Ice cream tune drives public nuts

You’ve got to have guts to take on a revered summer icon like the all-American ice cream man. But that’s just what Bangor resident Mike Gleason did earlier this month. Gleason complained to the City Council that those relentless, mind-numbing digital renditions of “Turkey in the Straw” and “The Entertainer” wheezing from the ice cream trucks that crawl through his West Side neighborhood threatened him with seasonal psychic meltdown.

The so-called music amounts to a “nearly daily assault” on his senses, said Gleason, who added, “I find the name ‘Good Humor’ an ironic misnomer.”

The sticky issue has fallen into the lap of the council’s government operations committee, which now must decide what, if anything, the city can legally do to satisfy the plea by Gleason and others to rid the streets of the clamorous wail. At the same time, councilors have been getting a surprisingly large number of e-mails from people all over Bangor who are urging city officials to simply leave the poor ice cream men and women alone.

The consensus seems to be that red-blooded Americans should be willing to endure a little musical aggravation for the greater good of society, and that an icy Popsicle on a sweltering day is definitely one of the greatest goods ever devised.

“People see the ice cream man right up there with apple pie and the American flag,” said Councilor Dan Tremble, who has gotten more mail on this seemingly innocuous issue than he’s gotten about the whole “racino” gambling controversy.

In all fairness to Gleason, who doesn’t deserve his anti-ice cream reputation, the vapid digital music blaring from ice cream trucks has been driving otherwise patriotic Americans crazy for years. I checked the Web and found dozens of stories about people desperate to take back their streets from the odious Mister Softee trucks and the Good Humor vendors whose mobile music elicits foul moods wherever they roam.

Stafford Township, N.J., made national news five years ago, in fact, when its ban on noisy ice cream trucks provoked the scorn of pundits who vilified local officials as “anti-ice cream scrooges.”

When officials in Brunswick, Ga., responded to complaints from residents by issuing citations to the offending truck drivers, radio talk shows got swamped with calls from people who demanded that the city stop picking on the nice ice cream sellers. One overheated pro-ice cream activist went so far as to say that “anybody who would ticket an ice cream man would probably kill kittens.”

In Hartford, Conn., last year an ice cream man was charged with assault and breach of the peace when he attacked a resident who criticized the music coming from his truck’s loudspeakers.

The good folks of New Port Richey, Fla., figured it was bad enough that they had to endure the same few bars of “Turkey in the Straw” every evening from one of their local ice cream trucks. But when the driver began to herald his arrival with a digitized mix of Beethoven’s “Fuer Elise” and gangsta rap that could be heard more than four blocks away, some of the townspeople demanded that the guy’s rig be banished immediately.

” I just never dreamed that so much trouble would come from being the ice cream man,” the beleaguered driver said.

A couple of years ago, when I spent an afternoon in a Bangor ice cream truck for a story, I asked the young driver how the locals reacted to the horrid music he played throughout his route.

“When people tell me it’s obnoxious,” he said with a smile, “I tell them to try to imagine what it’s like to listen to it for eight hours in this truck.”

Of course, there is a simple solution to this contentious “Turkey in the Straw” issue, one that would allow ice-cream trucks to retain their hallowed place in American summer tradition without causing adults to suddenly entertain lurid thoughts about shooting the messenger. It’s Gleason’s own suggestion to the council, in fact, and one that I would consider music to my ears. Dump the digital dreck, he said, and bring back the old-fashioned sleigh bells that once announced the arrival of ice cream trucks into neighborhoods across America.

As s a kid in Brooklyn, N.Y., the melodious jingle-jingle-jingle of those bells was the most welcomed sound in the world. I don’t know how far the sound traveled, but I know for a fact that it always managed to overcome the din of city traffic and reach the ears of every ice-cream-loving child in my neighborhood. When our friendly white-suited ice cream man grabbed that cord and shook those bells, he made a sound that could penetrate the windows and walls of apartment buildings up and down the block and make every mouth water on cue.

“Nothing works like the bell,” said a Memphis ice cream man who recently traded his maddening “Pop Goes the Weasel” and “Turkey in the Straw” song list for the pleasant jingle he remembered as a child.

For Mike Gleason, the bells might even restore his good humor about Good Humor.