Ring-a-ling!

Everything about it is iconic. The muscular shape. The mouthwatering art work. The frozen treats inside. But ask owner Tom Gesion of Garwood, New Jersey, what about his vehicle resonates with people the most?

“It's the bells.”

“A Good Humor truck," Tom says, "is a visceral experience."

"You’ve got the “clicks” from the coin changer. The “clunks” from the freezer door. But it’s the “ring-a-ling” that still connects.“ Leaning up against his time machine, Tom smiles. "With each ring, I think, 'Pavlov was right.'"

Tom got the chance to pilot a neighbor’s ice cream truck while he attended high school, and he was hooked. Later, he acquired his own vehicle. He supervised a frame-off rebuild to original specs, which took him three painstaking years and lots of help. But when he suits up and drives his baby to special events and parties, he says the memories don’t stop.

“People even remember their drivers’ names,” says Tom, happy to evoke echoes of a different time. “It's an experience that takes adults back to their childhoods, and gives little kids a peek into the world their parents or grandparents enjoyed.“

The sounds of the first Good Humor truck started ringing through the neighborhoods of Youngstown, Ohio in 1920, when Harry Burt invented a chocolate-coated ice-cream bar on a stick. Next, he fitted a fleet of trucks with iceboxes, and the ringers from bobsleds.

Jingle all the way.

Tom is proud to keep this analog American tradition alive. “Some of the newer trucks play recorded music through speakers,” he says. “But what if you don’t know the song? With bells, it's easier to relate to, whether you’re 8, or 80.”

That’s the thing about ice cream trucks. Whenever we hear that “ring-a-ling,” it’s a sound that never gets old, and somehow, keeps us young.

Contact Tom with TG & Sons Ice Cream at 908-232-7177.