The Good Humor Man

How many kids can say that their dad was an ice cream delivery man? Well, my dad was a Good Humor man of sorts.

I mean, he had a really great sense of humor too. He was an awesome storyteller and always had the room howling with his animated preposterous stories and one of his stories revolved around the three times he was a Good Humor ice cream man.

For those of you who are too young to have heard the term Good Humor, it started back in 1920 when a candy maker named Harry Burt developed a chocolate coating to cover ice cream. He then froze a stick into the center of a chocolate coated, rectangular chunk of vanilla ice cream and created the first chocolate ice cream bar. He bought 12 vending trucks outfitted with freezers and bells and sent his salesmen out to the streets to sell the bars. The men all wore the same white pants and shirt and a white cap, like the milkmen of the 50s. He called his company Good Humor because he believed that a person’s humor was related to his sense of taste.

The Good Humor brand was eventually purchased by Unilever and all the trucks were sold but almost every town in the US has an independent ice cream salesmen who has outfitted a colorful freezer van and plays that unmistakable circus music as it drives slowly through neighborhoods to attract children.

Dad didn’t have a colorful freezer van which played circus music. He had his own niche. A helicopter.

All three of us Mitchell kids went to Alderwood Elementary School in Bellingham, Washington. We were spaced three years apart. It was during those years that dad purchased a helicopter and started the first helicopter company at Bellingham Airport. Helicopters were a novelty and the local newspapers and magazines regularly featured stories about the company’s helicopter work around the region.

Be it a promotional gimmick or the fact that he was trying to be a good dad, he concocted a plan to delight both the teachers and students at Alderwood. With the agreement of the school principal, Mr. Thon, there would be an urgent need for everyone in the school to exit out to the baseball field and then, to the surprise of the teachers and students, dad’s helicopter would fly over the treetops with a delivery of ice cream bars. This type of flying stunt was allowed in the 60s. The FAA and city ordinances would never allow it today.

As the crow flies, it was less than a mile from dad’s office at the airport to the school. A nice easy five-minute hop in the helicopter. The ice cream was not to be carried inside the helicopter though. That space was reserved for one of us kids whose year it was to show off for the school. I, being the oldest, got to be in the first ride. The ice cream was to be slung under the helicopter in a net hung from a 15-foot cable.

Now, in the early post Korean War days of the helicopter, everything you tried with them was an experiment. If the FAA approved it, dad tried it to see if we could use it. This included hovering over fruit orchards in early pre-dawn hours to prevent frost from damaging the fruit, delivering Santa Clauses to shopping malls, slinging cattle stranded in floods, and of course agriculture applications. Slinging ice cream was yet untried.

As a surprise for the teachers and students, Principal Thon devised the plan of a mandatory fire drill. At 1:00 pm the alarm would sound; the teachers and students would exit the building to the baseball field and line up by classes. At 1:15, the helicopter would fly over the treetops slinging the net full of ice cream bars. Dad would lower them to the ground, drop the cable and land the helicopter so the kids could get a look at the flying machine up close. Of course, because I was in the seat next to him, I would be the cool kid on campus.

At 12:45 pm, the helicopter was sitting on the pad at his office. Dad had picked me up from school and brought me to the airport. The sling cable was clipped to the hook on the belly of the helicopter and the net was spread out. We were waiting for the Darigold truck to bring the ice cream bars. Dad nervously looked at his watch. At 12:55 the freezer truck rolled up to the helicopter and the boxes of ice cream bars were unloaded. Now, when you are experimenting, you find that there are right and wrong ways to perform a task. This first ice cream flight was . . . the wrong way.

Getting dangerously close to liftoff time, dad and the crew ripped open the boxes containing the ice cream bars and dumped them onto the center of the net. It was a sunny day, and the asphalt was warm, and the ice cream began to soften. There were 160 of them. Dad then climbed into the cab of the helicopter next to me and started the engine. As the engine warmed up and the rotors gained RPM, the warm air from the engine blew across the ground and of course across the ice cream.

He lifted the helicopter slowly into the air, directly over the net until the cable tightened and the ice cream net lifted into the air. We then flew off over the treetops toward the school.

As a promo for Dad’s company and a story of interest for the school, the Herald was notified of the event and a reporter with a camera was at the school to record the delivery.

At 1:00 pm, Principal Thon triggered the fire alarm. All the teachers and students quickly put on their coats, grabbed their papers, and left the school for the ball field. They stood in the required large circle.

Three hundred feet over the treetops, the helicopter carried its load of ice cream at 40 miles per hour. The first major problem which arose was that the net was made with a large mesh and some of the bars were making their way through the netting and dropping like bombs to the ground below hitting rooftops and cars. On a hotter sunny day, it might appear that they were dropped as gifts from God.

At 1:15, the student body waited patiently for the “all clear” bell to sound so they could re-enter the school, when “Whap, whap, whap,” over the trees flew the helicopter slinging the ice cream. Making a large dramatic circle around the field and over the students, teachers, and Herald reporter, Dad didn’t realize that the bars were continuing to slip through the netting, bombing the spectators on the ground. Since this was to be a surprise for the school, only Mr. Thon knew what was happening. The teachers were now trying to control their students who were running for and away from the ice cream bombs.

Finally, dad made an approach to the center of the student body circle with the net, and he set the load onto the grass. As he hovered in the air, two things happened: 1) the students who brought their papers out of the building, had them blown from their hands and into the air like leaves in the fall. And 2) The women teacher’s dresses blew up over their heads which put the children in a quandary: should they laugh or go into shock?

Once the ice cream net was safely on the ground, dad released the cable and hovered over to the far end of the field to land. I climbed out of the cab to be greeted as a hero only to see the kids chasing their homework papers, and the women straightening their skirts. To make matters worse, when order was restored and Principal Thon told everyone of the ice cream surprise, he allowed the kids to go to the net and get a bar, which was now a package of sloppy, melted, chocolate ice cream.

So, the first attempt at being an aerial Good Humor man was a failure. Did you know that Thomas Edison created 1000 light bulbs before one was a success? Dad still had two more chances, three years later with my brother and six years later for my sister and darn it, he was going to make it work.

After the first try, which the Herald reporter entitled The Great Ice Cream Fiasco, dad employed the use of ice chests which kept the ice cream frozen and prevented the accidental carpet bombing of homes and cars in the Alderwood neighborhood.

I will admit that we created and tried many uses for the helicopters. Some worked well and paid off, others went into the failure hopper. It was a few years after the ice cream incident that the Forest Service reported seeing red paint spread across the rock face of Church Mountain. Some say it was vandals. Some say it was eco-terrorists. I have no opinion and would never venture a guess, but dad did notice that when he returned from a contract flight to repair a fire lookout tower, 12 cans of red paint had fallen out of the sling net.

But that’s just our little secret.

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