11 August 1951, Dallas Morning News, part 1, pg. 2:
ONE ORDER FROM ALASKA
Sammie Bert Sells
World Snow Cones
Sammie Bert of Dallas, known as the snow cone king in international snow cone circles, is literally about to sell snow to the Eskimos.
Back in 1919, when Bert first appeared on the Fair Park Midway, he invented a machine for electrically making short order snow cones. He still manufactures these snow-making machines on the Dallas Midway and sends them all over the world. Friday he had an order for one from a client in Alaska where most of the customers would be Eskimos.
King Sammie has a natural businessman’s reticence about revealing how many snow cones he sells in a year. But he did say that he often has to use 1,500 pounds of ice daily to supply his snow cone concession at Fair Park.
And he said his heavier caliber cone-making engines can take fifty pounds of ice and turn it into 200 cones full of syrup-flavored snow in forty seconds.
State Fair of Texas publicity department statisticians estimate that King Sammie sold more than 1,000,000 snow cones during last year’s fair.
King Sammie was definitely not a king when he came to the Fair Park Midway in 1919. He was fresh from service as a combat hospital corpsman in France with the 79th Division. He set up a small snow cone stand, shaving the ice manually with a carpenter-style plane.
His patents on his electric snow-making machinery got him off to a good start by 1920. As the senior concessionaire at Fair Park he now owns, in addition to the snow cones the $100,000 roller coaster, the Cotton Bowl skating rink, a Midway restaurant and the grounds concession for popcorn and peanuts.
King Sammie is a fan of his own products. Almost any of these 100-degree evenings at the Midway, you may see the pleasant little man eating snow and riding over the breezy peaks of his roller coaster.
After selling snow cones and machines at the State Fair of Texas for 65 years Samuel Bert died September 9, 1984.