Ice cream was the furthest thing from Military Police Sgt. Eric Conde’s mind when he was patrolling the streets of Baghdad in 2003. Root beer floats? Occasional treats, but not something that came up all that often in his busy life as a Dallas Police Department community liaison representative, husband, father of two, and active church member. It’s a bit ironic, then, that a man who has said “freeze” off and on for two decades is now whipping up banana splits for appreciative CliffDwellers. Conde is so at ease behind the counter at Papa Danny’s, the old-fashioned ice cream parlor he opened last fall with his wife, Diana, that visitors to the Bishop Arts District may have a hard time picturing him doing anything else. Families who live in the area, though, know him well as the officer who oversees a host of programs for neighborhood kids out of the DPD’s Bishop Street Storefront office. And then there’s his history of military service and post-9/11 tour of active duty.
It takes a while to get the scoop on Sgt. Conde, the Oak Cliff native and sundae…er…Sunday-school teacher now working overtime to make Bishop Arts even cooler. As literally thousands of young Dallasites can attest, though, it’s well worth the effort.
Family affair
Conde — who named Papa Danny’s after his belated father, Daniel John Conde, Sr. — is, first and foremost, a family man. Pull up one of his brightly-colored barstools and strike up a conversation, and it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes for him to mention his wife, Diana, who works the counter many nights and over the one weekend a month he trains with the Army Reserves. Or tell a story about his children, 11-year-old Christian or seven-year-old Mary Hannah. Or reference his mother and fellow entrepreneur Mary Jane Conde, well-known to longtime CliffDwellers as the creative force behind Flowers by Conde, at the corner of Madison and Twelfth. That sense of family permeates everything he does, and is one of the biggest reasons he enjoys his role as a community liaison officer so much. 
Conde’s work on behalf of DPD, which he joined after a three-year stint in the Army and three years at Mountain View Junior College, covers a broad range of youth initiatives, including scouting programs, after-school activities and organized sports. He helps about 120 kids a year, some of whom are referred by local schools and many who find their way to the storefront from nearby homes and apartments. “I really love working with kids,” he enthuses. “I started back in the ‘80s as a volunteer coach for St. Cecilia’s, and I really can’t imagine doing anything else — unless, maybe, it would be directing a recreation center.”
Since Conde started on the force 19 years ago, he has counseled, mentored, or simply had fun with more than 100 kids a year in need of support and friendship — and he attributes his success to being open about some of his own experiences growing up. Oak Cliff’s newly-minted King of Ice Cream is dyslexic, and he freely admits his struggles to cope with his learning differences and graduate from Sunset High School. “It was hard,” he shares. “It’s still hard sometimes. I started work as a community liaison officer because I had so much trouble with my report-writing when I first joined the force in 1988. They recognized this, so they reassigned me in 1989 to run the after-school program at Ervay in Old City Park. I definitely tell the kids about it. They’re not the only ones who have trouble with school.”
That reassignment would prove to be a fortuitous match of assignment and inclination. From Old City Park, Conde was transferred to East Dallas, running youth programs at Bryan and Peak — and, then, in 2004, back to Bishop, “back to the neighborhood where I was raised,” he explains. “I know this place well, and everybody knows me and my family. Somebody’s always saying, ‘Oh, you’re one of those Conde boys,’ or ‘Oh, yeah, you’re Danny’s son.’ Yeah. It’s nice.”
What Conde enjoys most about his work is knowing that he’s having an impact on a kid’s life. “I don’t care how the kid got here, whether he was referred or whether he found his way here by accident, I can work with them,” he relates. “As long as they come to me and have that little gleam in their eye, I can see that little bit of hope. I’ll have a kid come in and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t get detention today,’ after 30 days of detention. I’ll take it.”
Tour of duty
If you’re a believer in karma, you might say that the Bishop storefront post came to Conde as something of a reward for his service in one of the toughest neighborhoods on the planet, the streets of Baghdad. Early in 2003, Conde, who has served in the Army reserves since the mid-‘80s, was called to active duty at the start of the Iraq war. “I knew after 9/11 it was a real possibility,” he recalls. Although he had trained monthly since his marriage in 1991, the news still came as a bit of a shock. “It was tough,” asserts Diana. “He started saying, ‘You know, I could be called up any day,’ and, then, he was.” 
As tough as the deployment was on Conde, whose nephew is also on active duty, it was even harder on his son. “The kids were younger back then,” Diana explains. “He was gone out of the house for a year-and-half. It didn’t really affect my daughter as much as my son, Christian. He began to have physical pain related to his daddy being gone. He had these terrible stomach pains. We had him tested, and it turned out that he had worry pains, he missed his father so badly.”
Not long after his return from Iraq, Conde’s father passed away. “He was sick when I left,” he recalls. “He had lots of ailments, but he was so proud of me.” Conde, Sr. used to sit on his porch for hours. “People would ask him, ‘What are you waiting for?’, and he would say, ‘I’m waiting for my boys to come back from Iraq,’” Eric recalls. “He made it until after I got back, and a lot of people say that’s why he made it that long.”
Conde, who spent a year in-country patrolling the streets as a military policeman, is slated for retirement from the Army this fall — and Diana lives daily with the possibility that he could be called up again between now and then. “He’s still in the reserves,” she says. “Every time somebody asks me I say, ‘I hope to God he doesn’t get called up’ because, as he and I have discussed, it’s a different war now.”
Sweet beginnings
It was his post-Iraq assignment to the Bishop Street storefront in 2004 that prompted Conde and Diana, a technology specialist with MEDCO Construction Company by day, to consider opening Papa Danny’s. At the time, the shop at the corner of Bishop and Eighth streets was owned and operated by a part-time entrepreneur whose store hours were becoming increasingly erratic.
“The store was owned by woman named Rosa, but it was closed a big part of every day,” Conde explains. “People were always coming by, asking when the ice-cream shop was going to open, and it got me to thinking. I had always wanted to start a business — something that I could build and grow and leave behind for my family. One day, I thought, ‘If that place were open all the time, I bet it would make money.’ Too many people were asking about it.”Conde, who got his start in the ice cream business as a teenager working at the Dairy Queen location on Davis that now serves as home to popular Mediterranean restaurant Kavala, approached Rosa with an offer: he wanted to buy the place or, potentially, join as a partner. “She turned me down at first,” he relates. “She said she had had bad experiences with partners. Then, one day, she told me she wanted to sell and I made her an offer.”
Getting Started
The store — and the ice cream business — were anything but sweet at first. “I didn’t have a clue,” he laughs. “Nothing in the place was up to code. Everything had been grandfathered in under Rosa, and the city wanted things brought up to speed. They definitely don’t make it easy, but I can say now that it was all for health, so it’s a good thing.” It took more than three months of moonlighting to get the store ready to roll. “We were shooting for Jingle Bells on Bishop last year, but we had to settle for handing out flyers.”
In the end, the shop opened its doors over the holiday season — admittedly not the best time to sell ice cream, but it gave the Condes the opportunity to get their feet wet at a manageable pace. Before long, they had a steady stream of customers — many of them the children and families Conde is so pleased to serve. “
From the beginning, we wanted the shop to be a place families could come and feel comfortable.” From the Blue Bell ice cream to the candy counter to the game tables to the animated videos on the television near the bay window, it’s clear the Conde’s plans are succeeding. “Families are loving it,” Eric exclaims. “What makes me happy is seeing the same people come in week after week, spending time together. A few weeks ago, a girl came in saying, ‘Dad, come on. The first time you played me in chess was last week and I want to do it again.’ That’s what makes me happy.” What makes his customers happy, besides the obvious? “They feel safe here,” Eric says. “People say that all the time…and we even get some kids who live nearby who come in on their own.” In the months since they’ve opened, the Condes have experienced their share of difficulties — from equipment breakdowns necessitating the emergency distribution of an entire freezer full of ice cream tubs to trouble with broken-down air conditioning. Now that the shop is running smoothly, though, they’re mulling over plans for chess nights or family game nights, and are close to expanding their menu, adding hot dogs to go alongside their existing nacho offerings. (“We started selling nachos because I needed something to eat,” Eric explains. “I’m more of a snack person than I am an ice cream person.”)
“It’s a lot of work, but it’s exciting,” Diana asserts. “It’s definitely rewarding. We’re building relationships. If you can connect with people, you’ve really done something.” Eric agrees. “I’ve always believed that if you give with your heart, you get it back,” he muses. “That’s what I tell the kids who work here. It’s not all about the money, it’s all about people and the way they like to be treated.”
Papa Danny’s, 408 North Bishop, is open Tuesday through Friday, 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m., Saturday, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m., and Sunday 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
