SHERMAN'S GOODY GOODY TRUCKS

     The truck moved slowly through our neighborhood playing music and featured a hand painted sign with an eerily smiling man on the side.    The lettering above his scary face said, “The Goody Goody Man”.    

     It took a long time for me to figure out the driver was selling ice cream.  I thought he just drove through town playing pleasant music.  After I saw children chasing him down, I joined the fray and begged my mother for a nickel to buy a popsicle.   

     Available nickels were rare and had to be planned for in advance.  It is hard to see your friends buy ice cream and you could not because you had no money.  The only worse feeling was buying a popsicle and your friend couldn’t because they had no money.  We split a lot of popsicles, but it seemed someone was always left out and it’s hard to enjoy the treat if not everyone is participating.  If my friends had no nickel and there were too many to share, I would rather not buy an ice cream and eat in front of them.

     One bright day the Goody Goody truck pulled up to our home on Willow Street and my Uncle Joel Sappenfield stepped out.  He was a new Goody Goody man as a summer job between college semesters.  I could not have been more thrilled if it had turned out he was actually Superman in disguise.  My social standing rose to an all-time high and he gave my brothers and me free ice cream bars, which he discreetly brought inside our house so my friends did not have to suffer.

     He joined us for lunch and after polishing off the free popsicles,  Uncle Joel asked me if I wanted to ride with him on his route.   This was the high water mark of my life (to date) and my immediate aspiration was to one day have my own route as a Goody Goody Man.

     The truck was not refrigerated.  It was paneled on the inside with sheet metal and big blocks of ice lined the walls and filled the interior.  There was a drain hole in the middle of the floor and when we stopped in the African American neighborhood, little black kids gathered around the truck, pointed to the melted water draining out and screamed laughingly, “It’s a pissin’!”

   

     Very few of these children could actually purchase ice cream and waved us down to see the truck appear to relieve itself.  This did not appear to annoy Uncle Joel.  When we did stop and someone wanted to make a purchase, he got the order and I walked into the cooler from the open cab and retrieved the requested goods.  

     The truck was full of boxes of ice cream bars and popsicles and he told me to help myself to whatever I wanted.  This weighed on my mind as we were waived over by some who could afford ice cream and some who could not.   As he walked back around the front of the truck to the driver’s side, I would gather a handful of ice cream bars and toss them to the “non-able to pay” children before he got back to his seat.     He did not notice my generosity with his inventory and it did not appear to seriously disturb his count at the end of the day.  

     However, the next day no one wanted to pay.  They saw they could get it free if they claimed not to have money and Uncle Joel broke the code.  My ice cream vendor days drew to a close.  Thankfully he did not explain my dismissal to my parents and he and I agreed I would just not accompany him anymore.

     One cannot toss someone else’s ice cream to the masses for free.  I am reminded of the line Steve Martin uttered in the movie, “The Jerk”.  He was working as a carnival barker and getting people to pay to play games for junk, “OH, I get it…it’s a profit motive, eh?”