It’s like a dream. You’re playing with your friends, running around someone’s backyard on a perfect summer day. The sun gives life. The grass is soft. Suddenly, you hear a sound. The synthesized chimes of “The Entertainer,” perhaps, or “Pop Goes The Weasel” come wafting through the warm, thick air. Sheer joy strikes. A Pavlovian reaction. The ice cream man cometh.
They are, after all, the first food truck. Way back in the 1920s, long before we bought bespoke shawarma or Korean barbeque from restaurants on wheels, Harry Burt of Youngstown, Ohio, was among the first to sell ice cream from a truck.
The story goes that Burt’s daughter, Ruth, thought the then-new (and problematically named) Eskimo Pie was too messy. Burt’s son suggested using a wooden stick as a handle. Genius. Suddenly, kids could eat ice cream without getting sticky fingers. Burt, seeing opportunity, outfitted 12 street vending trucks with rudimentary freezers to sell the new confection. Soon to be known as the Good Humor Bar, sold by the Good Humor Man, the business would become iconic for drivers in crisp, all-white uniforms.
Those earliest trucks, however, were not like the ones we see today. They were modified Ford Model Ts, more like pickups with bed-mounted refrigeration units. To make a sale, the driver had to step out of the cab and walk to the back of the truck…