It seemed natural for this summer issue to consult an icon of summer. Who better than that bearer of frozen delights, that peddler of toy guns, that purveyor of annoying, tinkling music. The guy that you don't necessarily want to leave your kids alone with?
Of course, we chose a perfectly delightful, wholesome, kid-friendly ice- cream man for our expert (we searched high and low for the darker type, but, aside from certain safety issues, they don't mix too well with the press). At the age of 66, ice-cream man Bob Rein, of Bob's Ice Cream Company, has the pudgy body of a choco-taco, the complexion of strawberry shortcake and the hardened veneer of a crunch bar, shielding his soft interior. He drives Green Valley six days a week in his chugging-but-clean ice-cream truck, blaring a high-pitched version of "Turkey in the Straw," waving and looking for familiar faces on the route he's been driving for the last 10 years. He sells ice cream, toy guns and candy cigarettes, and combats the perception that the ice-cream man is a dirty drug pusher. He smiles and sweats—there's no air-conditioning, and the truck stays 15 degrees hotter than outside. He takes July and August off, because, surprisingly, in Las Vegas, the ice-cream man and summer aren't so complementary.
Here are some of the tasty morsels he's picked up along the way.
"Everybody waves back. No matter how grouchy he might be."
On his favorite trick: The Bomb Bag.
Las Vegas Weekly: "What's a Bomb Bag?"
Bob the ice-cream man: "Oh you don't know what a bomb bag is?" Bob feigns surprise. "Huh. See, a bomb bag, you feel around in here and you find this lump and you press it. Or you put it on the ground and stomp on it. Then it gets bigger. Bigger. Bigger. BOOM!" He shouts. I jump. "I love that," he says. "I love that."
SUMMER BY THE NUMBERS |
Christopher Hagen |
Is it a lucrative business? "It's all right. I do OK. Enough to keep people away from me, bill collectors and stuff like that."
"I've got a very good rapport with kids. They don't mess with me. They did at the start but we settled that. Stealing my signs, stuff like that. Trying to steal stuff off the truck. We got that straightened out the first couple of months, by discussing the finer facts of life."
On kids: "Most of the kids are really great. One kid in this development, he's a good kid, but he just drives me bananas. As I'm approaching his street I say, 'Hey God, please keep him in the house.'"
Answer: No difference. Question: The preferences of fat kids versus skinny kids.
"What would you like?" Bob's greeting, which he touts over the standard "Whaddya want?" that kids have come to expect from ice-cream men.
On ghetto ice-cream men: "It's a reflection of the area. The trucks got gating on the windows and there's a little spot like this big he can stick his head out. Well I can't work that way. In Green Valley you don't have to."
On feeling unfriendly: "You can't. You just can't feel that way. It's not fair to the kids and the adult kids."
"I'm lousy with people but great with dogs." So he carries around milk bones and dogs (predominantly named Scruffy, as evidenced last Sunday) bark, whine and prance in their homes when they hear that familiar "Turkey in the Straw" coming around the block. Just like the kids.