Staying cool, waiting for Jerry the Ice Cream Man in old Belleville

Back in the day, our refrigerator's freezer was the size of two ice trays and a pound of chop meat. Then that small cool space froze over and there was NEVER room for ice cream unless it was your birthday!

 It was the same way up and down the block on Gless Avenue in Belleville. Anybody who got rid of their ice box and got an electric refrigerator had about the same amount of freezer space.

 Unlike an actual ice box, think: the kitchen on The Honeymooners, where you put in a block of ice and it melted water into a pail underneath, these new-fangled refrigerators used electricity to take heat and make cold.

 The biggest drawback in the modern world of the 1950s, which no one thought of  as a drawback on such a modern convenience, was that crust of ice forming outside the metal casing that served as the tiny freezer.

 The longer you let the fridge go between defrostings, the thicker the ice formed until you couldn’t put anything on the shelf alongside the freezer.

 And if you needed to get some ice cubes or, later, a frozen TV dinner out of the freezer, you needed an ice pick (or butter knife, or both) to chip through the ice pack until you unearthed the block that held your treasure.

 This is Jersey. It’s hot in the summer in New Jersey. We were hot. We sweated and drank tap water to cool off. We ran around in the sun, got sunburn, it peeled, and we went back out in the sun.

 We made wooden swords and beat the daylights out of each other until the swords broke in pieces. Then we crawled around in the dirt, set ants on fire, and played handball in the dead end street.

 There was usually someone’s grandmother with her hair in a bun, a heavy black shawl sitting on a front porch when we played. We never used foul language. Most of us wouldn’t have known it if we heard it.

 The kids on the block went through Grade 8 at School 7 in Belleville, or Holy Family School or St. Mary’s School in Nutley. Belleville High School was still on Washington Avenue. In the summer, it was hot. We played in the heat.

 Nobody on the block had air conditioning. The closest our family came was when Dad brought home a Lasko three-speed oscillating fan and put it in the living room window. All the rest of the windows were left open and the slight breeze lifted the thin curtains to shift the air in our four-room cold-water flat.

 We kids kept cool by running around outside and making our own breezes. We played hide-and-seek and learned to count to 100 by fives. At our peak on that one dead end block we had up to 28 kids. (We're talking the baby boom, here.)

 We had one set of twins from the house across the street. They were the oldest of that brood of five. Adults had a hard time telling them apart, but to us kids Jan and Joan looked nothing alike. They were a few years older than me. The last time they played with the kids my age, probably cowboys and Indians or Army, they spotted some boys they went to school with heading our way through the fields and quickly dropped the toy guns we’d loaned them to play along, saying, “We can’t play with you anymore.”

 Denise, who lived across the street with a brother Tom and a sister Rosemary, didn’t play all that much. She had some kind of heart surgery in the 1950s and we boys had to be extra gentle around her. She was a year older than me but smaller, and a whole lot prettier. Their house had a side yard with garages in the back and the girls would put together a carnival fund-raiser for some charity each year. They’d set up booths and rides and all the kids in the neighborhood would have a great time.

 On hot summer nights when we heard the truck horn play “Mary Had A Little Lamb”, all of us kids would rush out to “Jerry the Ice Cream Man.”

 We’d tell him what we want and he’d probe through the thick hatch into the freezer for the ice cream bar or ice pop of our choice. Then he’d give us our change from a change dispenser he wore on his belt.

 , the genuine rock-and-roll teenager on Gless Avenue, remembers that Jerry and his brother George had a store in Lyndhurst.  It was a small food store where when Lon an his pal Dave Macaluso would ride their bikes to Teterboro Airport, they stopped in to get some water and talk to George who was running the store.

 Jerry or George would come to our area after dinner time, usually after the mosquito man in the jeep would pass by to share that cloud of toxic spray we all loved to run through. We spent many hot summer nights running after the “Mosquito Man” chasing him through the sweet-smelling blue cloud of smoke emitting from his county-owned Jeep. It could kill mosquitoes but we never gave a thought as to what it could do to us.

 Lon says that when Jerry would be getting an ice pop for a kid on the side of the truck,  Lon would always press the button on the door in the back freezer and lock it!

 When he went to help the next kid, now at the back of the truck, Jerry would always get angry when he found the freezer door locked. Now, he had to stop what he was doing to go in the truck cab, turn off the engine and get the key to unlock the freezer.

 Good old Jerry never caught the wise guy. So, the more often Jerry got angry, the more often Lon sought the perfect opportunity to lock it.

 Lon remembers two of his favorites from the truck, one pop called "brown cow" and the coconut vanilla pop that was really good.

 My favorite was called chocolate cake. It was an ice cream bar covered with cake crumbs. Other kids liked frozen ice pops that left a mustache the color of the flavor when you were done eating it.

 On our birthday, we got a free ice cream. My birthday was in June so I always got one free ice cream. Our friends born in cooler weather always missed out. Nyuk, nyuk!

 Sometimes you’d hear a kid yelling up to an open window asking his mom or dad for ice cream money and they’d say, “No, we have some in the freezer.”

 But everybody who heard that, even the kid being denied ice cream, knew that it meant that we don’t have the dime or quarter to spare for your treat. That’s how it was in our working class neighborhood, in the 1950s and 1960s. 

 In my new neighborhood, on near School 10, no ice cream truck came through our neighborhood. The one-way street only had houses on one side for the most part, and there weren’t as many kids as on my old small dead-end street.

 But there was something unusual in being just slightly across town from where I spent my first ten years of life. The truck that came along sold snow cones. They were essentially crushed ice with raspberry, orange, cherry or some other juice flavored concentrate squirted over them. Then you tried to eat it so the ice and the juice lasted til the end, like that morning bowl of cereal and milk.

 These new-fangled snow cones turn out to be one of the good things about moving to Bellwood, leaving behind old friends, that old parochial school and wearing uniforms to class.  

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About the author: Anthony Buccino has written several collections about life and growing up in and around Belleville, New Jersey. He also created Old Belleville, a web site of local history.  His latest book is Belleville and Nutley in the Civil War – a Brief History. For more information, www.anthonybuccino.com

Copyright © 2011 by Anthony Buccino – used by permission.