• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

On the (rocky) road again

I know some of you are going to go all Mom-and-Apple-Pie over this and call it grumpy and downright un-American. But I live on an ice-cream-truck street, and the "music" is plain awful. It's not so much that it's too loud. You just hear it day after day, over and over again, until the high, tinny notes start boring into your brain. I don't know how the people who drive these things keep doing it without going berserk. How about a law requiring that the music be reasonable? A rocking Bob Seeger number, maybe, or a little Willie Nelson.

Comments

Lois Marquart
Sat, 09/03/2005 - 4:25am

In my former neighborhood, the dogs would set to major howling and whining whenever THAT vehicle came through. Does that tell you anything? I wanted to howl and whine at the thing, myself! I have not heard the ice cream truck in this new neighborhood. Could it be it has been banned to preserve the quietness?

Leo Morris
Sat, 09/03/2005 - 7:43am

I hope you're that lucky. I come home from lunch at different times -- as early as 11:30 or as late as 1:30. I swear THAT vehicle must wait in the bushes somewhere, the driver on his cell phone waiting for instructions from the home office, which is tracking me by satellite: "OK, Morris is home now; start your run down his street."

John Galt
Thu, 09/08/2005 - 8:39am

I applied to drive one of these trucks one summer back in the 70s. It was at that time probably among the ten worst jobs in this entire city, for both pay and working conditions.

I DID go berserk listening to that tune all day long, loud and distorted. The company even now could certainly benefit from a selection of ringtones -- but that wasn't the worst of it.

The little repainted mail trucks they used to run these routes "on the cheap" were so old that when you poured water into the radiators, gobs of rust bubbled out onto the ground. Flushing with the hose did no good, as the rust just kept coming and coming. The engines, you may conclude, therefore ran hot.

There was no air conditioning in the vehicle, and the engine was inside the compartment -- right next to the poor driver's knee under a steel cowling -- a circumstance that guaranteed the temperature inside the the vehicles would rise almost immediately to well over 100 degrees for the day -- a condition which not even open windows and doors could mitigate. The engine cover was so hot to the touch, in fact, that it would burn a careless driver's leg from time to time.

I recall that one day another driver was injured at a "T" intersection when, upon attempting to make his turn, his steering wheel came off in his hands, and his vehicle took him straight into a ditch.

On a good day, a driver might accumulate $20 profit, but only at the beginning of summer when the novelty was on and feelings of nostalgia moved folks to buy. Later in the season, most people lost interest altogether and a driver would be lucky to scrounge twelve bucks or so.

I was delighted to leave that job once and for all and you could not pay me anything short of a fortune to do it again.

But I must testify for the archives that the droning melody of the bell took an easy second place in terms of torture to the raw heat inside the steel cocoon of that old, overtaxed mail truck.

Quantcast