I’m sure you do. Good Humor truck blaring Turkey in the Straw, kids running clutching coins. The hard decisions between popsickles and strawberry shortcake bars and all?
I don’t.
Today was a beautiful warm day, and some neighbors started reminiscing about them, the excitement, the scramble to find the right change, which were their favorites… And I suddenly realized that I, a sixty something woman who grew up in (several different) American suburbs, have NEVER had a treat from one of those trucks.
Do you all feel pity for me?
My mom was always adamantly opposed to them. They’re low class, she’d say. And we have ice cream at home. Looking back, it was undoubtedly due to her having four kids and a definitely limited budget and a half gallon tub of ice cream being way more economical, but somehow I never questioned it as I grew up. Even when I was older and had an allowance and babysitting money, it just never occurred to me to buy from one of those trucks.
I’ve also never to this day eaten an italian ice, or any type of Slurpee. Or those plastic tube things. In fact, I never even had an ice cream CONE until I was away at college. Ice cream was to consumed from a dish, you see, that’s just how it was. (White gloves optional, I guess.)
Come to think of it, I once had a Dixie Cup at Vacation Bible School. Still, that’s in a dish, of sorts…
Clearly I have decades to make up for. What should I start with?
Weird, your thread gave me deja by like I had read it years ago. I had ice cream out of a truck when I was a kid and I also recently bought some for my children 2 weeks in a row.
Nor I. The suburb I grew up in banned ice cream trucks when I was fairly young. A kid was fatally struck (by the truck itself or another vehicle, I don’t recall) running across a street for an ice cream truck, and one of the conditions for settling the resulting lawsuit was agreeing to ban then from the village.
Definitely go for something interesting that you couldn’t get from the grocery store or convenience store!
Growing up, my neighborhood didn’t have an ice cream truck. There was a pharmacy on Main Street that sold frozen treats (and orange-ades!), but by the time I was old enough to ride a bike there myself, they were in serious decline. My friend’s neighborhood, on the other hand, had a treat truck that sold various uncarbonated, sugary drinks with slushie ice in them. They hit the spot when you had been running around in the sun for most of the afternoon.
My current neighborhood has a variety of ice cream trucks. A couple of them have a generator mounted on the front; I think they offer soft serve. There’s one that’s barely marked as an ice cream truck – just some faded ice cream-related stickers on one side and a barely legible “STOP for children” decal. (My mom is convinced that one sells drugs.) A new one has shown up this year; it’s an older van with new stickers on the side, and a bizarre audio system that features a repeating track of someone saying “Hello?,” followed by a gentle electronic dance tune with lots of synthesized clapping.
My house growing up was on a quiet street in suburban Connecticut. The houses were all on an acre or more of land, with more than a hundred feet from house to house. The nearest stores were at least a mile or two away, so it wasn’t as if you could walk to the store to buy anything. So I always thought it was really cool that the ice cream truck actually came down our street. So we’d get all excited and look for change (or a couple of dollars from our parents’ wallets) to buy something, hoping to get out there before the truck drove away. (In retrospect, there were actually quite a few kids on that street back then, so the driver probably knew this was a good one to include on his route.)
Anyhow, my favorite thing to get was a toasted almond bar, with crushed almonds on vanilla ice cream.
It’s a little weird that we were so excited about the ice cream truck, given that even back then similar treats were probably available in the supermarket, cheaper too.
I don’t think I ever got a treat from a truck - too expensive. Up until last year we had on regularly in our suburban Chicago neighborhood. Not sure if the tune was Turkey in the Straw…
I got something from an ice cream truck a small number of times–I wouldn’t be surprised if it was fewer than five. I lived in a rural area so they didn’t come by often and several hundred feet down a private driveway so even when they did come by it would have been a real sprint to catch it.
Thanks for the reminder of a gentler time. Big part of my childhood, and I vividly remember a hot afternoon in Seattle running with my kids: “I can hear it! It’s down this street… no…” “Dad! It’s over this way!” “No, it sounds like it’s near the QFC!” “Where IS it?”
Yes, we finally found it, and just in time, before we collapsed from heatstroke.
And if you’ve ever wondered about the odd graphics on those sketchy ice cream trucks…
My nephews have one in their suburbs. It was nice to take them to one but damn are they overpriced. You can buy an entire box of store brand frozen treats for the price of one from the truck.
I almost never actually got anything from the truck (as my mom pointed out, we already had ice cream at home), but for whatever reason, they still represent a source of happy memories for me. Maybe it’s just because I feel the world is a better place with ice cream trucks in it, or maybe it’s because I associate them with summer in general. They’re still one of my criteria, that I don’t consider it really summer until I’ve heard an ice cream truck.
When I was a kid, the most common song on them was “The Entertainer”, though “Turkey in the Straw” wasn’t uncommon, either. Nowadays, though… I have to wonder about the wisdom of buying food from a truck playing a song about cockroaches.
Push up pop or screwball if they still have them! Screwball has a terrible gumball at the bottom!
I pay for an ice cream truck to come by every year for my Kids Party. My favorite thing to get these days is some sort of watermelon ice cream thingy with chocolate chips.
I tell you what when the ice cream truck rolls up at my party the kids go nuts and I tell the parents to get in line too and they’re all like “naw, naw…” but they always end up picking a treat anyway
No, no, they’re “fudgicles”! I was also partial to the orange pushup thingies.
Starving, if it helps any, even back then I thought the ice cream didn’t taste that good. I remember a lot of ice particles, yuck. Probably they were partially thawed at some point then re-frozen.
I grew up in basically the same sort of suburban Connecticut town and I barely remember the ice cream truck coming around our neighborhood. And one of my buddies older brother drove an ice cream truck. That means he would take it and go canvas some other neighborhood!
It’s not surprising I guess. Up until I was 10, our family lived in a more urban suburb where the houses were closer together. Ice cream trucks were a regular summer fixture. One of the biggest shocks for me after moving to CT was that we rarely had kids just hanging out in the street playing. Even on the cul-de-sacs. Maybe we’d drive around town in little groups on our bikes and skateboards. But certainly not with enough density or regularity to make it profitable for the ice cream man.
Of course now that I’m a grown-ass man, there’s an ice cream truck that parks a block from my apartment every day. On Fridays another truck parks in front of the building. I just had a vanilla cone dipped in chocolate a few hours ago.
Hell, if I wanted to, I could eat truck ice cream all day until I puke!
At one point we graduated from the cheaper pops (fudgesicle, dreamsicle, good humor bar, pink lady, orange push-up) to drumsticks (chocolate coated ice cream cone). Then I didn’t have any novelty ice cream for a long time. When I tried a drumstick as an adult, they had added a dollop of chocolate to the bottom of the cone to keep the melting ice cream from dripping out the bottom. Genius!
Ice cream truck in my town played its own tune. The stuff on the truck was 10 cents to no more than a quarter. I don’t remember it being particularly good but it was fun to hear the truck jingling down the street, beg for some change–or go find it in the couch or the laundry basket–and run out there and get in line.
Confession: I do not like ice cream particularly and didn’t when I was a kid. I went for things dipped in chocolate, ate the chocolate off, and usually then managed to let an obliging pet “steal” the now drippy ice cream part. And there was always an obliging pet.
Good times.
Current neighborhood: Truck plays “Red Wing” (or “Union Maid” if you wanna be that way) and the treats cost $3-$5. But there is nothing dipped in chocolate. I let my kid get a treat a couple of times but, oddly enough, he wasn’t much into ice cream either. The truck did not go through the neighborhood I lived in when his brothers were of the age to get that kind of treats. I don’t know why, because there were tons of kids there.
Oh, I grew up with them in the city, and they were always parked on hot days right at the end of the block when my (grammar) school got out. I was all about the strawberry shortcake, with the occasional Choco Taco. I’m pretty sure they’re still around, but my neighborhood definitely has a paletero “paletas man” walking around with his push cart, selling Mexican ice pops for everyone to enjoy. No blasting of “Turkey in the Straw,” “Pop Goes the Weasel,” or the “Entertainer” to elicit a child’s Pavlovian response, but instead the sounds of a bicycle bell.
I don’t remember any ice cream trucks in my post-war2 childhood, possibly because our suburban neighborhood was not dense enough to be profitable. Even if they had come down our street, Mom didn’t allow me to go out of the yard for anything, and ice cream couldn’t possibly be an exception. How could you know that the ice cream was sanitary and safe? Much too dangerous. Even though one car per hour passed our house, you were certain to be hit by it.
I was also partial to the orange pushup thingies.