Chester and Roy Bridgeman of Duluth opened the first Bridgeman’s Ice Cream Shoppe in 1936. The venture was met with disbelief. Why would anyone open an ice cream shoppe in Minnesota? The climate wasn’t right! What about the depression? Chester and Roy heard the skeptics but they would not be stopped. They opened not one but six ice cream shoppes within eighteen months.
The Bridgeman family probably lived in Edina but went to school in St. Louis Park, as Don Byers remembers the nice cars that the “Bridgeman Girls” drove to school.