NEW SCOTLAND — After being closed for the past two years, Tastee Treat Ice Cream on New Scotland Road in Slingerlands will reopen with a local at the helm. 

“I have a great affection for this area, for Voorheesville, having grown up here,” said Jeff Clark, the shop’s new owner. “It was always a great town. It was extremely good to me and my family.”

Tastee Treat shut down after its 2019 season and never reopened due largely to the pandemic’s impact. Thursday, May 5, is opening day. Clark said the shop will be open every day of the week, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. 

He’s a Voorheesville native who graduated from Clayton A. Bouton High School in 1984, where for four years he was, at one time or another, the best high school wrestler within 12 counties, then all 62 of them, and then however many there are in the entire United States. 

The Enterprise reported in February 1984, that Clark had been a “four-time state champion, two-time elite national champion, elite world champion, Concord international champion (senior level), junior world national champion, and senior AAU national champion.” 

He was the top-recruited high school wrestler his senior year, having just come off of representing the United States at the world championships in the fall of 1983, but came up short at the Olympic trials.

“I was cutting a lot of weight to make 52 kilograms. That’s 114.4 pounds,” he said. “That was a big weight cut for me. And by ’84, I was growing and I just had a hard time getting into the weight. And it just killed me.” Clark said it was a growth spurt that did him in; it “wound up being very difficult to make” weight after that. During his sophomore and junior years, he’d been a better grappler than almost any person on the planet.

Things worked out, though, as he ended up at Harvard, where he told the student newspaper a year after leaving Voorheesville his natural weight was 155 pounds. Clark told the Harvard Crimson he’d been “really depressed in high school, I was cutting weight … trying to 112 pounds.”

Clark shrugs off his Ivy League pedigree, attributing his success in gaining admittance to perhaps the most-prestigious institution of higher education on the planet to the same thing that made him a great wrestler: work. 

“I’m not a brainy guy by any means,” he said. “I was a pretty simple guy but, when you apply yourself to something, whether it’s a sport or books or whatever, even if you don’t have all the talent in the world, you can get quite far, you know?”

Even though he’s traded in bond sales and boardrooms for ice cream and 600 square feet of nostalgia, the song remains the same: work. 

“We’re scrambling to get things ready for Thursday,” Clark said. 

When he first saw the shop for sale, Clark said he thought buying it would be a good way to give back to his hometown. He had his doubts, yes, as he’d spent most of his life working in finance, but “at the same time, it was, like, geez, this could be a great thing. This could be a really nice thing, to get back involved with the community here.” 

He closed on the property in September. 

When it comes to ice cream, he’s a “chocolate-vanilla twist guy.” 

The interior of the building was in need of a good cleaning, Clark said, a lot of which was handled by his father. On Friday, holes were being dug for the base of the spring-rider horses. Clark said the existing on-site playground structure was taken down over safety concerns.

Clark’s parents live in the village. He now resides on Forest Avenue in Albany. 

Although he described himself as “technically retired,” someone will be running the shop’s day-to-day business, Clark said, his new operations managers’ mother was cleaning the bathrooms recently, “making sure they’re in good shape for the reopening.”

And she put up signs in both the men’s and women’s rooms that said, “Be Kind,” Clark said. “And I walked to the bathroom, [and] I’m like, ‘I love those signs, Be Kind.’ It’s just a nice theme. It’s a nice theme. It’s nice for here. It’s just been really pleasant.”