Baby boomer parents cause the ice cream truck
'problem'
By Tom Long
Copyright 1998 Detroit News
July 27, 1998
Here in the summer of 1998, the big concerns are apparently
global warming, nuclear proliferation and ice cream trucks.
What with all the
global warming you might think the ice cream truck crisis concerns
a lack of enough drivers
intent on going out and cooling off the people of the world.
Not so.
While driving into work the other day I heard a National
Public Radio report on
yet another small town (this one in Massachusetts) that is debating
a ban on
ice cream trucks.
A woman interviewed said the noise from the trucks was
driving her crazy.
"Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee," she sang into the microphone with
no discernible melody.
I immediately thought of my 9-year-old son, who would
probably give up video
games for a week if an ice cream truck would drive by our place. We
live
at the end of a horse-shoe road and this summer has been
conspicuously silent.
I also remembered when I was a kid, during the Paleolithic
Era, when the sound
of an ice cream truck was like magic floating through the air.
But over the past few years, communities across America
have
decided that magic has a dark side. From California to New Jersey,
Texas to
upstate New York, towns have been struggling to deal with the ice
cream truck
problem.
What, you might ask, exactly is the ice cream truck
problem?
Well, there's a safety issue here that can't be denied. The
ice cream truck
comes toodling into the neighborhood and kids can run blindly into
the street
and get hit by a passing car.
This isn't the ice cream truck's fault, really, since Mom
and Dad should have
taught little Johnny to stay out of the street and drivers should
be watching
where they're going. But the ice cream
truck is involved nonetheless.
Some towns have had ice cream trucks add stop signs, like
school buses. Some
have just denied them access to busy streets. The clear lesson:
Don't go
running after an ice cream truck on the freeway.
Far more absurd and
irritating are the other two common complaints against these
joymobiles -- they
make too much noise and they may be driven by pedophiles.
If we're going to start outlawing any possible contact
between kids and
pedophiles we're going to have to get rid of all rec centers, the
Boy Scouts
and most major
religions. I don't think that's going to happen.
The most alarming contention, though, is the commonly heard
cry that the music
from ice cream trucks is polluting neighborhoods and driving
parents crazy. I
suspect many of these parents loved hearing an ice cream truck when
they were
young but would now
deny their kids the same pleasure because it dares intrude on their
insular
lives.
This may be one of the ugliest manifestations of the
progression of baby
boomers from kids to rebels to fashionably hip parents to outright
fuddy-duddies. In a world ever more regulated and sanitized, where
a sense of
community can too
easily give way to staring suspiciously at people walking down your
street, a
classic piece of Americana like an ice cream truck shouldn't be
reviled, it
should be revered.
Obviously there is something very wrong when it is easier
to ban an ice cream
truck than an
assault rifle. Give me a Drumstick any day.
Tom Long's column appears in Accent on Mondays, Wednesdays
and Fridays. He can
be reached by phone at (313) 222-8879, or by e-mail at
tlong@detnews.com
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