What gets Cincinnati Children’s Radiology employees off their seats in a delicacy uproar? It’s ice cream in between two chocolate chip cookies, known as a Chip Wheelie. A Chip Wheelie is a “handcrafted French Pot ice cream sandwiched between two made-from-scratch chocolate chip cookies and rolled in chocolate jimmies”[1] made by Graeter’s in Cincinnati, Ohio.
During our hospital Employee Appreciation Week celebration, our Radiology department distributed its own signature appreciation gift to its employees: the Chip Wheelie! It all began with Dr. Bill Shiels, a clinical fellow radiologist. In his fellowship tenure (1988-1990), he would hand out Chip Wheelies to the technologists during his late-night shifts. So began the tradition of the Chip Wheelie! Even when he would return to visit, he would come with boxes of Chip Wheelies. Sadly, Dr. Shiels passed away in 2015, but his memory lives on whenever we distribute his favorite ice cream sandwich.
One of our faculty, Dr. Bernadette Koch, remembers Dr. Sheils:
“William Shiels II served two years of his pediatric Radiology fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s. I was a resident during his fellowship.
I do not know if there were certain occasions where he would buy Chip Wheelies for the technologists or not; I only knew of him stopping in to visit the department after his fellowship, during his military years and then after he became radiologist-in-chief at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus. Whenever he visited, he brought a bunch of Chip Wheelies.
He was ninth out of 11 children and grew up in Hyde Park. His family had a lumber company, and I am told that maybe one connection to Graeter’s was that his family’s lumbar company made the wooden paddles used in Graeter’s French Pot ice cream process.
He was a kind and generous soul.”
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Contributions by Bernadette Koch, MD; Glenn Miñano, BFA, editor; Meredith Towbin, copy editor
