“Grandmaaaaa, why do we have to sit at the kid’s table with you?” Sam poked what remained of his cookout dinner with a plastic fork. Hotdog long gone, the picnic plate contained an ocean of ketchup and a potato salad iceberg interspersed with the green bean salad he’d rather spread around than eat.
“I’m sixty-five years old and still here, so if you don’t know the answer, I certainly don’t. Eat the rest of your dinner, or your mom will scold me.”
“It’s too hot! I want to go inside and play Switch.” Sam’s sister Zoey pleaded.
Nan looked at Zoey’s plate, even less picked at than Sam’s. “If I can tell you both a story that’s at least as good as whatever game you’re playing, do you promise to eat a bit more of your dinner?”
“Do we have a choice?” Sam asked.
“There’s ice cream in it for you.” Both children settled down, and Nan began. “Let me tell you how Grandpa Softee got his name…”
Zoey interrupted. “Kids at school said he was called Softee because he was soft in the head since he couldn’t hear anything.”
Nan shook her head, “Not at all! It’s way stranger than that.
“It was the summer of 1979, the hottest on record but not as hot as this one. We hadn’t met yet, but your future grandpa had just gotten a job for the town inspecting all the wastewater pumping stations installed around the neighborhoods.”
“Like the poop water?” Zoey held her nose. Sam just smiled.
“Oh yeah, lots and deep. These pump stations are anywhere the water won’t flow downhill. Sometimes he’d have to go down into the holding tank and fight off snakes to service them, but those are stories for another time.”
Nan saw Sam look a little disappointed, but she continued on. “Your grandpa was the youngest man hired, and this was the worst job. So, of course, the guys decided to add insult to injury and assigned him an old ice cream truck for his work vehicle.”
“Did it still have ice cream in it?” Sam asked.
“No, it probably hadn’t been used for ten years or more. Just sat in storage in the town motor pool. Your grandpa was nothing if not handy. He covered the whole thing with panels, even painted his own lettering on the side, very official-looking. I don’t know why he bothered since he was on the night crew.
“I’ve always been a light sleeper, and this was before cell phones. Believe it or not, the TV and radio stations used to go off the air at night. So I’m sitting out on the porch around midnight or so, smoking a… taking in the night air, I mean.
“I heard him before I saw him. This white box truck cruising down Grand Avenue, the ice cream song blaring at full blast. About a hundred feet behind the truck, I see lights popping on in the apartment buildings. He’s getting closer and closer, that song playing on loop getting less distorted by the Doppler effect.”
“The what?” Sam asked.
“The way you can tell if a sound is getting close. All the notes get smushed together or stretched out. Anyway, it’s one of the greatest earworms of all time. The Mister Softee jingle.” Nan sang the first verse and the kids immediately got it.
The cream-iest, dream-iest soft-ice-cream
You get from Mister Softee
Sam’s eyes widened in recognition. “I know that song! I just had no idea there were words in it.”
“Oh, there’s a lot more, but it seems only the melody has really stuck around. So here I am, taking in the night as this lunatic blasts by, waking up all the barking dogs and working people in the neighborhood. I see him get to the end of the block and pull over, cutting the engine. The song stopped when the truck went dark.
“I tell you, curiosity just got the better of me. I was never much of a reader, and hot summer nights were a special kind of boring. I saw a young man exit the truck, get some tools from the back, and head over to the little culvert at the corner. You know we’d all just had our wits scared out of us by the Son of Sam murders a couple years before, but I won’t get into all that. Running around at night with the ice cream song blaring seemed about the least likely thing a serial killer might do, so I decided I better check it out. Still, it wasn’t far from my mind that maybe he had stashed a body in that waterpipe.
“I got into my cat burglar suit, a slinky black turtleneck, and tight black pants. You know your grandma was something of a hot number back then.”
Sam grimaced, but Zoey smiled.
“I took a flashlight and a security whistle, another gift from the Son of Sam panic of ‘76. With the commotion on the street, people were already out looking for the ice cream truck, so I knew somebody would hear me if I blew it.
“As I got down to the entrance to the large drain pipe, I saw the strangest thing. A man squatted down next to a work lantern. He had what looked like a dentist’s tongue depressor in his teeth. If I worried he might have been a murderer before, now I thought he might be an alien. But he was fit and had the cutest little… nevermind. So I called out to him, but he didn’t turn around. Definitely an alien.
“I thought about blowing my whistle, but the way his careful hands moved, the way he seemed to be listening for something only he could hear, made me want to get a better look at him at least. Curiosity killed the cat burglar, they say.
“I shined my light on him, and he jumped. I have never seen a more handsome face, then or since. He followed my eyes to the file in his mouth, removing it with one oily hand and speaking for the first time.”
“I’m deaf, but I hear the pipes through my teeth.”
“That pick-up line hadn’t been used on me before, and I was smitten. He held out the file, wiping it with a dirty cloth, offering me a try. I remember squatting down next to him, touching the handle to my tooth, and placing it from pipe to pipe. He was right. I could feel the water flowing through them.”
“He stared at my mouth, his attention unlike other men’s. Although I’d never met one, I realized he must be a lip reader. ‘That’s a good trick,’ I mouthed, not making a sound. He understood and smiled when I handed back the file.”
Zoey interrupted. “Grandma, you’re blushing!”
“If you’re lucky, my girl, you’ll have a story like this to go back to when you’re old, too.”
“But what about the ice cream?” Sam asked.
“Hold your horses. We’re getting there. I asked if I could ride along and keep him company on his shift. He said that sounded fine.”
“What I didn’t do was tell him about the ice cream song playing at a hundred decibels whenever we drove from place to place. It felt a bit like Bonnie and Clyde. I watched as lights turned on behind us, angry shouts coming from open windows. Once or twice, a kid would run out with a handful of change, looking confused. It was hard to keep from laughing and giving away the game.”
“So then what?” Zoey asked.
“Well, eventually, we got pulled over by the police. Your grandpa still had that file in his mouth, a bit of a habit. We got out of the truck, and I gently placed the tip of the file onto the silver horn above the driver’s door. Your grandpa’s eyes got so wide when he realized how much sound it was making! I just slapped my knee and laughed and laughed.”
“When the cop came over, he was laughing too. It was infectious. I told the cop my friend was deaf, and I’d been trying to help him to turn off his horn. The cop looked at me funny, but that grin never left his face. He issued your grandpa a public nuisance ticket, which he humbly accepted.”
“The paper the next day read, ‘A Terrible Twist! Mister Softee Put on Ice.’ I still have a copy of the article somewhere. People started calling him Softee after that, and it just stuck. What your grandpa didn’t know was, once in a while, we’d be driving around in that old truck, and I’d flip that switch on for a couple of minutes.”
“Grandma!” Sam said, with the indignation of a child.
“Ha! I know, but it was a thrill. Every time I hear that song, I smile and remember your grandpa.” Nan produced a tiny metal file from her pocketbook and handed it to the children.
“If you listen closely, you can still hear the music. Each of you, touch an end to a front tooth.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Zoey said.
Sam scrunched his eyes. “Wait, I do. And it’s getting closer!”
As they listened, a real ice cream truck turned the corner into their little suburban neighborhood, a familiar tune merrily jingling. Nan already had a ten-dollar bill out. “And ice cream you shall have.”
“You summoned him!” Zoey’s tone was full of awe.
“Enjoy, kids, this one is on Grandpa Softee.”
Author’s Note
I like taking silly songs and finding deeper meaning in them. If you think about it, music is one of the most succinct ways to tell a story or evoke a particular emotion.
In digging into the “ice cream song”, everybody knows and few actually enjoy, I turned over some interesting facts.
The reason it sounds like metallic bells is because in 1960 when it was written, it was intended to be played on a giant hurdy-gurdy — those metal fingers that plink along a rolling steel drum with bumps mapping out the melody. (The truck in the story probably would have worked this way, but I took a little bit of artistic liberty and decided it had a speaker.)
It was written by Les Waas, one of the most prolific jingle writers of all time. I think it’s fair to say he’s reached more American ears than any pop star. Even if the rivers of time have eroded his other work, the power of cold ice cream, sugary sweet, will ensure his legacy continues long after the rest of us are gone. The lesson? If you truly want to live forever, go into marketing, not show business.
I like to think the particular qualities of this song are meant to preserve our collective dog brain trained over generations to begin salivating at the thought of ice cream whenever one of those metallic notes is plucked so discordantly. With a truck moving around at speed, they only have a few notes to trigger recognition. When I hear the song in my head usually it’s distorted by the Doppler effect I often hear from my office as the mysterious driver plies his sugary wares to the local children.
So how do you turn an ice cream song with lyrics nobody remembers into a beloved family tale? I hope you enjoyed my answer!
Please consider sharing this blog with others if you like it. Forward the email, text your friends, or just have a little cawfee tawk. I’m hoping to reach more readers like you!