Susan Turner and the 25-Cent Lemonade Stand of 1970
In 1970, Susan Turner learned something that felt like business and love at the same time: you can set a price, you can make a sign, you can do everything “right”—and still, the day doesn’t truly start until someone decides to show up for you.
This memory is brought to you by Oh Sherri Irish Pub — Testing the partner system
This story is brought to you by
Oh Sherri Irish Pub
Testing the partner system
Visit Oh Sherri Irish Pub →We sold lemonade for twenty-five cents a cup. Business was slow until my dad convinced the neighbors to “stop by.” Looking back, I’m fairly sure most of our profits were from supportive parents.
It’s easy to picture Susan Turner’s 1970 wooden lemonade stand: the grain of the boards, the tiny wobble in the legs, the hand-written sign doing its best to look official. Twenty-five cents wasn’t just a number—it was the whole pitch, spelled out in marker like certainty. The kind of certainty you can only have when you’re young enough to believe a sidewalk can turn into a storefront if you want it badly enough.
Then comes the part Susan Turner remembers with a smile that has edges: the slow business. The waiting. The way time stretches when you’ve made something with your own hands and nobody seems to need it. It’s a particular childhood feeling—half embarrassment, half stubborn hope—standing near your sign as if standing there long enough might summon customers out of thin air.
And then Susan Turner’s dad steps in—not to take over, but to quietly tilt the world in her favor. He “convinced the neighbors to stop by,” which is such a gentle phrasing for what it really was: a parent doing that invisible work parents do, the kind that lets a child keep believing the stand is succeeding on its own merits. Suddenly, there’s movement. Footsteps. Friendly faces arriving like they’d just happened to be walking past at exactly the right moment.
The older Susan Turner gets, the funnier it becomes—and also the sweeter. Profits mostly from supportive parents is its own kind of punchline, but it’s also the truth that makes the whole memory glow. The lemonade wasn’t the product. Susan Turner was. The stand wasn’t just a stand; it was a small stage where the neighborhood proved, cup by cup, that they were willing to participate in her confidence.
There’s something very 1970 about that handwritten sign, too—before everything was printed, before polished branding, before the world asked kids to be slick. Susan Turner’s sign didn’t need to be perfect; it just needed to exist. In that era, a few boards and a marker could be enough to claim a little corner of summer and call it a business.
If Susan Turner still remembers the price so clearly, it’s probably because the money was only half the thrill. The other half was being taken seriously—being the person behind the counter, the one who gets to hand something over and receive something back. And thanks to her dad and those neighbors, she got the best version of that lesson: sometimes your first customers are people who love you, and that doesn’t cheapen the win. It explains it.
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About the Storyteller
Susan Turner
Memory from 1970