Many years ago, I was reading an Archie comic book, and one particular episode showed Archie and his friends in a classroom, presided over by the teacher, Miss Grundy. She was asking the class to tell the signs of it being summer. Some kids gave normal answers, such as by the heat, but when she asked Jughead, Archie’s best friend, he answered, “By the bells!”
Miss Grundy stared in confusion. “Bells! What bells?” she asked.
“By the bells on the ice cream trucks!” said Jughead, smiling.
He was right, of course. When the bells on the Good Humor trucks “clang-clang-clang-clanged,” they were a signal to kids that tasty, cool joy was on the way. Street and sandlot baseball games were temporarily “called on account of ice cream.” Jump ropes hit the sidewalk and lay forgotten. Small change was searched for or begged for from grownups.
Kids of all ages developed a special kind of hearing that could always hear Good Humor truck bells, but not necessarily their parents’ voices. Was that truck a block away, or just coming down the street, ready to pass by? Kids could tell, without looking. Call it Good Humor Radar.
Grown kids, wishing to hear those old bells one more time, can do so by stopping in at the Ice Cream Planet, on 9345 Southview Ave.. A set of the bells are mounted over the counter, ready for ringing.
Way back, in the June 5, 1969 issue of the Riverside-Brookfield High School Clarion, reporter Jim Anderson wrote an article about the man with the Good Humor truck that used to park outside the school at the school day’s end.
Bob Maher, the ice cream man, told Anderson that he “roamed the streets of North Riverside and Brookfield from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on almost any given day.”
He just sort of fell into the job, having had nothing to do on April 15, 1969, so he decided to try being a driver/salesman.
“It’s not a hard job,” said Maher back then, “and you can take it easy most of the time. You only work from April through September. It involves about 80 hours a week, but it averages out to a 45 hour week, [spread out over all] the year. I know of two college boys who shared a route over the summer. They each worked three days a week, and the work is easy, so it makes a nice summer job if you’re at least eighteen.”
The workday for a Chicago area Good Humor man back in 1969 began at one central location with 175 men, each dressed in white, climbing into 175 identical white trucks, and going out on their routes. The open air trucks were often called “jump trucks,” because the men would have to jump out to serve customers. A few drawbacks with the trucks were that there was no air-conditioning, except by natural air flow, and no shelter from the rain.
The Good Humor man’s uniform was pretty much unchanging: a white cap, white shirt and jacket, white pants, blue bow tie, and shined black shoes. On the front of his black belt hung a metal coin-changer, loaded with quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.
Sometimes he was out on cooler, rainy days, too, and when we heard the bells (whose sound carried better in wet weather), we’d grab some money and splat our bare feet out of the house and through the puddles to buy a Strawberry Shortcake or Chocolate Eclair bar (boy, those bars have been around for a long time!).
So where have all those beautiful, white Good Humor ice cream trucks gone? The decline and fall of the trucks began in 1977, when Good Humor sold its street vending business and concentrated on supermarket sales.
Steve Muth of the Ice Cream Planet told me that when Good Humor was phasing out their ice cream trucks, they announced that they would give them away free to anyone who wanted them. Some people did, and sometimes you can see the restored Good Humor trucks at car shows, and are they ever magnets for attention. He told me that he wished he’d gotten a truck or two back then, but who knew?
There are some ice cream distributors around the country who still own and operate Good Humor trucks, dispensing ice cream to eager children and their nostalgic elders.
Maybe you’ve heard other ice cream trucks roaming the streets, since that time, but they are not the same. They play repetitive song snatches over their loudspeakers, with melodies like “Little Brown Jug,” “Music Box Dancer” and “Turkey in the Straw.” But no bells.
Many years ago, some old grouches started complaining to the village about the noise of the bells. I always wondered if they were happy when the trucks and bells were no more. But then came the music, played over and over, which I’m sure continued to annoy them. Does it annoy me? Naw. Even though the songs never fully play out to the end, I hum or sing the rest of the melodies to myself. And then I am in Good Humor.