In 1953, Mr. Mitchell and his younger brother, Larry, turned an old liquor store in the Mission District into Mitchell’s Ice Cream parlor, which would become a Bay Area tradition.

Mr. Mitchell’s grandfather had owned a dairy farm in San Francisco in the late 1800s, but the only experience the younger Mitchell boys had with ice cream was eating it.

Mr. Mitchell’s favorite flavor was plain old strawberry — funny for a guy who would later import exotic fruits from the Philippines to make gourmet-flavored ice cream and sorbet. When he was a kid… Read it.