Sweet, tasty memories of summers long ago
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- August 3, 2024
- 507
Whatever happened to ice cream trucks, the once-ubiquitous symbols of summer, now relegated to the sad exile of memory?
With their happy, jangling tunes announcing their arrival while still blocks away, kids exhibited a Pavlovian response, their taste buds on high alert as they cadged quarters from their moms and dads.
When I was growing up, they were as common as grasshoppers, which we used to catch and unleash on unsuspecting girls, which probably explains more than I care to admit about my social skills.
The ice cream truck’s appearance was equal parts celebration and anticipation, a regular post-supper occurrence that seemed to me, at the time, to be the virtual embodiment of everything good in life.
Sure, we played baseball in established leagues, wearing heavy woolen uniforms that the occasional mother would dye pink — thanks for that, Mom — and we had access to the summer playground program that included teenage counselors acting as impromptu DJs, playing 45s all afternoon — thanks Drifters for “Under the Boardwalk,” the first single I actually purchased.
So we had allowances, a shiny Ben Franklin 50-cent piece, which would be replaced by JFK half-dollars, which no one ever spent.
Seemed like a sacrilege, a sort of sin, at least to us Catholic kids, whose growing-up process was accelerated after Nov. 22, 1963.
Mostly, though, suburban life in the late '50s and early '60s was pretty excellent, and I was like everybody else, I suppose, learning to believe in the American Dream, the promise that if you studied hard enough and worked even harder, you could succeed.
That kind of Horatio Alger/Tom Swift attitude bore fruit in a number of tangible ways, none weirder than the Kool-Aid stand.
For those of you who might not have been part of that kind of fledgling exercise in free-enterprise activity, let me elucidate.
It was a case of classic Keynesian economic theory, the belief that supply and demand were the twin steeples of a thriving cathedral of sustained growth, better wages and a higher standard of living.
Hmm … wait a second. I seemed to have stumbled into a Google rabbit hole. Give me a minute to gather my thoughts. Thanks …
(Cue the musical interlude of an ice cream truck’s jaunty jingle.)
OK, I’m back.
The bottom line, when you’re a kid in a neighborhood full of them, as most postwar bedroom communities were, was the conviction that there was strength in numbers, a notion that would find full flowering in a few years when a lot of us protested the war. But back then, in the embrace of suburbia’s seductive embrace, we solved things by working together, many fingers making a tight fist.
For a literary iteration of this phenomenon, allow me to recommend “Emil and the Detectives,” a slim paperback adventure story that entered my life through the Scholastic Book Club, a wonderful tale of how young folks outwitted the bad guys in a case involving stolen money with a denouement that is utterly delicious.
Written by Erich Kastner and published in 1929, it remains one of my favorite young-adult stories, up there with “Homer Price and the Donut Machine,” “Stone Soup,” “Who’ll Bell the Cat?” and the entire Mushroom Planet series, created by Eleanor Cameron.
And if you’ve never visited the world of David and Chuck, Mebe and Oru, and, of course, Tyco Bass, you should do so this summer.
It is, after all, already August, and it won’t be long before Alice Cooper’s promise that “School’s Out Forever!” will be broken.
Which always reminds me of a commercial in which a young girl, I think maybe his niece, reminds the rock star of the vow he made.
“No,” he gently admonishes her, “I said ‘for summer.’”
That was back when commercials were actually little movie scenes, smart and funny, not the stuff now that I have no idea what it’s for, all image, no substance, nothing approaching wit, just vapid flash.
Which brings us back, circuitously enough, to Kool-Aid stands.
The powdered product, which was created in Nebraska in 1927, became a staple in households nationwide. Sold for mere pennies a packet and available in 10 flavors, it became a summertime hit.
So when it came time for kids like us to make a little money so that we could afford baseball cards or a Mad magazine, we hit on the idea of selling cups of Kool-Aid right there in the neighborhood.
This was long before adults were old fogies who didn’t like children and would call the cops for any imagined violation. No one complained about our lack of a vendor’s license or the occasional delay in traffic when someone stopped and helped out.
I’m probably guilty of romanticizing the past … it’s what I do best.
But I firmly believe the cheery sound of the ice cream truck as it made its way to the street where we all lived and had fun all summer long was as essential as anything we ever experienced.
Boy, I could sure go for a sky-blue Popsicle right about now.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or at 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on his Facebook page, where it’s totally fine if you’ve never grown up.