Old-fashioned ice cream trucks in demand

Tanner's trucks play 32 different tunes _ from "Pop Goes the Weasel" to "Happy Birthday." All are in the music-box style. Phillips plays a carnival-style song that ends with a robotic sounding voice happily shouting, "Hello!" — then it starts all over again.

Four-year-old Seth Schreckengost is an easier sell.

On a day when temperatures climbed near 90, he and mom Heather Schreckengost could hardly wait for two $1.50 Bomb Pops, the rocket-shaped ice on a stick that has been around for 50 years.

The original Bomb Pop is red (cherry), white (lemon-lime) and blue (raspberry). These days, the trucks are stocked with various flavors, including a top-selling chocolate-banana.

Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University, said parents and grandparents often want to relive and pass along whatever made them happy as youngsters.

"I can think of very few things with the Pavlovian response that hearing the bells of an ice cream truck brings. It's like this immediate kind of physiological change that occurs, and it's all happy," he says. "As a kid I can think of no other sound I welcomed more on a July afternoon than that tinkle of the ice cream truck. Even though in the end what it gave you was just ice cream, it seemed to promise so much more."

So baby boomers are big business, and the classic treats endure. But Groff, of the ice cream association, says new products help ensure success.

Some strong sellers, like a taco-shaped chocolate ice-cream cone, can't be found in regular stores. Others, like a chili powder-flavor ice cream, don't last long.

"They made the kids gag," says Phillips.

Joey Simonton started driving an ice cream truck in Hilton Head, S.C., while he was in graduate school. More than two years later, he's still at it in Charleston, W.Va., and his new business is thriving.

Joey's Ice Cream Trucks built 16 trucks last year and 12 so far this year with contracts for more.

Simonton says the long hours, regulations that vary from town to town, and insurance and taxes can be a pain. Other downsides include oversaturation. Some areas are seeing so much growth that competition is getting cutthroat, forcing some drivers to find new routes hundreds of miles from home.

And vendors are increasingly concerned that some cities, including Stow and Hudson in northeast Ohio, are banning trucks for fear children will be struck by passing traffic.

Even so, Simonton says, "it's definitely a great American institution."

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