Have you noticed the abundance of competing food trucks at events you attend? Is this a machination of the current marketing minds? Excepting for the good humor truck and the milk man in his distinctly peculiar looking milk truck, I don’t remember food trucks being at events. Maybe the current food trucks are the modern manifestations of the old ice cream man. Hold it! Let’s for a moment back up, rewind the brain 60 years or so. Let’s think about this.
It’s maybe January, 1966. I am in my second year at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. I am 19. The university is over run with baby boomer students and trying to survive the glut. The faculty seems less accessible and much less prone to help out struggling students.
Speaking of me, I am not doing very well grade-wise. Being a late bloomer (or more likely the bloom that withered on the vine) and being thrust into the academic melting pot I don’t really have any goals or objectives. I am not at all comfortable with the courses I am forced to take. But the social life is increasingly attractive to me. In 1966, if you weren’t attaining a C average, the university did not offer you a dormitory space. Thus, I have been renting an off campus room in a house of ancient German immigrants who do not speak the language too well and probably were once part of the Gestapo. I am receiving little support from home. I have an old Lambretta motor scooter to get around which I bought with last summer’s wages. I am working evenings driving a Mr. Softlee ice cream truck to earn some living money. It’s a brand new truck set up to sell soft serve ice cream.
Mr. Softlee was bought and paid for by the parents of a 17 year old entrepreneur. They set him up in business while he finished high school. Obviously from a family of distinct elitist tendencies Mr. Softlee junior hired me to run the truck, serve and sell the ice cream, and clean the truck at night for $1.25 an hour, “and don’t eat the merchandise!” He meticulously showed me how I must make the ice cream cones. “Never put any ice cream into the actual cone. The customer won’t know. You carefully start at the top edge of the cone, and spiral it around one layer on the next until you get to the top. Do this with haste. The slower you go the more ice cream gets put into each spiral. We don’t want that! You must very carefully weigh each cone so that the exact amount of ice cream is portioned out and no more. Less is acceptable, preferrable.” At the end of the week he would compare the money intake to actual stock used and then lecture me about giving out too much ice cream and thereby damaging his profits. “This can’t go on, You’re killing the business….” Yeah, right, I’ll try to be more meticulous, obsessive compulsive, and greedy like you.
Well, I just couldn’t do that. You can’t screw working people. By the end of the first month I was making sure that everyone got their money’s worth. Sometimes the banana splits took two hands to carry them away! Mr. Entrepreneur thought that I was making big time profits based upon the stock that was being used up. He was never nice to me, and always was condescending. He relished bossing around, degrading college students. Needless to say, he had an elitist hemorrhage at the end of the month.
A competing food truck had been watching me, talking with me. I am nothing if not on time, consistent, dependable and honest. The owner offered me a job and situation I could not turn down: drive his food truck (Mr. Bobkitty) for a good deal more than I am being paid by Mr. Softlee, and live free at his office/old house in the country a few miles from the campus. His food truck is a 1946 Government surplus food truck once used on military bases. It’s a dinosaur, laboriously slow and barely able to make it up the hills of Athens. Everything has been ad-hoc added onto it—propane, electricity, steaming bins. There is no grill. “Don’t worry about food. Eat whatever doesn’t sell.” I don’t know this Bobkitty owner very well. But I see that he is also an entrepreneurial college student. I wonder….but I am in no place to wonder. I took the offer faster than a lightning bolt.
Needless to say the motor scooter got replaced quickly with a 1955 Ford hardtop. Yes, 99,000 miles but in reasonable shape. The price was right. It beat the hell out of commuting in January on a motor scooter. I really liked the small town atmosphere of Athens. Other than never wanting to go back home to Maple Hts. I have little direction. I met a girl, we developed a relationship. She was very nice. I liked her a lot. But the world was closing in on me. If you don’t stay in school you’re gonna get drafted and go to Viet Nam. I need some time off to gather myself, figure out my priorities, make some money. She is not coming back to Ohio University, but going back to Connecticut. I haven’t got two nickels to rub together. This will mean I’ll never get to see her anymore.
So now I am working for Mr. Bobkitty/Sammywagon. It turns out that this entrepreneurial boss has two little trailers as well that sell sandwiches, chips and pop near the dormitories. Each day we have to make up 25-30 sub sandwiches to put in the steamer and an assortment of sandwiches to sell at the wagons. It is turning into an 8 hour 7 day per week job. Of course the boss isn’t hearing this—”you’re living here free and eating…..” I have even less time to study.
The daily routine is to start making sandwiches at 1 PM. At 4 PM drive the Bobkitty truck about 4 miles to the campus, park it and set up for business until 11PM, then drive it back to the farm. Earlier I alluded to the fact that Mr. Bobkitty was, at best, cobbled together. A propane tank the size of an atomic bomb was hanging attached to the rear of the truck. I always feared that someday someone is going to run into the back of the underpowered truck and its gonna be Hiroshima all over again. There was also a gas generator attached to the back of the truck which had to run to supply the 110 volt electricity when parked….OK, Hiroshima and Nagasaki if I get hit in the rear. Inside the working area of the truck was the counter, a refrigerator, and the steamer fed by an open flamed burner—all this plus an assortment of extra chips, pop, and whatever else stashed all around the truck. Also, there was a 5 gallon open G.I. can of gasoline for the generator
On the drive back to the farm it was customary to stop about half-way home at an informal dump by the river to empty the trash. Now, the trash can was next to and often leaning on the G.I. can since very little was strapped down or secured. I grabbed the garbage can and started for the door. The G.I. can fell over, spilling gas from the uncapped spout. The rest is history. I just remember seeing the gas spill out, the steamer burners burning, and fire erupting everywhere. Instinctively I ran through the flames and out the back door. Instantly the whole truck was engulfed. I kept envisioning the propane tank. I ran as far and as fast as I probably did ever in my life waiting for the massive explosion. When I finally came to a house I banged on the door and just kept pointing to the glow down the road. I had no breath, could not talk. They got the idea and called the police.
Mr. Bobkitty burned down into the pavement by the time the firetrucks got there. Mr. Entrepreneur ‘s father was there the next day praising me and so grateful that I was OK, just singed a bit. Of course, Mr. Entrepreneur tended to blame it all on me. He, however got cited for unsafe this, that, and the other…a list of things. As you can imagine the working and living arrangements shortly deteriorated to unbearable and I moved into a boarding house. I worked as a pizza delivery driver. To this day I still marvel at the fact that the propane tank didn’t explode.
