The Chris Moeller Archives

Old Times on the Mississippi

“And I remember Ferguson, Missouri still more pleasantly, for the summer sunsets. I have never seen any on either side of the ocean that equaled them.”

Substitute the town of Ferguson for Muscatine, Iowa (less than three hours apart by car), and you have the words of Samuel Clemens in his book Life on the Mississippi in 1883, under his more famous pen name “Mark Twain.”

All Aboard
In the summer of 1994, my plan was to spend the three months between my freshman and sophomore years of college working at Busch Stadium. I had recently gotten a first taste of living alone when my roommate at Iowa State pledged with the Phi Kappas (or whatever) and left to live in the fraternity's campus castle following spring break. This was the life, I thought. All that was missing were several dozen Cardinals baseball games so off I went to pursue the glamorous life of a stadium concessionaire.

I attended the stadium job fair in May, after finals had been completed in Ames. I discovered that a job was mine if I only wanted it, and I determined also that an usher's job, where you can actually watch the game, is far superior to a concessionaire’s job, where you have to bust your tail. But by this time, Major League Baseball’s regular season marathon was already seven weeks in, and I was also going to have to close up shop early, since school started back in the third week of August. By my account, that left what amounted to less than 25 home dates at which I could actually work-- plus a lot of down time during those days and weeks when the team was on the road. That particular summer also held the threat of a baseball players’ strike, against an absurd threat by the league owners to impose a salary cap upon them. The strike that would ultimately come to pass on August 12th and lead to the cancellation of the World Series. Therefore, my dream of working for the Cardinals as a stadium employee-- a long-time back-up plan to playing center field for the club-- was aborted, yet I still had the bug to spend the summer in St. Louis.

A Pilot's Memory
During that May trip to the city, with el Papa's help, I secured a hard-to-find three-month apartment lease. Hard to find is the three months, but we came to it finally near a college campus, that of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. I found employment alternative to the ballpark during that same two-day visit-- not bad results, I’d say, for a man with no college degree. I would go to work instead for eleven weeks with Frosty Treats, Incorporated, as one of their ice cream truck drivers. You know the kind of truck I mean, the ones that have the ringing bell and the brightly-colored photo menu plastered onto the passenger side of the truck, along with a couple drawings of clowns. It was a van, actually. If you live in Des Moines, Iowa, as I have for twenty years, you may not know about these trucks as they have been prohibited in our city and its suburbs for decades-- considered a nuisance, I suppose.

I was all set to go-- a jay-oh-bee and an unfurnished apartment. I could work any and every day on one of the trucks if I wanted to, and since money would surely be tight, I vowed I would only take a day off, whether it be weekday or weekend, if I was going to a Cardinals game. I filled my apartment with the 13-inch television and the VCR from my dorm room, along with a card table, two folding chairs, and an air mattress. That was it. There was a bedroom, but it only served as a passageway to the bathroom. I think I used the bedroom space only for a week at the most-- to stretch out a poster. The building was located in Ferguson, Missouri, a town you now know as the home of Michael Brown’s family and the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement, and it was a great little town. Still is. I visited last summer, and I venture to say that, despite perceptions, I found it nicer now than I did 23 years ago. It was a great building, too, that still stands. It's right next to the tracks of the Wabash Railroad, a refurbished brick hotel building built in the 1890s. 1994 was the centennial birthday of the town of Ferguson, and my building was February in the centennial calendar. None of this is whitewash.

I become a Jack-of-all-trades
I drove my Cardinal red Pontiac Fiero to work every day, only a mile or so to Frosty Treats' regional headquarters. It was a small building that stood surrounded by a fleet of about 25 to 30 white vans, all stored safely inside a tall, barbed-wired fence. The freezers, which accounted for about two-thirds of the space inside each van, would need to be plugged in each night because they would be without power from the time you disconnected to hit the road at eleven o'clock in the morning until sunset. As drivers, we were obviously cautioned to keep the door of the freezer unit closed for as much of the day as possible, but there wasn't even air conditioning in the vehicle so you couldn't avoid the fact that the unsold frosty treats might be a tad soft by the time the evening hours rolled in.

St. Louis can be hot and unpleasant, as you know. It is the city, and the Mississippi the river, about which Mark Twain's contemporary, Charles Dickens, once wrote:

The banks low, the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice... mud and slime on everything; nothing pleasant in its aspect... No man ever admits the unhealthiness of the place he dwells in (unless he is going away from it), and I shall therefore, I have no doubt, be at issue with the residents of St. Louis in questioning the perfect salubrity of its climate, and in hinting that I think it must rather dispose to fever in the summer and autumnal seasons.

Those words were written just after the English author's visit to the Mississippi River Valley in 1870, more than a decade before either Life on the Mississippi or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would go into publication. Perhaps the appeal of the area demands a certain sense of humor Dickens didn't possess.

Old French Settlements
I was assigned my own area of the metro in which to ply my wares to the good people. It was an unincorporated area of North County that adjoined the town of Black Jack. A year ago, I watched a documentary film online about this unincorporated area, which also abutted the Great River. The film was called Spanish Lake. Residents there filed a lamentable lawsuit in the 1970s against new public housing construction that was going up shortly after the closing of St. Louis' rather-infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. The area became the focal point of some hard racial feelings during the '70s that continue today. I didn’t particularly notice any of this in 1994. Everybody loved the ice cream man, and he loved them.

A Universal Grasp
A paper map of the city was my guide. It was glued to a big clipboard that was given to me to help me navigate my way through the streets. I would begin each day in what was the south part of the map, and business would not be brisk. The neighborhoods were more depressed in that part of my route, certainly, but they were solidly working class. More so, it was that parents were out working during the afternoon. I encountered really just kids until after about 5:30 in the evening. Most of them were gathered in groups out on the street. All summer long, I heard their refrain: “Can you hook me up? Can you hook me up?” They didn’t have any dough, lots of them. The more aggressive of them would jump on the back bumper of the van. Hopefully, I would have remembered to lock the back door. I found I had to give away a certain amount of product each day as good will offering. The 25 cent cherry pops were the go-to for that. They were the cheapest item on the menu. And that reminds me, I remember we also had the 75 cent Bomb Pop, that was the old red, white, and blue popsicle I was told was an American classic, though I had never heard of it. There was the Strawberry Shortcake drumstick-- vanilla ice cream, strawberry filling, and a shortcake crumb coating, and the one that was like the Shortcake, except it was chocolate instead of strawberry. I forget what it was called. These items can all be found, then and now, inside those little waist-high freezers at your local gas and go. The premium item in my freezer was the Choco Taco—two dollars strong! Chocolate fudge, ice cream, and peanuts inside a waffle cone that was shaped, yes, like a Mexican tortilla. But that was cost-prohibitive, and nobody that I encountered until after five carried enough cash to buy a Choco Taco. (I just looked it up online. It has double in price in a quarter century, and it is still the priciest item on the menu.) I would run clean out of some items on a good day, but Choco Tacos were always still available for purchase after dinner, probably a little soft inside the wrapper.

At night, the cash flow would come alive. By dinnertime, I would be rolling into the tony suburban neighborhoods to the north, mom and dad were home, and they wanted dessert. Here comes the whole family, and every member of the clan gets a treat! Even the infants! Cha-ching! Speaking of-- in case you were wondering-- I think I’m keeping about 17 percent of my total sales at this time, something like that. I recall that I would take home on average of 70 to 80 dollars a day, the only day over 100 coming during 4th of July weekend. More experienced drivers had more lucrative routes than I did. Their evenings were likely similar, but they had office parks where you could score big dollars during the afternoon if you timed your arrival to employee break times. I didn't mind though. I was in it for the kids, right?

Just as on the TV show Taxi”-- one of my favorites, as you know-- we had a dispatcher back at the garage that was seated inside a window (but no metal cage and no Danny DeVito). It was a cash-only business and we would turn in our envelopes at the end of each day, then mill about until they had figured everybody's payout for the day. I do remember waiting for my pay one night when a colleague informed us that, on TV, OJ Simpson had a gun to his head and was engaged in a slow-speed chase with police down the Los Angeles Expressway. We chewed on that one as we acted out our Taxi-like, tragicomic Beckett scene in the garage.

Loaded to Win
Okay, now back to the ice cream van, and about that bell. It didn’t have a bell, actually. Instead, it had a loud speaker and a sound system that had a switch and four musical settings. This was the sound system that got ice cream trucks banned in Des Moines. One of the musical settings actually was a bell. It kept up a “ding dong, ding dong” noise that couldn't be endured by any of the drivers for more than 10 seconds. A second setting also could not be tolerated-- for the tune was “Pop Goes the Weasel.” So right away the first day I'm down to two options-- “The Entertainer,” by Mr. Scott Joplin (Hello again, St. Louis!) and the other one I can’t even remember. The sound system was, shall we say, unpopular. One man came out of his home during a steamy afternoon, told me he worked nights, slept days, and then he physically threatened me. I tried to keep the music to a minimum, but there is no ice cream truck without the sound system. The art of it is to drive down a street (ideally a cul-de-sac), blaring the music, average rate of driving speed, then turn slowly around, and go slower still back up the street. Give the people time to grab their pocketbooks. I do distinctly recall an incident of magic one evening-- turning a corner onto a street where the music could already have been heard for two blocks, then seeing in the far-off distance, the shadowy figure of a small boy jumping up and down next to his parents as the van came into his view. I saw only his jumping shadow at first, but there was pure joy on this child’s face as I drove closer. I don't think my arrival was ever greeted so warmly, before or since.

Almost every day I drove happily that summer. What's not to like about work such as this? The dress code permitted me to dress each day in t-shirt and shorts, and I always wore my Cardinals cap as a lid. That accessory would start conversations that I wished to have with people about the local nine. And I was a chatty one. Customers would ask me where I was from and what my story was-- both the kids and the adults would do this. And when you bother to talk to people, you find that you have friends you didn’t know you knew. I met my high school government teacher’s brother. I met another Iowan, a lady who used to work at the Blue Bunny ice cream factory over in Le Mars. At summer’s end, a little girl named Jasmine, who was sweet on me, gave me a computer-printed greeting card she'd made, using cutting-edge 1994 printing technology, to create a likeness of an ice cream cone. Inside, the card expressed how much she would soon be missing me when I returned to university. Likewise, a little boy gave me a going-away card, but the artwork was poor.

Pilots and Captains
Even more memorable to me today was the circle of co-workers I spent time with-- and then immediately lost all connection with in those pre-Facebook days. My trainer had a first-class mullet and also wore a Cardinals cap every day. He was probably my best acquaintance-- think Otto the bus driver on The Simpsons, but a much brighter bulb. I think he liked me because he liked the idea of a young man going on an adventure to do what he did year-round. I spent an evening at his house with him and his lovely family, and another driver joined later. I recall chatting with both of them at one point about my all-time favorite TV show WKRP in Cincinnati, and the other driver relayed that he loved the episode where Johnny Fever thought he was being pursued by the phone cops (Editor’s note: the episode was “An Explosive Affair, Part 2," originally aired 1981). What I remember best about the conversation with this other guy was his tobacco laugh and the fact that he had come to the house straight from county lockup on a charge of domestic violence.

Another Frosty Treats co-worker drove his van every day with his 10-year old son in tow. What a goofy little kid. He was the "what does this do? what does that do?" sort. One day he told he liked my little car, the Pontiac Fiero, but if it was him, he declared, he would have bought American. Another driver yet was a fantastic guy who was a French exchange student about my age. This fact was, of course, as surreal as it sounds. This company of less than 30 drivers actually had an exchange student on roster. I truly think his name was Pierre, but I may be stereotyping with my memory. I was invited one evening to go out with him and his friends, all French exchange students also. We gathered and drank alcohol (underage, in my case) in one of the high-rise apartments downtown-- FYI, the one next to the Days Inn on 4th Street. (You can see it plainly from the observation room at the top of the Arch.) Just like me, Pierre’s friends had no furniture. We sat on the floor that night and drank beers and I enjoyed some of their conversation in French. We ended the evening by going arm-and-arm and singing La Marseillaise. That part I just made up.

I didn't known then what I wanted to do with my professional life, what would satisfy my passions, but it came to me many years after the Summer of Ice Cream. I loved the shows WKRP and, later, Newsradio, and really internalized them, to the point that I made my career in radio for just short of a decade. What I always wanted though, I decided, and what was represented by these great TV shows I enjoyed, was to be part of a great workplace ensemble, and I’ve had that now with three different employers, the first of which being Frosty Treats, Incorporated. This garage was like Taxi. There were only a couple of ladies, older ones like the extras, no Marilu Henners. The French guy, being foreign, would be Latka, I guess. Some of us wanted to be actors, or boxers (the ones I didn't know, probably), others were probably like Reverend Jim, and would have trouble finding work anywhere else, some of us wanted to be stadium ushers. I’ve never seen any of these people again, with one possible exception. A couple years ago, I believe I saw the boss, the man whose name and phone number I kept in my wallet throughout the '90s, when I still thought I needed to list Frosty Treats on job resumes. He was with a group of friends sitting several rows in front of me at a night game in the upper deck of a new Busch Stadium. He was a big man, and several beers along, clearly enjoying himself. Not entirely sure of myself, I didn’t think it necessary to go say hello after two decades of time had passed.

From Roses to Snow
I made it to a record 15 ballgames during that summer living in the city-- though I would later tie that record through sheer hustle in 2000, commuting from Des Moines. At one juncture during that memorable year of '94, I went to four games in two days, thanks to back-to-back doubleheaders in a series against Atlanta. My wages, paid out in cash each one of those days, turned out to be enough to cover my lease and all expenses for the summer, with enough left over for an electronic sound receiver, a five-disc compact disc changer, and two speakers- all of which can still be found in my current living room. They are a living memory.

Home Again
It dawned on me just the other day that my ice cream truck piloting venture is an equivalent to Samuel Clemens’ brief career piloting steamboats in the 1850s. For both of us, this youthful escapade would inform the rest of our lives. He made his way down the river from Hannibal, Missouri, and I came from Iowa. As he wrote in Life on the Mississippi, a river pilot was required to “get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cottonwood and every obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, must… actually know where these things are in the dark.” And as I explained, my work required me to give away a lot of cherry popsicles. His work in the field came to an end with the outbreak of the Civil War, during which he made out for Nevada Territory, and ultimately, to his first important writing assignment. My work ended with a return to the classroom. Clemens derived his alias from his experience-- in river boating, the phrase ‘mark twain’ stands in for the water depth measure of two fathoms, or twelve feet-- the level of depth considered safe for piloting. I have my new pen name narrowed down to “Strawberry Shortcake” and “Choco Taco,” leaning toward the latter.

posted by CM @ 7:35 PM