Owner David Acklin says Jerry’s Sno Cones is not coming back to its 1657 Wells Station location.
“I’m not going to re-open Jerry’s there,” Acklin says. “We’re going to move forward.”
Acklin, who still owns the Jerry’s Sno Cones at 1601 Bonnie Lane in Cordova, won’t say why he closed the old location. “I really can’t say anything about anything. I’m just taking the high road. We needed a change and we’re moving forward with Cordova.”
Asked if it was a safety issue, Acklin says, “I never had any problems. But I may be a different kind of guy. I’ve been in Memphis for 54 years and I love Memphis.”
Acklin believes the store opened in 1967. In a 2021 interview in the Memphis Flyer, Acklin says, “I used to go there when I was a teenager.”
He got to know the owners L. B. and Cordia Clifton, whose son Jerry was the namesake of the business. Acklin, who was working at a printing company at the time, worked for the Cliftons for free after he got off his other job.
Acklin eventually bought Jerry’s Sno Cones, but he continued to work at the printing company. As he says in the interview, “I used to change clothes at red lights. Take off my tie and put on my shorts … I used to wear penny loafers. I’d pull my socks off and slide into my flip-flops.”
There would already be a line when he got there at 3:30 p.m., he told the Flyer.
And in the interview Acklin recalls going outside one July. “The line went straight out around the sign and two houses down.”
He asked a youngster in line to count the people: there were 220 lined up.
Acklin is going to ask customers in the next couple of weeks to begin voting on another location for Jerry’s Sno Cones. “We’ll pick it out by people coming to Jerry’s and voting.
“We’ll have a list. Like Arlington, East Memphis, Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett — whatever areas we feel like a lot of our customers come from. Maybe let them nominate an area.”
So, will the old Jerry’s Sno Cone location become something else? Maybe a cafe? “Man, I guess anything is possible.”