Some things just go together – like ice cream and Ford trucks. While that may seem puzzling to some folks, it made perfect sense in previous decades, when Good Humor ice cream trucks cruised through American neighborhoods, selling their frozen dairy treats. These trucks were mostly Fords. In the 1950s, when Good Humor trucks reached their peak popularity, Ford even used them in at least two advertisements. Let’s take a look at these refreshing ads.
The story of Good Humor ice cream stretches back to the 1890s, when Youngstown, Ohio confectioner Harry Burt added ice cream to his candy store wares. Burt soon adopted the idea of automobile-based ice cream sales, outfitting a 1902 Oldsmobile chassis with cargo beds filled with ice cream tubs (though it’s not clear whether ice cream was sold from the vehicle, or whether the Olds was used to deliver the product to retailers).
Burt and his son, Harry Burt, Jr. created their business’s major retailing advancement in the early 1920s, when they introduced a chocolate-covered ice cream brick with a candy-sucker stick in one end. The ice cream bar was born, and Burt patented it in 1923. Ice cream suckers proved especially adaptable to selling from vehicles, which the Burts did in Youngstown, and quickly sold franchises in other cities. Most of these early ice cream trucks were Fords – Model T’s and then Model A’s.
Following Mr. Burt’s 1926 death, the company was no longer controlled by the Burt family (though Harry Jr. remained in the business), but the firm’s trajectory remained true, becoming America’s largest purveyor of ice cream bars, mostly sold from trucks.
Good Humor’s truck fleet and drivers became fixtures of American life. Along the way, the company nurtured a reputation for quality and meticulousness – the trucks were always spotless, as were their drivers’ white uniforms (which were laundered daily). In 1950, a slapstick comedy called “The Good Humor Man” featured the main character driving a Good Humor-outfitted Ford F-1 pickup. That film, and the ubiquity of Good Humor trucks, led Ford to promote both in this ad from the summer of 1950.
Ford’s ad highlighted the F-1’s economical operations, as ice cream trucks’ demanding schedule demonstrated a need for thrifty and dependable transportation. Good Humor’s president, Joseph Meehan, is quoted in the ad that “Ford reliability helps keep sales up by cutting lost-time losses.” In an era when most pickups were purchased by commercial or agricultural users, this was valuable praise. (Meehan was more of a financier than a dairy man; he later served as governor of the New York Stock Exchange.)
The 1950s was Good Humor’s golden age – by decade’s end, the company operated 2,000 trucks, most of them Fords. It’s therefore fitting that the decade would be bookended by Ford ads highlighting these mobile refreshment purveyors.
In this 1958 ad, the truck is an F-250 with New York license plates, and the Good Humor official quoted in the ad is Vice President E.J. Otken. Otken was a Middlesex County, New Jersey dairy farmer who also superintended Good Humor’s Brooklyn plant that produced 600,000 ice cream bars during each year’s April-through-October production run.
In the advertising copy, Otken is quoted as saying “In this sort of work, eight years and 80,000 is a long life for a truck… but we have many eleven-year-old Fords still going strong!” Perhaps the F-1 from Ford’s 1950 ad was still in the fleet!
Incidentally, while children are always associated with ice cream trucks, a late 1950s Good Humor survey of its vendors noted that children accounted for just 55% of truck-based sales, teenagers 20% and adults the remaining 25%. But an ad showing an ice cream truck swarmed by office workers or construction workers wouldn’t have quite the same effect as this type of scene.
Good Humor truck in Fairfax, Virginia, 1967.
Good Humor Corporation was sold to Lipton (itself owned by global giant Unilever) in 1961. Mobile sales continued, and Good Humor added stepvans to its fleet as well, though in-store grocery sales gradually increased in importance. Ice cream truck sales tumbled during the 1970s due to increased gas prices, population shifts to more dispersed suburbs, municipal regulations, and the accelerating trend of children not being home on summer afternoons. Finally, in 1976, Good Humor sold its company-owned vehicle fleet. Many of its trucks were purchased by entrepreneurs who continued selling ice cream, though by then ice cream trucks had already faded in prominence.
The past few decades have presented a rocky road for ice cream trucks. While the trucks still work the streets in many locales, these days they are more likely to be owned by individuals or small firms, rather than corporate entities such as Good Humor with a national presence. Maybe someday, corporate fleets of ice cream trucks will re-emerge, but until then, we can savor these tasty ads from the 1950s instead.
Image is vital, and as a former Pepsi driver and a Seven-Up/RC Cola driver, our trucks were heavy-duty sanitized by a crew of college students after ever day’s route. All Fords. Our uniforms had to be spotless. They gave us clean dollies to load products on, and if they got too broken down – new ones.
So, if we were handling ice cream, I would expect the same set-up. Sanitizing heavy cleanings, spotless uniforms and Fords.
This one shows up at the Motor Muster at Greenfield Village (when you guys were here in 2017, you missed the show by a week) The guy also has a Good Humor trailer and a pedal cart. And yes, he sells Good Humor products from that truck during the show.
I have watched that Jack Carson movie in the last year or two. Yes, I like TCM. And I do remember his Ford F-1 truck.
I think home sales/delivery of ice cream went the way of home sales/delivery of almost everything else. Even in the 60s there were a lot of homes with refrigerators with a “freezer” that was a small compartment within the fridge itself. Those were good for a couple of ice cube trays and a few TV dinners, but not much else. They were terrible for ice cream, as it was always mushy in those freezers. Ask me how I know – my family didn’t get a “modern” fridge with a separate freezer door until about 1967, and we kids were thrilled when we could finally buy ice cream just to have on hand (and not just for special events.)
I once worked with a guy who had a summer job driving an ice cream truck (not Good Humor, though), and this was probably around 1960-61. He was told to keep to the low-income neighborhoods because the nicer neighborhoods already had ice cream in the freezer at home. He remembered that after dinner in lower income areas was his best time of the day.
I remember The Good Humor Man although he didn’t come through our suburban neighborhood. He was a big treat though if we were in the city! “Mooooom! Can I have some money for ice cream?” I’m trying to remember what music he played to let you know he was coming…
I’d probably start drooling like Pavlov’s dog if I heard it right now.
I also remember those old refrigerators… when I was 14 I got a summer job along with most of my friends planting, weeding, and later harvesting various vegetables for a local farmer. I learned to put a can of Coke in the freezer every evening, and it froze just enough to keep my lunch box cool, and that Coke would be icy cold and delicious at noon.
Then we bought a nice new fridge, and the can exploded in the freezer overnight. Who knew? I didn’t even get in trouble because nobody could even imagine that would happen.
He was told to keep to the low-income neighborhoods because the nicer neighborhoods already had ice cream in the freezer at home.
There is something special about buying a bar from the truck, vs the half gallon (which is now 1.5 quarts) carton in the freezer.
When I was little, living in Dearborn, we were on a dead end street, with a playground at the end of the street. The Good Humor truck lived on that block all summer. Dad said I referred to the truck as “the doing” because I heard the bells when the truck drove down the street.
In Kalamazoo, there were no ice cream trucks, only push carts. Different company “Have-A-Bar”. The city had tried to keep the downtown retail district alive by closing off several blocks of the street and converting it to a pedestrian mall, so that is where I usually saw the push carts, though I do remember being in the barber shop, in a commercial stretch of Portage St, and seeing a push cart go by.
This is what the Kalamazoo mall looked like back in the day. Happy hunting ground for a guy with an ice cream push cart.
Required automotive content, that same block in Kalamazoo, before the mall was put in.
Interesting about your co-worker who drove an ice cream truck.
From what I understand, ice cream truck drivers came from many walks of life, but the two biggest cohorts were college students (during the summer peak), and home heating oil truck drivers. Since the home heating oil and ice cream delivery seasons run consecutively, this was a natural source of labor for both industries.
And I had a vague sense that ice cream trucks developed somewhat of a low-income association by the 1970s/80s, but I hadn’t thought of home freezers as being a contributing factor.
I think JP nailed it on the improvement in home refrigeration units (i.e., freezers) putting a serious dent in neighborhood ice cream truck delivery.
In fact, I was rather hoping for a more in-depth analysis of the refrigeration units the trucks used through the years. Surely, those early models around the turn of the century just used blocks of ice to keep the ice cream frozen, eventually being supplanted by cut-down versions of refrigeration units used by heavy trucks to transport flash-frozen food across long distances.
Yummm, toasted cocoanut bar> (IIRC)
Finally, in 1976, Good Humor sold its company-owned vehicle fleet. Many of its trucks were purchased by entrepreneurs who continued selling ice cream
Like Reggies!
Wonderful!
I’m a huge Columbo fan. An ice cream truck was the murderer’s set-of-wheels in the 1972 episode The Most Crucial Game. Robert Culp played the bad guy.
(Source, what else: IMCDB)
This was exactly what I was going to bring up, and you beat me to it:
Searching “Chevy Good Humor truck” brings up a lot of image results, but the only Chevy newer than 1955 I’ve actually seen as a GH truck is from one of the episodes of Columbo with Robert Culp.
Never knew the history of GH.
We had a decidedly not-good humored driver of one of these Fords in Towson.
In Iowa City, a college kid drove a Cushman ice cream three-wheler, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t GH.
Our neighborhood ice cream vendor (a local franchise, not Good Humor) drives a GEM electric cart outfitted with a freezer on the back. During the summer she shows up like clockwork just as the kids are finishing soccer practice in the park down the street. I’m guessing youth sports practices/games are where they make the bulk of their sales nowadays, not kids at home.
We had the Good Humor Man in my nice new suburban neighborhood at the very western edge of the Philly burbs in the late 69s thru mid 70s. It had a bar of bells (not a music box), and it definitely had the outside freezer doors, not a window.
I recall at least one year it showed up literally on the first day of spring, March 20. It was a warm(ish) day for March, so since Good Humor = summer, I took that as my signal to go shirtless, which my mom wasn’t too happy about.
Interesting. I never thought of Good Humor as an actual chain, just stupidly figured it was a generic brand like Acme!
When I was young the ice cream man drove a ’52 Crosley panel, complete with propeller on front. I still taste a Creamsicle when I think about Crosleys.
We get a Good Humor Man visit, in his ’66 Ford truck, every summer at our little village library – courtesy of the “Friends of the Library” group. 🙂 It’s quite the treat and definitely brings back memories of my childhood in Brooklyn Park, MD (just south of the Baltimore city limits, and none too far from what is now BWI airport). 🙂
Growing up in the 1950’s and early 60’s ice cream vendors in my neighborhood were a fixture in the summer-but not Good Humor-they were individually owned. By the mid-sixties they were mostly gone, although I wood occasionally spot one running around the neighborhood. I also remember Manor Bakeries used to drive through the neighborhood selling bread, rolls and other baked goods. They all disappeared decades ago.
These are the trucks I remember as a 5 year old, living in a Baltimore row house, slowly coming down the alley, tinkling the bells over the windshield, on summer evenings when it was still light out but I had already been sent to bed by my parents who didn’t believe in daylight savings time; most likely an excuse to put me and my sister out of the picture so that they could have adult time. Which in their case consisted of buying Good Humor bars and enjoying them on the porch without the annoyance of 5 and 3 year old children.
If they were feeling particularly generous, or wealthy, there might possibly be a few extra treats purchased and put into the freezer so that we kids could find them the next morning.
That didn’t happen very often.
Ouch. That was a bit sad.
I guess so, but as with many childhood memories it’s so tangible and embedded in the mind that it’s just familiar mental wallpaper, and so neither happy nor sad…it just is.
On the other hand, there’s the ice cream vehicle that comes next in my recollection, and that’s the Mr. Softee van.
The constantly repeating jingle – usually played on an 8-track player that had a bad idler and hence inconsistent pitch – is the soundtrack that haunts my memories of the Upper West Side in Manhattan during late 1970s summers. The emphasis there is on the word “haunt”.
By the time it came on my radar, Mr. Softee seemed to favor re-purposed Grumman postal vans. I much preferred the Good Humor Ford trucks with just the bells from my Baltimore youth.
…tinkling the bells over the windshield, on summer evenings when it was still light out but I had already been sent to bed
You weren’t the only one. I don’t think Michigan did daylight time until around 65-66. When I was 4-5 I was sent to bed at 7pm. Kalamazoo is on the west side of the state, at the western edge of the eastern time zone, so, even on standard time, sunset in late June isn’t until after 8pm. But the house in Kalamazoo was out in the boonies, so no Good Humor trucks anyway.
From the mid 70’s to the mid 80’s there was a lady driving an early 50’s Chevy independent ice cream truck in our neighborhood. Bob’s Ice Cream. I helped out when the truck wouldn’t start after a stop one day, it still was running a stovebolt. Bomb Pop for me please.
No Ford has ever put me in a Good Humour.
Thanks for this great trip down memory lane .
Here in Southern California we have ice cream trucks 365 days the year…..
Most these days are clapped out one ton P-Vans and sell a bewildering array of treats, hot and cold .
-Nate
tThe genuine Good Humor trucks occasionally rolled by my childhood neighborhood (middle class ‘burbs) in the ’70s, looking much like the one Mark H posted above, and I would often run out when I heard the ringing bells (not music); my favorite was the two-flavor swirled italian ice cup. Didn’t know the official GH trucks went away after 1976 though it does seem more recent trucks were all sorts of shapes and sold different brands. I forgot that they couldn’t be accessed from inside like many new trucks. There was also an ice cream truck that parked outside my high school in the ’80s, but I’ve only seen them on rare occasions since then.
I never saw the Good Humor man where I grew up, but did occasionally when we would go up to Chicago to visit my grandparents. That’s where I first saw these unique trucks. In our neighborhood, we had a lady who drove a Fiat 500 with the front passenger seat removed for room for the ice box and an old school bell attached to the driver side door that she would hit with a hammer, signaling her arrival on our street. We called her the “ding dong lady”.
An interesting follow up article would be on how and where these unique vehicles were constructed.
The poor bastages in my town had to pedal three-wheel bicycles–two up front carrying the insulated/refrigerated box, and one in back powered by the pedals, chain, etc.
The handlebars had a rack of bells the driver would jingle as he made his way slowly down the street.
Those guys must have had thighs and calves like canned hams by the end of summer.
“by the end of the summer”
That brings up memories of my brief investigation around becoming a Good Humor man around 1984.
(Yes, there are so many things wrong with that concept, even at the level of the title.)
I saw an advertisement in the Springfield, MA paper for ice cream truck drivers . Since I lived in Western Mass at the time, and since I liked driving, ice cream, and needed a job, I figured I’d check it out. Being able to drive around evenings torturing children whose parents had already put them to bed seemed to be just gravy on top of an entirely reasonable way to make a living. As a new graduate from a liberal arts college in 1984, I was desperate to make a living in 1984. (I still am, but that’s another story)
Anyway, what I discovered shortly after looking into the job – and spending a bit of time on the phone with the “employer” – was that the way the job worked was that I would be responsible for renting that neat Ford truck, buying all of the ice cream in advance, and then hopefully making enough money on my route (I could set the prices for ice cream to be whatever I chose) to cover my expenses and turn a small profit.
It was also made clear that I would only be allowed to stock the truck on a regular schedule (once a week ideally) and had to figure out how to keep my stock frozen. Either i would have to have a giant freezer at home, or….? Ruined stock would be my responsibility since I’d have to have paid for it when I took it from the Good Humor depot.
Even as a 22 year old, with a largely (at the time) worthless college degree, I realized that this was a pretty bad deal. So I passed. And the rest is history.
Although I would have LOVED to have been the guy driving one of those trucks.
While I am a Chevy man I have a strong desire to own a 55-56 Ford F1 truck. Do you know of any for sale?