And I Never Learned Mister Softee's First Name

My second father.

All that blogging I did for Tuesday's post about ice cream, combined with Father of the Anthony Show's birthday yesterday, brought back some summer memories that involved the ice cream gentlemen who roamed my neighborhood.

The main guys who worked the territory were Mister Softee, who usually showed up in the early afternoon, and the Circus Man — I still don't know what circuses have to do with ice cream — who'd swing by after dinner.

When my brother and I were young, too young to have any money of our own, the only truck we were allowed to patronize was Señor Softee. Dad's logic was that Monsieur Softee sold actual ice cream, not the "candy and junk" that the Circus Man offered. Back then, a basic soft-serve cone cost only 50 cents, so Dad could send us out of the house with a buck and we'd be rather satisfied for the next 20 minutes.

My brother and I never went to camp, except for one horrendous two-week experience that I'll probably blog about at another time, so the ice cream man appearances helped us know what time it was during the summer.

You can measure the size of
your cavities with them.
(Picture stolen from here.)

Sometimes Dad, whose patience and ability to make things last were legendary and probably a byproduct of being born during the Great Depression, would also have us buy him a small cup of vanilla ice cream, and it would sit in the freezer for days as he rationed himself small bites like Charlie Bucket nibbling on a Wonka Bar.

Once Brother and I started to have some money, either through an allowance or found change or who knows where, we were able to buy our own crap from the Circus Man. The things I remember buying include:

• Big Buddy bubble gum. Know what a yardstick looks like? Now imagine a yardstick made entirely of gum. Three feet of gum could last a normal person a few days at least, but I usually devoured mine in about an hour.
• Marinos Italian ice. Usually watermelon or the mysterious "blue" flavor. The correct technique was to work your small flat wooden utensil so you could flip the colored iced hockey puck to get at the sugar-concentrated crystals that collected at the bottom.
• Bomb Pops. Not sure what made them look like "bombs," since they actually resembled rockets — I'd expect bomb treats to be round, with maybe a licorice wick — but hey, you get three flavors/colors in one package!
• Fortune Bubble gum. This was gum with a weird, most-unlike-regular-gum flavor, and I liked that it contained fortunes, which were probably bad puns written in mock Chinese-English, lacking words like "a" and "the." Best of all, the gum cost a nickel a piece, and I always tried to spend every cent I had in my pocket, so any leftover change went toward Fortune Bubble.

AND THERE WENT A MORE SUCCESSFUL CAREER AS AN ICE CREAM MAN

"Your fortune: You will chew strange-tasting gum featuring
offensively portrayed 'Chinaman' on wrapper."

One summer when I was around 10 or 12, and looking back I don't know how the hell this happened, there was an ice cream truck manned by some young guy, probably in his twenties, who got to know my brother and me pretty well, and he said it would be OK if I rode with him on his route in my neighborhood.

I'm not sure how I'd react today if Son of the Anthony Show told me that the ice cream man was interested in giving him a slow tour of the neighborhood, but if that happened today I'd probably know the guy well, since parents don't let their kids too far out of their sight. Back then, my brother and I could have been out robbing liquor stores and my stay-at-home (and stay-in-the-home) mom wouldn't have known the difference.

And I don't know why my brother was never asked to go for a ride. I think that back then I looked like quite the pathetic figure: I was shy and small for my age and usually tagged along with whatever my brother did, so I probably aroused a lot of sympathy.

The day arrived — somehow my mother approved my taking part in the adventure with the ice cream man, even though she never ventured out of the house to actually meet the guy to make sure he wasn't a frozen-treats-on-wheels version of John Wayne Gacy — and I hopped aboard the truck. I was so shy that I politely turned down the free offer of any ice cream treat on the truck, which for the average kid my age is like the ultimate fantasy perk of riding an ice cream truck.

Unfortunately, it was a very overcast day, so we didn't have many customers, but I remember how different it was to see my neighborhood from the view of a slow-moving truck.

OLD HABITS DIE HARD
It's funny (or, sometimes, not funny) how certain things you grew up with can stick with you, no matter how bizarre they seem when you step back to examine them. A couple of years ago we were at a street fair and patronized the parked Mister Softee truck. Son of the Anthony Show, who was 4, really wanted a snow cone, and I got in a huge fight with him because I was all, "You have to get ice cream, because the rest of the stuff is just candy." Son got very upset — after all, he was 4 and probably didn't understand my father's hierarchy of desserts — and I realized that having a snow cone on a hot day probably wasn't much worse than indulging in a soft-serve cone.

I felt a little guilty in that "What Would Dad Do?" sort of way, but later that weekend, when I dropped him off with my parents for a few hours, the moment we walked in the door, my father offered him some non-dairy ice pop, and I realized that maybe it's okay to forgo the frozen dairy once in a while.