The only Icecream truck I know of anymore is the Schwann’s truck(I guess they’re still around, none of 'em ever showed up out here).
Son-of-a-wrek said you had to get a second mortgage to afford much off that truck. (They have been to his house, a few years ago).
Our condo complex is right next door to a park & playground; the boundary line between the park & complex is a common stop for ice cream trucks. At least one of which has music like it’s from a cheap keyboard on demo mode, rotating through all sorts of styles – including Christmas carols.
Why can’t grown folks have such a fun truck?
A little truck with a ditty playing “Roll out the Barrel” or Irish drinking songs, selling shots of the hard stuff. Cocktail glasses clinking painted on the side.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Cheers!
They have these things:
I’ve usually heard them called ice cream novelties or frozen novelties.
Greensleeves, when I was a kid. I can’t remember what I hear these days, they aren’t as common as they used to be.
Just the other day I saw a Baskin-Robbins food truck set in the parking lot of an abandoned 7-Eleven near my work. I suppose that’s the modern day equivalent of an ice cream van.
Back in the 1970s, when I was in high school and working a summer job, a kid on a Dickie Dee cart would come pedaling through the parking lot where I worked. I was an easy mark, as Toronto summers are hot and humid, and he was a sight for sore eyes.
Not sure what I got by name, but it was typically a vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate, and served on a popsicle stick. And it was wonderful! A great way to refresh on a dull afternoon.
I grew up back in the holler, so there were no ice cream trucks. When I moved to Brooklyn there was Mr. Softee, which I consider the gold standard of ice cream trucks. Our neighborhood just outside DC has a truck that plays a song I don’t recognize, always punctuated by “hello!” They have soft serve, which is required if I’m gonna partake. Anything else and I may as well just walk over to 7/11.
As a kid in suburban Houston, the ice cream truck drove by at least once a day and sold all manner of frozen treats- Frozetoes, Bomb Pops, fudgesicles, bananasicles, italian ices, ice cream sandwiches, etc. I sometimes got something, if I had managed to scrape together enough couch change and whatever else I could cadge or earn from my parents.
Now, in a neighborhood in suburban Dallas (still Dallas, just what was the outer suburbs in 1970), the ice cream guy comes by infrequently if at all. They are pretty thick down around White Rock Lake and the various city parks like Flagpole Hill though.
I blame the rise of convenience stores and the child-snatching moral panic that happened in the mid-late 1980s. As a kid, we were out and about on our own, and it was likely that enough kids would have a buck or two to get a popsicle or something to make it worthwhile for the drivers. But with the child snatching panic and convenience stores getting more and more comprehensive in terms of inventory, the traditional ice cream trucks and carts probably don’t really make a lot of money in many neighborhoods anymore, so they congregate in places people might buy- parks, lakes, sports events, etc.
I think another part is just that families are more likely to have ice cream in the house these days. Back in my youth, the only time we had ice cream in the freezer was if there was going to be a party or event. If we wanted some frozen treat, it was waiting for the ice cream truck or else some “fill an ice cube tray with Kool-Aid/Lemonade” thing. These days, as a parent, I just buy ice cream if I want some ice cream and while it’s not a household staple, it’s not noteworthy that we own a box of ice cream sandwiches. It has company with a number of things that were carefully rationed “treats” as a kid that are just “food” now: bacon, orange juice, trips to McDonalds, etc.
Anyway, I did notice that we had no ice cream truck visit during the recent heatwave and that I maybe see the truck in my neighborhood once a year for the past several years.
Around here there was an ice cream truck coming around quite regularly in the “summer”. (The boundaries of what constitutes “summer” being significantly pushed.)
I heard it once very early on this year and then nada.
I don’t patronize it or know what their prices are like. I’m assuming a Fudgesicle is a lot more than a dime.
I don’t know… it seemed like popsicles were pretty common for people to have when I was a kid. But I suspect that was mostly just something the parents of smallish kids might have. There weren’t a lot of options back then- seems like there were ice cream sandwiches, a couple variants on popsicles- fudgesicles and those orange/ice cream things, and then after that, it was half-gallons of ice cream and they came in maybe 8-10 flavors.
I don’t remember pints being common at all until considerably later, and it seems like at about the same time, other frozen treats started being available in grocery stores as well.
And I think there are multiple reasons why people have ice cream in the house more often these days. My mother could have maybe fit a half gallon of ice cream in her freezer. That’s gonna last how many days for six people? I have more freezer space than she did and fewer people, so we will have different flavored pints and a box or two of sandwiches or bars. Which means we only buy from the soft serve truck once in a while. Now that I’ve seen pre-packed soft serve, we might not even need to buy that from a truck.
ETA / they had half-pints on some trucks when I was a kid in the 70s. I remember that my mother rarely let us buy them.
I mainly remember, if they had anything, you had those frozen flavored water tubes. Freeze Pops or whatever. But then I’m remembering only my own youth and street so this shouldn’t be taken as a general statement.
On the other hand, I know this to be false from my youth (say, 1970s into early 80s so may not match your youth). My father was a manager/exec for a big grocery products chain in the dairy department which included ice creams and there was a ton of stuff. Notably missing off your list and Klondike bars and Drumsticks but there was a bunch of other stuff as well.
in SoCal Mexicans had carts selling paletas, frozen pops like mango, coconut etc
NASCAR would object.
I remember when the operator of the ice cream truck was called The Good Humor Man. Good Humor made popsicles and other X-sicle products.
The current ice cream van in our neighborhood isn’t selling food products cheaply. It’s only one van for our area and I think it lives on the next street over.
I had a chocolate/peanut sundae from one today; I caught it just before it left.
Sounds very much like my childhood. My mom didn’t even care for ice cream anyway. She worked as a soda jerk in high school (6 hours a day for ten cents an hour), and the owner wisely told his hires they could eat as much as they wanted. She got so sick of it, she had no interest in eating it even 25-30 years later.
Plus we an older fridge whose freezer area was about a foot (well, maybe 14 inches) square. Not much room for a carton of ice cream.
Yeah, I saw my first paleta truck at Olvera Steet when I was about five. Now, I always get a flash memory of Olvera Street and its smells when I see a paleta.
I remember that supermarket ice cream wasn’t very good when I was a kid (1970s or so). Typically, we’d have a rectangular half-gallon “brick” of vanilla Breyers or another brand in the freezer. Super-premium brands like Ben & Jerry’s were not yet available. (My father had a thing for pistachio ice cream, but the only way we could get that was to go to the Howard Johnson restaurant and buy a pint that one of the employees had to hand-pack.)