Bob Sanders: Ice cream music and the beautiful sounds of spring

By: Bob Sanders Columnist | Opelika Auburn News
Published: March 24, 2009

Some sounds make you smile. I was in my backyard when I heard the popsicle truck on a nearby street. Wonderful sound, like a calliope at the fair.

Made me want to run over and buy something. (C’mon, didn’t you also pronounce it “cally-ope” ‘til you were grown?)

Reminded me of that long-ago time when Mother and baby brother Jack and I went to visit our three Birmingham aunts.

The Depression was still on. Hundreds of families, like these three had given up on the farm and moved to Birmingham to work for TCI. Two of them lived in Ensley, on a street where the streetcar came by about every 10 minutes.

My cousin and former playmate had lived at the foot of the hill, near Little Yellow Creek. We had played in their barn and ridden our tricycles down that hill.

Now, she was a city girl, introducing me to the magic of the picture show. Wow! How citified could you get?

Mother got to shop at the huge Loveman’s, Parisian’s and Pizitz stores. One even had an escalator. Lamar County didn’t have anything like that, I can tell you, although Ogden’s store did have a little cable that whisked your money to somebody on the second floor who would send your change back down. Not an escalator, but pretty swift.

The third aunt lived in Tarrant City, a tad more upscale.

There was a grassy lawn, which my cousin was mowing with a remarkable instrument, a push lawn mower.
Interesting, I thought. A sidewalk ran in front of the house, and down that sidewalk came a man pushing an ice cream cart ... which made that nice little music. What a treat, something we didn’t have by the cotton patches. (Sometimes, when we were chopping, hoeing or picking, we’d discuss how nice it would be if an ice cream truck did come by the cotton patch. We could dream, couldn’t we?)

I had been by their house once before, right after I’d had my tonsils removed, the summer before the first grade, and the only thing I could stand to eat was ice cream. I lived a life of luxury for a couple of days.

Ah, yes. The sounds of spring. When you woke up this morning it was springtime, a magical time, time to get the rust off the Chattanooga slat-wing steel beam plow and start waking the sleeping fields. The mules still have their long winter hair, not for long.

Old Hat on the right, in the furrow, old Bill on the left. Round and round. Old Bounce chasing a rabbit. Birds looking for worms as the plow turns up endless possibilities.
See what you’ve done, Mr. Ice Cream Man? You’ve stirred up a whole bunch of memories.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.