This column will stand alone, but here's Part 1.
Letters of eclectic commentary featuring the wit and wisdom of a garrulous geezer and {Dana}, a persistent hallucination and charming literary device.
"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate." -Thornton Wilder
Dear Gentlereaders, first, a trigger warning. This column mentions a product once called an Eskimo Pie, a cultural abomination that has since been remedied.
The first time I made my living by peddling popsicles in the '80s and became a Good Humor Man Person, I had no idea that Good Humor was once an RBFD dating back to the 1920s, a former American institution that's now just another American brand, a product licensed to be manufactured and marketed by various and sundry firms who knows who, who knows where, and distributed here, there, and even way over there.
{The Donald may have inadvertently put an end to that.}
That's why you might be familiar with the name Good Humor even if products bearing that name weren't widely available in stores and you had never actually seen a real Good Humor Ice Cream truck.
The Good Humor Bar was invented by Harry Burt, owner of a candy store/ice cream parlor in downtown Youngstown, Ohio, a significant city of the Hooterville Ohio Metropolitan Area. As my millions of regular readers already know, I've been a temporary resident of Hooterville for the last 40 years.
The original Good Humor bar was fundamentally an Eskimo Pie, a small chunk of vanilla ice cream coated with chocolate (which had already been invented and which in no way resembled a pie) with a significant twist. As the story goes, Burt's daughter thought that Eskimo Pies were messy to eat (I agree), and he was inspired to produce a version that came on a stick, and thus invented the ice cream bar.
Please don't start hyperventilating; the name's been changed to Edy's Pie because Eskimo is "...a term considered offensive by some for American Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples," according to Wikipedia. Nowadays, it also comes on a stick and looks less like a pie than ever. Go figure.
Oh, and shame on those of you who immediately thought of at least one rude joke involving the term Edy's pie.
Mr. Burt hung a set of sleigh bells on a dozen trucks and sold his new invention directly to his customers, thereby also inventing the ice cream truck. This was in the early 1920s. By the middle of the '30s, Good Humor "sales cars" were everywhere, driven by men in white uniforms who were subject to strict company Rules&Regs and three full days of training before being entrusted with a coin changer.
By the 1950s, roughly 2,000 Good Humor trucks were roaming the streets of America, ringing their bells and being chased by neighborhood kids. There was even a mainstream movie, The Good Humor Man, an "American slapstick noir action comedy film" released in 1950.
(In case you're wondering, the first of those three goofy movies you're thinking of was released in 1978.)
By the time I became a "Goody Bar" man person in the early '80s, commercials were running on TV advertising the fact that boxes of Good Humor bars could be had at your favorite supermarket (at prices street vendors couldn't match). Individual vending-sized bars were significantly larger, but try explaining that to a cash-strapped mom or dad.
Regular readers are aware that I've been plagued with a tendency to be a day late and two (inflation-adjusted) dollars short in the course of my life with disturbing regularity.
{Wait-wait-wait. What did you mean by a "real" Good Humor truck?}
If you see a Good Humor truck out and about, it's probably not a Good Humor truck.
Back in the day, as they say, the company used to have fleets built to their exact specifications (the truck I eventually personally owned was one of those, a "step van" (think bread truck, made out of galvanized steel). You may encounter a truck that says Good Humor on the side and that features Good Humor bars, but it's unlikely to be one of the versions commissioned by Good Humor, which haven't been manufactured for quite some time.
Being a civilian, you're unlikely to know the difference, but an experienced driver who's driven a generic version of an ice cream truck...
{You mean old?}
An experienced driver knows that it's equivalent to a Cadillac vs. a Chevette.
{They stopped making Chevettes in 1987.}
Thanks for the update, Dana. There are still a few around (both Chevettes and real Good Humor trucks), and there are restored "jump" trucks that were no longer produced after 1969 that you may encounter. They turn up at car shows and are used for marketing events. Properly restored, they can sell for better than 50k.
{I'll bite, what's a jump truck?}
The driver has to "jump" out of a cab and walk around to the back of the truck to serve customers out of "the box." When I first hooked up with Good Humor Pittsburgh, there was at least one of these still working the streets (HT: Courtney), but almost nobody wanted to use one. Who wants to have to keep getting in and out of the truck all day, not to mention being at the mercy of the kids when you do?
I took to being an ice cream man like the proverbial duck to water. By my last day, many years later, my feathers were turning grey and falling out and I couldn't wait to quit. But at first, I loved it.
My first assigned route was Greentree, Pa, a Pittsburgh "borough" that shares a border with the city. In short order, I was "promoted" to a much more lucrative route that included various townships in the vicinity of the Pittsburgh airport out in the Western suburbs.
Shout out to Moon township, where I made some good money and met some good people, particularly the ones I confess I sometimes partied with after work up in Mooncrest. There was a brief period of my life when I was living in a small town, Mars, Pa, and peddling popsicles in Moon Township
My quick "promotion" was simply due to the fact that I was reliable and showed up on time every day, recently showered, and was not prone to drama. There are legitimate reasons many people associate ice cream truck drivers with Cheech and Chong.
I arrived when ice cream street vending was past its glory days and had begun its slow slide down a slippery (icy?) slope, and when America's industrial base was packing up and heading to East Asia. Rustbelt cities like Pittsburgh had begun rusting and were about to have some very grim years decades.
Big BUT...
Good Humor trucks were still a well-established Pittsburgh area tradition, and most people (me, anyway) didn't know how bad things were eventually going to get.
And I had access to an up-to-date route book.
Most civilians, and even most former ice cream truck drivers, unless they drove a Good Humor truck before Unilever turned Good Humor bars into just another global brand, don't know what a route book is, or rather was.
When I took a geographic cure for a broken heart, mentioned in part one, and was briefly pushing popsicles in Austin, I found myself driving what I thought of as the generic ice cream truck. It was made out of aluminum and creaked as you drove down the road.
The freezer box worked about half as well as the one in a G.H. truck, and you might find yourself selling softened product by the end of the day in the Texas heat. They were manufactured by a company called International Mobiles in Boston that's no longer in business, as best I can tell.
They probably manufactured more ice cream trucks than anybody, and there are, relatively speaking, many still around and are easy to spot if you know what to look for.
{Route book?}
Oh, yeah. When I was a Goody Bar Man in Pittsburgh, all the "routes" were just that, well-established routes that could be followed by using a route book that supplied directions from the moment you pulled off of the company lot that including the best way to get to the area you were assigned, how to work it street by street, and how to find your way back again.
Sometimes they mentioned where you should be by a certain time and/or came with tips pencilled in by someone who previously had worked that particular route. I assume this was a practice put in place when Good Humor was still serious about street vending. Irregardless, it was a common-sense practice that enabled newbies to extract maximum profits from a given area in short order...
As opposed to,
Being assigned a given geographic area, having to find your way there, and then wandering around finding out where the kids were on your own, which was how my employer did things in Austin. I'm led to believe this was normal for most companies of any size. With enough trucks on the road, you could make money despite high driver turnover, high prices, and poor customer service.
Which way was better, at least from a business perspective? The latter, I assume, given that it required much less work. From a quality of life perspective, not so much. Now that ice cream trucks and plenty of kids are no longer a daily feature of most neighborhoods, I guess it's a moot point.
This just in: I found a company online that operates soft ice cream dairy products, and pizza trucks, in a handful of New Jersey cities.
"We always use premium ingredients and pair food with feel-good music and exceptional customer service!"
"Premium Klipsch Outdoor Speakers." No brass bells (another feature of a real Good Humor truck) or even obnoxious electronic music box endlessly repeated renderings of Turkey in the Straw or The Entertainer.
Customers register with the company. They text you when they're headed to your area so you can place an order, and a bright and shiny, sanitized truck will come directly to your bright and shiny, sanitized house, Home Owners Association Rules&Regs permitting.
It's all carefully/efficiently controlled via artificial intelligence software, and you can buy a franchise for as little as $300,000.
Have an OK day,
Colonel Cranky
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