Larry Mitchell, co-founder of famed ice cream parlor, dies

Larry Mitchell, co-founder of famed ice cream parlor, dies

Ice cream veteran Larry Mitchell was a man of adventurous tastes — not just chocolate and strawberry, but also ube (purple yam), macapuno (sweet coconut), lychee and avocado.

About a dozen other customers lingered outside the shop, including players from a youth basketball team who had just won a regional tournament.

Opened in 1953, Mitchell’s still hawks many of the flavors that its eponymous founder concocted in the 1960s and ’70s — a period of freewheeling experimentation, according to his son Brian Mitchell, 53, who helps run the business now with his sister Linda Mitchell, 62.

Mr. Mitchell co-founded the business with his brother Jack, who died in 2006, and a creamery salesman supplied their raw ingredients.

In the early 1980s Mr. Mitchell bought brother Jack’s share in the business and began running the shop on his own.

Relatives and employees remember him as an unassuming handyman who could always be called on to fix a broken ice cream machine.

When he wasn’t making ice cream, Mr. Mitchell enjoyed fly fishing and duck hunting, and he occasionally took his children to pick berries near Lake Merced.

“He would bring home a duck and show me how to clean it, pluck off the feathers and take out the innards,” said Brian Mitchell, who remembers eviscerating and then eating his father’s trophies for dinner.