A handful of original flavors made from milk given by his father’s cows have since grown beyond 1,000 varieties, including his own favorite, “Jamoca Almond Fudge.”

Irvine Robbins, co-founder of the Baskin-Robbins chain of ice cream stores, died late Monday at age 90 in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

A former yell king at Stadium High School and the son of a dairyman, Robbins spent his early years in Tacoma working at Olympic Dairy Store & Ice Cream Parlor on Court C, behind Rhodes Brothers department store. Selling cottage cheese and ice cream produced from surplus milk, Robbins managed the business and gained a respect both for quality ingredients and for something beyond.It’s about the power of ice cream, and what the ice cream did.

According to his daughter Marsha Veir, Robbins “especially loved selling the ice cream because customers enjoyed buying it, and throughout his professional career always focused on the fun involved.”

In 1945, with $6,000 and an honorable discharge as a sergeant from the Army, Robbins opened his first ice creamery, called Snowbird, in Glendale, Calif. His daughter says the grand opening was delayed for a day because the paint on the floor hadn’t quite dried.

The first day’s sales totaled $53, and the shop featured 21 flavors. That number would swell to 31 – one for each day of the month – after the birth of a partnership with Burton Baskin.

Baskin, who died in the mid-1960s, joined the extended family after marrying Robbins’ sister Shirley, who had attended Tacoma’s Annie Wright Seminary.

Baskin’s brother Lester remained in Tacoma and became a respected surgeon, founder of Western Clinic and a patron of the arts.

Irvine Robbins and Burton Baskin each spent the late 1940s and early 1950s managing his own small chain of ice creameries, then combined efforts in 1953 as Baskin-Robbins, with the order of names chosen by the flip of a coin.

Alongside creating a nationwide niche for premium ice cream, Robbins was a pioneer in the business of franchising. He was one of the first to realize that he could profit by licensing to owner-managers.

One of his sweet delights in life, according to Veir, was the invention of new flavors such as “Plum Nuts” and “Pink Bubblegum.” When asked by a New York reporter what he would do to celebrate the coming of The Beatles to America and “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Robbins answered, “Beatlenut.”

This was the first the world had heard of such a flavor, but company factories immediately began production, and Beatlenut was ready for the freezer two days later.

Some proposed flavors, including “Ketchup” and “Lox and Bagels,” did not merit mass production.

Robbins was born Dec. 6, 1917, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to parents who had emigrated from Russia and Poland. He attended the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, and in 1939 earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Washington, where he joined Zeta Beta Tau fraternity.

With his wife, Irma, whom he married in 1942, he raised three children.

After retiring in 1967, Robbins moved to a Rancho Mirage home equipped with a six-flavor ice-cream counter, and he was known to begin his day with a bowl of cereal topped with a scoop of banana ice cream.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Robbins is survived by two other children, John and Erin, both of California; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

On Tuesday, the company that bears Robbins’ name asked “ice cream lovers across the globe to keep Irv and his family in their thoughts and prayers and honor his memory with 31 seconds of silence on Friday, May 9, 2008, at 3:31 p.m. local time.”

C.R. Roberts: 253-597-8535

blogs.thenewstribune.com/business

The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.