Mr Whippy Ice Cream vans were not big where Baker or Smith grew up. It was 10 miles to an ice cream at the corner store for Smith. Baker was lucky if she scored a ‘special’ ice cream treat on a summer break – a 60-cent deluxe, rather than
the run-of-the-mill 20-cent ice block.
The Mr Whippy van, more often then not, would surface on beach jaunts. Where he could be spotted picking off the familiar kid haunts with a Pavlovian jingle crackling from speakers left over from World War II.
I had always wondered about the Mickey and Donald images that formed part of the livery of some of the vans. The renderings seemed like an arbitrary appropriation and a poor approximation of the famous mouse and duck. Would Walt Disney really have signed-off the intellectual property rights to Mum and Pop ice cream vans in Sandringham and North Balwyn? Better to stay quiet on that one.
An old school friend recently held a birthday party for his nine-year-old boy, and secretly organised a Mr Whippy to arrive on location. At 4pm sharp, he would pull into the driveway for a private ice confectionery party. I wondered to whom this soft serve fantasy might belong. Was it what the middle-aged dad would have liked for his own birthday? Was he future-fitting a memory to his offspring? No, actually. Well, yes actually. All this, but here was someone in tune with exactly the sort of thing a group of young kids would love – he had tapped into ‘kid think’. The delight and excitement was the only proof needed. A new future-memory secured, frozen in time. I’ll have a double scoop of that, but could you make it lactose-free please?
bakersmith 