than it ever glowed, Sioux Falls residents affectionately remember it and the food served at the Frosty Treat, Huber said.
âThere are a lot of good memories,â he said.
Favorite food items were the barbecue served on a bun and the chili-topped footlong hot dog. Huber has seen several people post on Facebook pages that they have his fatherâs original recipe for the barbecue and chili, but theyâre wrong, he said.
He keeps Don Huberâs handwritten recipe in a safe in Normal, Illinois, where he has lived since 1998.
What made it so special? Itâs all in the sauce, Huber said. Originally, his father used a barbecue sauce from a company that he remembers being named Oh So Good. Don Huber added his own spices to that base. When the company went out of business, Don Huber replicated the sauce, and no one noticed a difference, Huber said.
Frosty Treat also offered dozens of flavors for its ice cream selections and other products. It originally opened in 1958 as a summer-only ice cream stand. Vern and Erna Mutton ran it that first year, then sold Frosty Treat to Don Huber in 1959.
Don Huber had opened Donâs Standard Station at 2200 E. 10th St. in 1956. Don and Rita Huber had recently married, and they bought Frosty Treat with a loan for $22,000 from her father. As the Huber family grew, Rita Huber spent much of her time at home but still helped at Frosty Treat, David Huber remembered.
âIt was always there, it was the centerpiece of my life growing up in Sioux Falls,â Huber said. âIt was a part of almost every day. Either Dad was heading over there, or we were going over to eat when I was a kid. Mom would help at the noontime rush hour. Sheâd bring us along and stick us in the back. Weâd watch everybody work.â
The young Hubers grew to know Frosty Treat’s employees well, and some achieved legendary status. Huber remembers Mike and Sherry Olawsky.
“They were dating when they first started working at Frosty Treat and later married,” he said. “My younger brother Mike was the ring bearer at their wedding. They drove a Volkswagen, and because of them, my brothers and I were big fans of Volkswagens.”
Frosty Treat opened a drive-up window after the Hubers purchased it. It was the first of its kind in Sioux Falls, Huber said.
The original Frosty Treat displayed a modest sign when the Hubers bought it, one that promoted Coca-Cola as much as it did the business. Sometime in the mid-1960s, Don Huber contacted Pride Neon about erecting a larger, much flashier sign.
While Pride Neon would have to dig back into its files to determine the original size of the sign that became known as the dancing hot dog, thereâs no doubt it was distinctive. Travis Cole, who joined Pride Neon almost 17 years ago and works in receiving and maintenance, said today youâd have to travel to Reno or Las Vegas to see a similar sign with moving components in neon.
âEven now, itâs still a unique sign, and even on an old sign, you donât see that movement without a lot of work,â Cole said. âIt was an amazing piece of artwork to start with.â
Not only did the sign have moving legs, arm and flames, it also boasted another feature, Huber said. The words âdrive-up windowâ would light up for about 30 seconds, then would be replaced by the word âquickâ for about five seconds before reappearing.
âMy dad was a stickler for ‘fast,’â Huber said.
The Huber kids took pride in the unusual sign, and when they would tell others their family operated Frosty Treat, almost everyone knew where it was located.
Don Huber sponsored the softball teams his sons played on in Hilltop, so the boys had plenty of often-worn Frosty Treat T-shirts.
“When we won games, the whole team would climb into the back of my dad’s pickup, and he would drive us over to Frosty Treat for free ice cream cones,” Huber said. “I can still remember us chanting ‘we won, we won’ as we drove down 10th Street. Any player who scored a home run got to choose anything from the menu, which generally translated into a root beer float or a banana split or one of the 30 or more flavors of malts.”
Don and Rita Huber divorced in the mid-1970s, but the sign danced on. In the early 1980s, Don Huber changed Frosty Treatâs name to Taco Rita. Family speculation has always believed it was a tribute to his ex-wife.
In 1983, artist A. Bruce Loeschen created a poster titled âA Portrait of Sioux Falls,â featuring city landmarks. The dancing hot dog sign had its place in the upper left corner.
The hot dogâs days of dancing were nearing an end, however. Don Huber sold the business in 1985, then partnered with Dan and Bill Grevlos in the newly opened Neon Diner. After four or five years, he left that partnership and died in July 1998.
The sign was gone by then. Huber doesnât know what happened to it. Someone once told him it had been seen in a graveyard of old signs; he himself thinks it probably was scrapped.
All of Don Huberâs children â Steve in Minnesota, John in Arizona, David in Illinois, Mike in Portugal and Sioux Falls and Kris Riley in Sioux Falls â remember the sign fondly. Last year, when Mike saw a South Dakota Public Broadcasting segment on Pride Neon and heard a Pride Neon employee call the dancing hot dog one of his favorite signs ever, he let his brother know.
For several years, Huber had thought about obtaining a replica of the dancing hot dog sign. A software engineer with State Farm Insurance, he has photographs of Frosty Treat on his wall, along with other nostalgia such as movie posters. About six years ago, he saw a painting of the sign created by a former employee.
âIt was very, very well done, cool looking, framed and hanging in his house,â Huber said. âIt was almost like a lightbulb went on. He didnât make it look exactly alike, but it was the basic look, a very iconic sort of look to it, a â70s sort of look. I thought it was really cool and that I would love to have something like that.â
But he didnât pursue it then, not until he saw the SDPB video with its animated image. Almost on a whim, he contacted Pride Neon.
Pride Neonâs staff members were delighted with the assignment, Cole said.
âRedoing old work makes it significant,â he said. âItâs the ability to bring old signs back to life. And old signs mean a lot to a community. I know Frosty Treat is special to a lot of people. It was a hangout to a lot of the youth.â
The interior lighting for the new sign is LED, not neon, and boasts a longer-lasting power supply. Thatâs typical of todayâs signs, Cole said. The only neon signs found in Sioux Falls today likely will be in bars.
Designing the sign for Huber combined love and art, Cole said.
âItâs something that a lot of us love to do,â he said. âWe put our heart and soul into it. Bringing someoneâs dream to life is something that makes us happy.â
And Huber is very happy. The 34-by-29-inch sign greets everyone who walks into his office.
âWhen they sent me the design that they came up with, I was just flabbergasted,â Huber said. âI was stunned, it was so nice, better than what I envisioned. Itâs bright and colorful, and it looks nice even when itâs not lit up, the colors are so rich.â
When Huber picked up the sign, he put it on display for several days at Trail Ridge Senior Living, where his mother, Rita Blake, now lives. He enjoyed the reception it received and the memories it summoned up. The experience with Pride Neon just added to his memories of Frosty Treat.
“I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I arrived to pick up the completed sign, but I have to say that I was completely blown away. The professionalism shone through from my initial contact with a sales rep and continued on through the design work and onto the finished product,” Huber said. “Pride is an amazing company, and I hope to do more business with them soon as I’ve got some additional sign ideas dancing in my head.”
As much as he loves having the replica in his home office, Huber would love to return his sign to Sioux Falls, where a business or museum or ad agency could put it on display temporarily.
âIâm into the notion of preserving the memory of Frosty Treat and my dad, and I can better do that by sharing it with people who want to see it,â he said. âThere are so many facets to it for me, working there as a teenager and all the friends I made. And as a kid looking up to the older employees, who were very kind to us kids. I just turned 60. When I retire, maybe Iâd want to do something like that. Open a stand, and serve the barbecues and hot dogs.â
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