Today, I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch. Mr. President, thank you very much. As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy.
The U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and war. I'm Susan Matthews. In Slate's new season of Slow Burn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick.
We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment. He is the most unpredictable vote on this court. Including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him. Nobody showed that Gorsuch would join the majority on this.
He is the justice most likely to be a true wild card. This is judicial activist. Slow Burn, becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come.
Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts. The upstart company was called New York Ice Cream. So this is a New York Ice Cream guy who was right around the corner from the New York Times office. And he told me, from 34th Street to 60th Street, river to river, that's ours.
You will never see a Mr. Softee truck in Midtown. And if you do, there will be problems. If a Mr.
Softee guy pulled into a spot that they wanted to be in, they would summon their fellow New York Ice Cream guys who would kind of surround the Mr. Softee truck, making sure that he could not do any business at all. Reporting the story, and he rode around with a driver in a Mr. Softee truck.
As we were driving down, he would point out, like, there's the other guys with this combination of hatred and awe. And he would talk about how, yeah, I was on a corner right across the street from a New York Ice Cream truck for three hours last week, you know, without an incident, as if this was, like, a great big accomplishment. This is not the first time there's been tension, confrontation, harassment, violence in this business. This is something that, like, bubbles up every few years in the newspapers.
And sometimes Mr. Softee guys would be doing it, and other times other guys would be doing it, and people would get beaten up, people would get burned and robbed, and all kinds of things. It's like the Ice Cream Wars. This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.
I'm Willa Paskin. Every month we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters. I love a soft-serve chocolate cone with rainbow sprinkles, but this past May, May of 2019, when another story about ice cream truck misbehavior appeared in the local news, I started to wonder how ice cream trucks actually worked, how I got a delicious cold $3-$5 embodiment of summer into my hands, and it was something about the process of making, serving, and selling that cone that lent itself to conflict. So today, on Decodering, a real summer treat, we're going to make like an ice cream truck, working its route with stops along the way, first in China, then in Manhattan, and finally in Brooklyn, starting global and getting really personal in order to answer the question, why is the soft-serve ice cream truck business so bananas?
Nothing seems like it could be further from seedy, violent adult misbehavior than ice cream, the sweet stuff of childhood and innocence, which is why when these two things collide, it's so intriguing, so delicious. The ice cream truck trade probably has no more conflict than any other street-based, weirdly regulated cash business operating in a major metropolitan area, but that means that it has some conflict. Over the years, ice cream trucks from California to Scotland have occasionally been caught up in turf wars and legal battles, physical violence and the drug trade. In order to understand why this business might be so conflict-prone, we're going to start at the very beginning.
Consider this the part of the story where we're at the depot, the place that in New York, ice cream trucks park, get their supplies, and are assigned a route before heading out for the day. Before we turn on the soft-serve machine, in other words, we need to load up on a little backstory. Soft-serve ice cream was first sold in the 1930s, invented, depending on who you ask, by Tom Carvell, the founder of Carvell, or John McKellar, the founder of Dairy Queen. Two decades later, two brothers in Philadelphia were working at a company that made soft-serve ice cream machines, and they thought there might be a business opportunity in figuring out how to get those machines onto trucks.
My father and my uncle started Mr. Softee in 1956. Jim Conway is the vice president and co-owner of Mr. Softee.
They just started by building ice cream trucks, and they were using the name Dairy Van. This is the name Dairy Van? Yeah. From the start, Mr.
Softee was a franchise business. That means the Mr. Softee company licenses the name and the business model to third parties who run the ice cream trucks independently. Every franchisee's contract includes an agreement about the territory that they can operate in.
A truck costs about $150,000, and the franchisees also pay an additional annual fee of $3,500 to the company for the rights to the name, the logo, an ice cream cone with a face on it and a bow tie, and that jingle. The jingle was originally written in 1960 by an ad man for a radio spot, and it was so catchy, they put it on the trucks. Here comes Mr. Softee, the soft-serve cream man.
The cream-y, cream-y, soft-serve cream you get from it. There are now about 250 franchises operating 650 trucks in 16 states across the country. But in order to get a sense of why the ice cream business is so prone to certain kinds of conflict, it helps to look at a place that until recently didn't have Mr. Softee at all.
That's why the first stop on our route is the Chinese city of Suzhou, where Mr. Softee arrived in 2007. In New York, there's this idea that everyone in the world knows Mr. Softee, because if it's here, it must be everywhere.
Turner Sparks moved to Suzhou, China, a city of 10.5 million people, just 60 miles from Shanghai, in the mid-2000s, right after college, to teach English. After he'd been there for a little while, he noticed something. Soft-serve ice cream was only being sold at McDonald's and KFC in China. But it was so popular at McDonald's and KFC that they had to create these almost drive-through windows for walking up that only sold the ice cream.
There was always a line of, like, 20 people at all times. Turner is from Sacramento, so he didn't grow up with Mr. Softee. But he learned about it at college when he became good friends with the son of one of the company's co-owners, Jim Conway, who he heard from earlier.
Turner and that friend from college, who was still living in the States, and another friend, a Chinese businessman Turner had gotten to know while living there, pitched Jim Conway on bringing Mr. Softee to Suzhou. Oh, yeah, that sounds great. Here's the thing, though, I have no interest in doing this.
But if you guys want to do it, you can do it, and we can work out a deal where you guys can have the rights to develop Mr. Softee in China, but I'm not paying for it. Turner and his partners took that deal, but it only meant something if they convinced the Suzhou government to let them on the street in the first place. And so their questions were like, why would you want to do that?
And then they're like, well, you're going to be selling ice cream to kids out of a moving vehicle? This sounds wildly dangerous. Like, they're imagining kids just running down the street and then we're, like, slamming on the brakes and then them all running into the back of the truck. Over the course of a year, the guys sold the local government on the concept, figured out all the paperwork and the supply chain, got their permits, and raised enough money to hire staff, build one truck, and open one store, which it had to do for tax reasons.
Their first vehicle hit the street in October of 2007. The first truck was a hit literally immediately. So we opened that day, we had this big party, the truck's packed, and we go, we think we're going to be driving around to different neighborhoods. We get to our first neighborhood, which is by the Laser Light Fire Show, and we can't leave because there's 20 people on both sides wanting ice cream.
It was, I'm going to say, like 1,500 cones in two hours or something like that. It was as fast as you could pump it out, they could get it. What was Mr. Softy called there?
Oh, Ranxin Chansung, which means Mr. Soft Heart. Is it only chocolate milk at the beginning? No.
At the beginning, it was all the stuff we had in America, plus a mango flavored blast. We had one that tasted like banana cream pie, a red bean and rice cake, so the ice cream tasted like a rice cake, four were franchised. Each one was making about $80,000 to $100,000 a year in sales. They had really big plans.
Basically, there was 100 million people in there you could drive there back in the day. We could franchise or grow just in our region, and that could take a decade. But yeah, there was definitely a time, 2010, 11, 12, 13, where we were like, this is going to go. This is going to go huge.
And then what starts to happen? Yeah, it goes sideways. What? To understand how it started to go sideways, you need to understand how Soft Serve is actually made.
So there's a Soft Serve ice cream machine, right? Which is like, you know, you pull down and twist. And you just take a mix. It's thicker than milk, but it looks like kind of milk.
And then you pour it into the top of that. And then it takes like two minutes. What's happening in those two minutes is the mix, sugar, milk, cream, and some stabilizers, is getting really cold while being shot through with what is officially called overrun, but is more widely known as air. That's one of the secrets of the business, but I guess it's just a fact.
Well, it's not one of the secrets, because it's like, well, it's not really a secret, but it's less ice cream, so you're selling air. The air, specifically, isn't part of why Turner's business went sideways. I just love that fact. It's also why Soft Serve can't be sold in grocery stores.
The stuff is ephemeral. If you let it sit too long, it kind of deflates. Anyway, over a period of months, a few of Turner's employees figured out a number of creative ways to sell additional cones off the books, pocketing the cash from those additional sales. The way they could sell ice cream without selling it in a cup or bowl or cone was to buy their own cups, bowls, and cones, and then sell out of their own.
A few months, we caught that. Then they started buying their own ice cream mix. So we caught that, and then they started watering down the mix. And that only lasted like two weeks, and we caught that.
And then our drivers would either quit or get fired. Sometimes quitting or getting fired was not the end of it, though. The first guys we caught, so they were buying cups and selling out of their own cups. And so we fired them.
I woke up the next morning and outside my apartment, before my tires and my car were slashed, and then we fired this other guy, and then he stole a truck, and the police had to go find them throughout the city in a stolen ice cream truck. I don't know what his plan was, but he's just driving through the streets of the city and also he's in a Mr. Softee truck, it's like the most recognizable. But there was something else that was more common and more troublesome.
About like a week or two after they quit or got fired, they would have their own truck parked right down the street or sometimes bumper to bumper with our truck. As I suggest, and it's something to keep in mind going forward, once you know how the ice cream truck business works, it's not that hard to get into. It doesn't cost a huge amount of money, the overhead is low, and it has relatively few moving parts. A small menu, one vehicle, a few employees, no lease.
And in China, where it was all but impossible for Mr. Softee to legally enforce its copyright, the other companies that followed in Mr. Softee's footsteps really looked the part. They all had the same color scheme as us, they all had like red, white, and blue, and a lot of them had their, so we had like the Softee Blast, the Softee Cone, and if you look at their menus, they were just exactly the same, like the Softee Cone, even though that wasn't the name of the brand.
Turner begged the Suzhou government to come in and help regulate these other trucks. For about a year, also take away your permits, so now you can't bother us. The local government's changing behavior towards Mr. Softee mirrored a larger nationwide cooling towards foreign business.
I was like, okay, well I guess we'll keep parking and try to figure something out. I still didn't quit at that point, and I still didn't totally understand what was going on, and then the police started finding us every day for parking in these locations, and they weren't finding the trucks next to us. It quickly became clear that Mr. Softee could not continue.
Mid-2015, we decided we're closing. We didn't leave because it was a bad business. We left because we got shut down, so they all knew, oh, this is a really good business model. Yeah, I want to go back.
They're everywhere, and they're all over the country now. Turner is now a stand-up comedian, and he has no regrets about his experience. It was a decade from age 22 to 32 where I learned anything and everything about business the hard way and whatever the fun way. He cannot, however, eat Mr.
Softee. So now that I've come back to America, I've developed this dairy... I've never had a problem with any... Oh, now you're lactose intolerant.
I'm just an old man. So I can't even eat Mr. Softee anymore. This story makes clear that even in a place that has no tradition of ice cream trucks, the mixture of ice cream, mobility, and cash can get very volatile very quickly.
Some of what happens to Mr. Softee in Suzhou is specific to Suzhou, but copycatting, dissection, competition, and the particularly powerful impact of local city government are not, as you'll see as we head to our next stop, a place with a long tradition of ice cream trucks, New York City. Today I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch. Mr.
President, thank you very much. As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy. The U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and more.
I'm Susan Matthews. In Slate's new season of Slow Burn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick. We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment. He is the most unpredictable vote on this court, he is the justice most likely to be a true wild card.
This is judicial hackathon. Slow Burn, becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come. Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, so now we're going to take what we learned in Suzhou about ice cream trucks' tendency towards a certain amount of disorder and see what happens when that disorder has had decades to marinate. New York just has an extraordinary number of ice cream trucks and food trucks. Jim Conway, the co-owner of Mr. Softie again.
And you don't see that virtually anywhere else in the United States. So we have competition in New York. We have virtually no competition anywhere else. The key thing to understand about why soft-serve trucks can get so competitive is that the only thing that really differentiates one from another is location.
I've lived in New York City my whole life and before working on this episode, I never really noticed that most of the ice cream trucks I call Mr. Softie are not, in fact, Mr. Softie. They're Freezy or Funtime or Carvel or Bella or New York ice cream and they have different colors and logos and jingles.
I never really registered the differences, though, because it doesn't matter. They all sell basically the same thing. The best-off-serve truck, in my experience, is the one that's right there. On the business side of things, though, that means you want to be at the there where the most possible people are.
In New York City, that means you want to be in Midtown. Manhattan makes the best money? This is my point. I've got five years.
Matthew, not his real name, works but does not own a truck in Midtown. I've been at least two, three years in other places, but this is the best part. In Manhattan, which is full of both tourists and office workers, cones cost at least $5 and shakes at least $8. I got five months off, but then I got to work 17 hours a day, seven days a week, hello?
But the money's not bad. And don't even ask me how much I have. You know, more than what you make probably in a whole year. For various reasons, good manners, safety, taxes, ice cream trucks are a cash business, there's a lot of obfuscation when it comes to how much a truck makes.
There's also a lot of variation, both day-to-day and depending on where the truck is parked. In the outer boroughs, making about $250 a day is common, but in Midtown, it can be much, much more. Hassan works a truck a few blocks away from Matthew's. I make my make like $100, he can be like $25 in my bucket.
I ask Hassan how much he makes on a good day. It's a Saturday, almost $1,000. That means his truck is pulling in close to $4,000. And when Hassan is located, there's basically a softer vendor every two blocks.
But not every ice cream truck can be in Midtown, logistically or financially. If there are too many, they all make less money. And besides, it's not like there's no money to be made in the outer boroughs. So how does it get decided?
Which truck goes where? In Suzhou, the answer to this question was the local government. They gave Mr. Softee permits to sell ice cream at about a dozen specific locations and only those locations.
In New York City, where the permit system is not so orderly, locations are determined not by the city, but on the street. In Manhattan, ice cream trucks really don't move. Your grandfather didn't go to a place, you know, and the people who own that truck have generally. really had a truck there.
Douglas Quint is one of the co-founders of Big Gay Ice Cream, which now sells ice cream in supermarkets and has brick and mortar stores, but it started in an ice cream truck. It was a retired Mr. Softie truck, so it didn't have any of the Softie branding on it anymore. It was just a real plunker.
From the start, Big Gay Ice Cream sold more ambitious soft serve, with elevated toppings like olive oil and toasted pine nuts. The ice cream truck menu is boring. Every ice cream trucker does the exact same thing. It has for decades.
Toppings aside, Douglas' truck otherwise operated like any other in its fleet, which means it was assigned a location, one the company had been using for years. In Big Gay Ice Cream's case, that was a high traffic spot right by Union Square. Your company had this corner, and that was just like, okay, like other people didn't try to take your spot, or did they? Occasionally they did, and I would go over and say, I'm here, and as you know, this is where I park weekdays.
Please move along. And only a handful of times in the three years I did it to the personnel move. And generally, if I showed up late at all, somebody would swoop in. There's another thing to understand about these spots, though.
Most of the food truck parking is sort of quasi-legal. So, you know, I made friends with the local fire department because I was probably a couple feet into a fire hydrant. Food trucks find space where they can. They idle in front of hydrants, crosswalks, driveways, no parking zones.
Idling for longer than five minutes is in and of itself prohibited by the city. They're constantly getting ticketed for all of us. House of the New York City came to have a system where hundreds of ice cream and food trucks more generally are competing for spots that even when they secure them are not really meant to be parked in anyway. It's time to talk about permits.
The word permit sounds boring, I know, but permits are the thing that I got totally obsessively fixated on while reporting the story. There's a deep rabbit hole here, I'll spare you. The short of it is New York City has an unregulated market for food car and truck permits. The number of permits of various types is capped at 5,000, and they officially cost $200 each.
But they can be capped basically until death, so the wait list is thousands of people long, with only dozens or so turning over every year. The demand so far outstrips the supply that something crazy has happened. Vendors basically rent permits for $20,000 to $25,000 for a two-year period from the official permit holder. It's like the taxi medallion system, except it's unregulated and the city makes no money off of it.
Another complication. Due to law change in the 1990s, there's only one permit officially allowed per person, despite the fact that many vendors, and certainly most ice cream truck owners, own multiple vehicles. Douglas Quint, the co-owner of Big A Ice Cream. I don't know of any food truck operators, you know, in general who actually have a permit that they apply for.
Now, still at our second stop. It's very busy in Manhattan. I want to take all of this context about how ice trucks work in general, and how they work in New York City specifically, and apply it to understanding the conflict we started this episode with. The one in which an upstart company called New York Ice Cream muscled Mr.
Softee out of Midtown. The whole conflict began with some copycatting. The owners of New York Ice Cream started out as Mr. Softee franchisees.
They were a group of guys who knew each other who were working out at the same depot. Jim Conway, the co-owner of Mr. Softee again. And decided that, you know, between them, they were all multi-truck owners, and that if they grouped together, then they'd have strength in numbers, and they could go off on their own and not have to be constrained by things like territories.
That was kind of the big issue that prompted them leaving our system. What Jim is talking about here is location. As Mr. Softee franchisees, these guys worked a lot of Midtown corners, and because they were so lucrative, they didn't really want to work anywhere else.
In 2009, they stopped paying their franchise fees, but they kept their corners. Eventually, Mr. Softee terminated their franchise agreements, and the truck started to go by another name. It's very good.
They were called Master Softee. And they took the very familiar human ice cream cone logo, and they added some sprinkles, and made it a waffle cone instead of a sugar cone, and said, okay, now we're Master Softee, and that did not fly weekly. Mr. Softee took Master Softee to court for copyright violation, and in 2015, won.
So Master Softee changed its name to New York Ice Cream, still holding onto the corners they had first as Mr. Softee, and then as Master Softee trucks, while further pushing current Mr. Softee vendors out of the area. And that was how things were when Andy Newman, who you just heard from again, wrote his story for the New York Times in 2017.
It's how things remained until earlier this summer, when New York Ice Cream, who declined to speak with us for the story, got caught up in a whole new ice cream brouhaha. New York cops are scooping up ice cream trucks, dozens of them, towed away and taken into custody. The story got lots of airtime on the local news, where as you can hear, everyone got a punny kick out of another story about ice cream gone wrong. In this case, what had gone wrong was something I mentioned earlier, parking.
They had discovered a unique way of avoiding being responsible for their parking debt. That's Joseph Aceto, the sheriff of New York. Since breaking away from Mr. Softee, New York Ice Cream had accrued 23,000 traffic violations worth $4.5 million in fines.
They had come up with a crafty way to avoid paying them, by creating a new shell company every 90 days that effectively kept the ticketing system from fining them. During this time, New York Ice Cream was not only not paying millions in fines of revenue to the city, it was giving itself a competitive advantage, since all the other companies were paying their equivalent tickets. In a sting dubbed Operation Meltdown, the sheriff's of New York pulled 34 New York Ice Cream trucks off the street. Did you have fun naming Operation Meltdown?
We usually come up with very creative names for our operations. Usually the name they have those Cheech and Chong movies. I wanted this one to be Nice Dreams. Nice Dreams is the name of a Cheech and Chong movie in which they sell drugs from an ice cream truck.
By mid-summer 2019, after paying a quarter of a million dollars towards the fine, New York ice cream trucks were back on the street, working to pay down the rest of the money. Hassan, who you heard from earlier, is a New York ice cream driver in Midtown. Hey, about like two weeks. Two weeks to take the auto truck, like too many people stay at home, too many people not working.
But now everything is good, thank God. But even with New York ice cream off the street for two weeks, Mr. Softee is still not in Midtown, at least not that I could find. There's trucks in very busy places in Manhattan, on 23rd Street, on 68th Street, but in the 30s and 40s, it's notably absent.
Once you lose your corners, it's hard to get them back. There is, however, another company in this space with New York ice cream. Matthew, you heard from earlier, works a Freezy truck in Midtown. I asked him if Mr.
Softee is nearby. No, Frostee, Softee's soft. We took the blue pill and we're frosted. We're frozen, baby.
What do you mind? Frozen or soft? You tell me? Ah, Wilma.
Wilma! As for exactly how Freezy and New York ice cream came to an understanding, which I tacitly agreed to share the streets of Midtown, I have to admit, that one is still a mystery. Hey, I'm Emma Sale, the host of Decks, Decks & Money, an interview show here at Slate. And I want to tell you about a very exciting event coming up in June.
I am hosting a live episode taping at the Tribeca Festival featuring Peter Dinklage and his wife, Erika Schmidt. Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones, my favorite film, The Station Agent, and Erika Schmidt, who's a director, screenwriter, playwright. They are married, and we're going to talk about making art separately and collaboration and how they've built their life around that. Join us.
It should be a great event. It's their first joint interview they've done ever together. And we are so glad at Decks & Money to be back at the Tribeca Festival. The show is June 10th in New York City at the SVA Theater at 5.30 p.m.
Get your tickets at TribecaFilm.com slash audio. See you there. Today I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch. Mr.
President, thank you very much. As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy. The U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and war.
I'm Susan Matthews. In Slate's new season of Sloburn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick. We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment. He is the most unpredictable vote on this quarter.
Including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him. Nobody showed that Gorsuch would join the majority on this. He is the justice most likely to be a true wild card. This is judicial activity.
Sloburn, becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come. Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts. Despite the conflict, despite the chaos, despite the parking tickets, the permits, and the raids, business seems to be booming, and not just on the trucks.
There are a number of companies, like Big Gay Ice Cream, that are trying to do something new and inventive with SoftServe. In comparison, the Mr. Softy style trucks are unchanging. That's what makes them so reliable, so unfussy, but it also potentially makes them vulnerable.
I mean, this is a business that could be dramatically altered by taking credit cards. And ice cream trucks that are everywhere, they can disappear. It's happened before. To hear how, let's pull into our last stop in Brooklyn.
Maria Capinello, I am the ice cream girl. I was born into ice cream. My father was, he was one of the good humor guys, original. You know, with the hat, the white, he wore white all his life.
I guess by the 80s, he stepped away on the bow tie, just stepped away on the white with the black belt and the black shoes, you know. Before Mr. Softy, there was good humor. Good humor was founded in 1920, and you can still buy good humor bars at markets.
But good humor men, and the trucks and cars they operated, used to be ubiquitous. In 1976, though, the company, setting declining profits and coming off a reputation-bless marching lawsuit, in which it pled guilty to knowingly selling tainted ice cream, decided to focus on grocery stores. It sold its fleet of trucks, distributors, and individual operators. One of these operators was Maria Capinello's father.
Her story really gets at what it's like to be an ice cream seller, to live this business, for better or worse. I met Maria at a Greek pastry shop in Bay Ridge, in South Brooklyn, where we ordered four desserts and sat in the garden in the back. Her story is personal, so Maria is going to tell it herself. My father started off on a bicycle, for good humor.
And then I think he went into the army, you know, and he got discharged because my father had bad lungs and, you know, and always had asthma attacks, heart problems, this, that, and the other thing. So my father was a sick man, but he never stopped working. Like, no, my father worked, he used to come home and get asthma attacks. You know, he used to get asthma attacks on the truck, you know.
So, and he just kept going. He originally started the route on the west side of, like, Brooklyn, the south, South Brooklyn. That was his territory. That was his turf.
It was a gentleman's handshake. They would be like, you know, chubby, you know, well, that was my father's name, you know. This is your route, I respect that. Now they're like animals.
Now they don't care. There's no gentleman. My mother was never an ice cream woman or anything like that, but she was behind the scenes. You know, she raised us and she went along with everything that, you know, my father, you know, had to put up for the truck.
He used to take me to school, in his ice cream truck. I was the coolest person, forget it. He used to take me to college, in my ice cream truck. I used to drive it there.
I got bullied when I was young. I had, I didn't, I was my mother's apron. I was on her apron until I was 13, didn't cross the street on my block. And then when I was, I was in junior high school, that's when I met my friends.
And that's when we became the worst, we got, we were so bad. And then, you know, I got into all this stuff. You would never believe. I ran away from home.
When he put me on the truck that day, I said to myself, how can my father put me on this truck? This was his prized possession. Everybody loves my father. Why would he want me to ruin it?
And that day is when my whole life, my whole chapter, but before that, I was, woo, forget about it. I wanted to prove to them that, you know, I could be somebody. I started in the 80s. I worked everywhere.
I worked the streets. Back then I worked seven days a week. I worked at one o'clock in the morning. Now I'm sent out there.
I'm a girl. You know what I'm saying? I'm by myself. And I got to protect my father's route.
They weren't ready for a girl, the ice cream girl. They weren't ready. You know? Once you let these guys stay on your route, that's it.
They own it. And that's when it was good. In the 80s, it was like, it was great money. It's, it's, it's, um, ice cream is universal.
It's supposed to be, but it's not. It felt like it was in Brooklyn. You know, I had all my good blocks and then the other blocks were great. Now it's, I could ride down those blocks and I see the kids outside and they're stupid.
They don't even know I have an ice cream truck. It's like, what is that? An alien, an alien in a spaceship? I'm like, yo, I saw ice cream over here.
I'm going to stop ringing doorbells. I have a school, you know, that I do all year round. Candy, ice cream, chips, soda. Yeah, but even in the winter, they buy like maybe about seven ice creams a day.
I've been there for 36 years and my father's been there 15 years before that. You know, he started that. You know, it's not a lot, but it's me. So it's enough.
I'm grateful. You know, I'm grateful for anything. If I go out and I make $20, I'm grateful for it. I want to continue my father's legacy.
And the other thing I'm scared about is my ice cream truck. It's a 1974. And I do want a soft truck. I could go sit on the busiest street, Kings Highway, where there's so much traffic, let's just say.
But, you know, there'll be hundreds of people passing by every minute and they just go, you got soft, you got soft, you got soft, you got soft. Now, people stop me. I have to stop all over, get to a spot, whatever, and stand up. Okay.
You know, and then come over the truck. Oh, I'm sorry. You got to swap. If I had a new truck, I'd be able to go more places.
My father's been selling ice cream and he bought a couple of trucks. And, you know, it's so hard to buy one, you know, since he's gone. Like, I can't do it. It's impossible.
Like, the bills, everything went up. It's like, I got to take care of this, I got to take care of that. That's what I'm worried about. But other than that, it's okay.
Because it's my father's legacy. I can't imagine not doing it for him anymore. I mean, the past, like, five years was down to the ground where, like, I cried all summer. I mean, July and August, once school gets out, I'm dead.
I'm dead. I go on the army base. That's what I wanted to tell you. I go on the army base.
I like to stay up there and watch the sunsets. Because, like, I never had that for 30-something years. I was in an ice cream truck all day long when I took it from my father. He used to go out early.
He used to bring it home 2 o'clock, you know. And that's it. I was on that ice cream truck until late at night. So I never saw the sunsets.
I call it my perch. I'm all by myself. On the top. You know, and people can come buy ice cream.
But, you know, maybe I'll get, like, two or three customers in the parking lot over there. It's right on top of the bridge. Like, my view is the whole bridge, you know. And I'm just on it to be there.
Like, that's the best thing in the world to me. And just, you know, like, the whole story is the end. Like, talk to my mother and father. You know.
So that's a great part. So, but anyway. I mean, I love it. I love it.
I never want it to end. You know. So, but, you know, you get scared, you know. And my biggest fear was when my mother and father were alive was, go off the bed if I got sick.
You know. Who would, like, who would drive the truck? I'm glad that I did it till. I mean, I'm not glad that I'm on.
Believe me. Because, like, my father's my life. My mother's my life. Every single day.
I would do anything to. I would give the truck up in a second just to have them there. You know what I'm saying? But, you know, I'm glad that I fulfilled my.
I wouldn't have had it any other way. You know. One of the things I found so moving about Maria's story is the way it plays with time. In her telling, a soft ice cream truck is the future.
But as I've been working on this piece, I come to think of ice cream trucks as something from the past that have managed to stay surprisingly current. An analog business surviving in a world where everything analog seems like it's just awaiting its own disruption. Ice cream trucks are basically gas-guzzling push carts. An old-school street vendor operation that was here before food trucks were cool and soft serve became artisanal.
This outmodedness is the reason there's so much conflict. It's a high. It's a highly competitive yet undifferentiated street business, a cash business, run according to outdated, half-stated, semi-dysfunctional regulations and customs, organized around the shape and city rules and a fleet-to-fleet honor system that, like so many honor systems, isn't always honored. But it's outmoded.
This also means that in an increasingly stratified city, instead of having a business plan that targets some micro-niche of New Yorkers, instead of being perfectly optimized for someone, it's still for everyone, all the different kinds of people who live and visit here. When you have a soft serve, you're eating something really messy, something delivered to you on a piece of turf made of unchanging, quickly melting ingredients and shot through with air, that's sold by people working in a hot truck for dozens of hours on steamy summer days as those same trucks view exhaust and noise into a blocked, crowded crosswalk. If you were starting from scratch right now, you would never start with this process, these regulations, or even with this ice cream. So thank goodness, we're not always starting everything from scratch.
The soft serve ice cream cone is an imperfect product, made by an imperfect business, sold imperfectly in this imperfect city. But still, at that serendipitous moment you spot a Mr. Softy on the corner, it's absolutely perfect. This is Decoder Ring.
I'm Willa Paskin. You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin. And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decoderring at slate.com. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, and even better, tell your friends.
This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode. Clio Levin is our research assistant. Thanks to Anna McGorman, David Favarolo, Jim Middleton, Matthew Shapiro, Tom Skoka, June Thomas, Oded Shankar, Michael Lanza, Hilary Gissard, Matt Yeager, Ranjan Roy, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way. Thanks for listening.
Just a quick programming note. We'll be back in October. Have a great summer.