ICE CREAM: While we’re on the topic of ice cream shops, James Sheffer of Buffalo, N.Y., called to talk about the South Bradford Dairy Bar.

The shop was built in 1948 by Walter Neely, James said. He remembers going there when he was in high school.

One section of the restaurant just served ice cream, and there would be one person just to scoop ice cream cones and another to make sundaes — “so they would look nice,” he explained.

James said the ice cream counter was shaped like a “W,” and there were two islands with stools. He said they could make eight milkshakes at a time, and it sounds like that feature came in handy.

“It was a very, very busy place,” he said.

Among the shop’s offerings was a double banana split, made with two bananas, six scoops of ice cream and all the trimmings, including marshmallow, butterscotch nuts and cherries.

The shop was “open round the clock,” too, James said, though from midnight to 2 a.m. “you couldn’t get anything hot of the grill.” He explained it was during that time the staff turned it off to clean it.

James called this time “the last of the big ice cream-eating days” and attributed the death of the popularity of such ice cream shops to the availability of ice cream in grocery stores.

He explained a half gallon of ice cream from the South Bradford Dairy Bar would have run you about 99 cents, while at the store it was about 69 cents a half gallon.

James tells us Bradford used to be teeming with stores, but around the mid to late 1960s, “businesses started to close and leave town.”

He said the population of Bradford had been around 35,000 at one time. He explained that downtown businesses had ran up Congress, Mechanic and East and West Washington streets.

The population is now somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000.

2015: With the beginning of 2015 looming over us, are readers thinking about how they want to bring in the new year?

Does anyone else remember back in 1999 how weird it sounded to hear years in the 21st century? Saying “two-thousand-and-fifteen” sounded really futuristic. You might as well have been saying the year “two million.” We guess we’re used to it now.