Other than having to walk to school, uphill in both directions, I believe I couldn’t have grown up in a better time. They were the Golden Years of Ice Cream Trucks.
I loved seeing these when I went into “The City”
Another local company
Bungalow Bar
Our very favorite independent Ice Cream Man
Cosmo
And last but not least, the aforementioned Mr. Softee, who still comes around the neighborhood as well as all over NYC every summer…
Now, Get Off My Lawn!
Kids aren’t stupid, you know. Tell your kids that when the truck arrives, if it’s playing music, that means it’s only advertising the ice cream and point out the pictures of the ice cream on the ice cream truck from the window. They might buy it. It’s plausable.
The ice cream trucks in my neighborhood look like #3. Popsicles are typically $2-$3. The driver likes to park across from the primary school at dismissal time or at the bus stop when the older elementary kids are due to arrive. (There are about 40 kids at that bus stop - it’s insane.) I’d be delighted to see a less shady looking van, but whatever. All the food is pre-packaged, so how bad can it be?
The ice cream truck that comes through our neighborhood is not at all creepy. There is a very nice young lady driving it around with a dog wearing a scarf. The trudk itself looks exactly like the ones from my childhood. Damned if I could tell you what song it plays, though. We get something from her about once a week, but she definitely drives by at the same time every day.
Did anyone else have the little round ice cream trucks, with a canopy over them? They were either red & white striped or red, white & blue. I remember them distinctly in Evansville IN, but can’t find a picture of them. They were around in the 60’s.
There’s an ice cream van outside my office right now. It looks pretty much like this. I haven’t noticed the look of them changing over the years.
FOUND ONE!! I added my city’s name on the search… must have been a local thing.
We must live in a good neighbourhood! Our ice cream truck looks like your second link, drives fairly slowly, and stops for patrons!
When I was a child, the “Dickie Dee” bike would come by. It was basically a freezer on wheels with a bike seat on the back and the seller would ring the bells to let you know he was in the neighbourhood. The seller was usually a late-teens, early 20’s male, but you could always tell when the economy was bad, because then the sellers would be full-grown men with families…
Man. That’s awesome. If I had that in my childhood memories, I might be a nicer person today.
There’s a Mr Softee truck that still goes through my neighborhood in the summer just like it did when I was a kid. It looks like the same exact truck from 30 years ago 
There was an awesome one shaped like a cow that would pass by where we stayed in the Outer Banks for a few years, but that was back in the early 90s and I haven’t seen it the last few years we’ve been there.
The one that drives through my neighborhood looks pretty much like the one in the first link, only it’s white. He drives slowly and stops to sell ice cream when ever he sees a potential customer. Maybe we are just lucky.
The one in my neighborhood growing up sold more to the local teenagers than the kids. I suspect there was very little actual ice cream changing hands.
And yes, the ones that come by my house are horrid, I wouldn’t eat anything that came out of there packaged or no.
There is another segment to the population now though: The SAHM Mom who sells to the Summer daycares. Most of the Summer daycare programs now include “Ice Cream Lady” visits once per week. This is just a wite van with a side opening and a standard chest freezer in the back. They have a standard weekly time slot and have pre-sold to each facility. The kids get all the fun of lining up and choosing their treat, without the worries of strangers stopping by or needing the right change. The Moms and their kids get the fun of riding the van 2-3 days per week and making little kids happy, without worrying whether they will sell enough. It’s a great system!
Caused a bit of a problem at the playground though, when Celtling went up and got her icecream, then was confused when the guy asked her for money. LOL! He didn’t look happy! Fortunately I was already heading in their direction.
I KNEW I hadn’t imagined them! About once a week, Mom would give me a quarterfor an ice cream treat. I usually got the Push Up Pops… orange sherbert in tubes you pushed up from the bottom. Wasn’t really crazy about the ice cream, but at the bottom of every Push Up was a little plastic figurine, and I LOVED those! I got a little circus pony once and carried her with e everywhere all summer.
Hey they weren’t all men, that was one of my favorite summer jobs. Pay was crap (commission only) but I got to bike around all summer long. I think that was the only year in my life I actually tanned.
Please forgive me - I never saw a girl out there.
Except maybe the 12- or 13-year-old ones who had a crush on the Dickie Dee boy and followed him around… :0)
My sister said there were two reasons she was going to hell…one was for telling her kid that the ice cream truck was really the “music truck” and that all the kids were happy because of the music. She was never bothered to buy ice cream.
For some reason the “Free Candy” van pic was my first thought when I read the thread title.
Pap, you aint got to explain no push up to me! That was my joint! Yum! Boy, I am going to try to find one of those today.
Here’s a pretty standard Toronto one: Donkey Kone
Actually, I came in to make the same observation. When I was a kid we had the Good Humor trucks, which looked nice and official (with the Good Humor man wearing a starched white uniform, with white policeman-type cap, and a money changer on his belt). The other ice cream truck was from the Carnival company, and looked pretty similar. As a kid, I even had a toy Good Humor truck.
To me, the first example from the OP looks creepy by comparison, as do all ice cream trucks these days.
We actually ran one of those when I was a teenager.
My father decided that, although my sister and I were too young for regular jobs (14 and 16) we were old enough to run a business ourselves. So he bought a Truckster, fixed it up (used conduit, for example, to make a canopy with posts, and put red and white awning material on it). The back had two freezer compartments, one with the usual ice cream bars and popsicles, and one with crushed ice for snow cones. There wasn’t any music, just a bell that had to be rung manually.
There was a company in town that had a fleet of similar vehicles, but we were the only ones with snow cones, so we were popular. My sister had to do the driving/selling all day, and I was responsible for everything else (keeping up the stock, bookkeeping, general maintenance, etc.). This went on for two summers; the third year my sister was doing college prep and I was still too young to drive, so we tried to hire someone else to drive, but it didn’t work out.
Overall, due the the overhead of my salary (I got paid the same as my sister, but there really wasn’t enough work to justify it) our company slowly lost money. But it was good experience for me, I learned about bookkeeping and writing checks and figuring taxes and buying supplies. My sister got a tan and flirted with any likely guys she saw around her route.
Roddy
