Don-the-Ice-Cream-Man May Give Up Life in the Curb Lane

Ice cream is more than a source of income for Don Pierson after decades of selling Bomb Pops and Flintstones Fruit Push-Ups to sticky-fingered children.

It has seeped into his identity like a fast-melting Fudgsicle. Greeting a visitor to his battered ice-cream truck with 300,000 miles on its rebuilt engine, he stuck his hand out the side window and introduced himself as Don.

Asked for his full name, he replied: “Don-the-Ice-Cream-Man.”

Pierson has been dispensing frozen treats along Ventura Boulevard in Encino for a quarter of a century, longer than anyone else in the San Fernando Valley, according to local industry experts. A throwback to the days when brigades of ice-cream trucks trolled the wide residential streets for business all across the Valley, Pierson is a living link to their childhood for a whole generation of people such as Hal Lifson, now a balding advertising executive in Los Angeles.

“My brother and I would hear the music from his truck, then we’d run and ask my parents for quarters,” Lifson said. “There was always a sense of wonderment when we got up to the window of the truck because the menu was so large. And there was this agony, if you only have so much money, what do you choose?”

Lifson still patronizes Pierson’s truck. Only now he can afford to buy six or seven Sparkle Chocolate Eclair bars at once and take them home.

Driving an ice-cream truck, the kind of job college students used to do during summer vacation, may not seem like much of a calling. Indeed, the 52-year-old man in jeans and a lime-green T-shirt earns barely enough money to support himself in a $400-a-month apartment in North Hollywood, with a little left over to spend on lottery tickets, which he views as a kind of repayment to the schools for the customers they supply.

But it is enough for him. He has a low-calorie philosophy that contrasts sharply with the ravenous lifestyles and anxieties of people in luxury cars swooshing by him on the boulevard.

“Life is easy; there’s no pressure here,” he said, scanning the armies of children playing on the swings at Encino Park, where he spends much of his afternoon on days when it isn’t raining. “I haven’t banked hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I haven’t got all the tensions and gray hairs and bosses yak-yakking at me. If you have to work at an unenjoyable job, what’s life?”

That is a fairly simple recipe for living, the kind of thing advocated for generations by ascetics and back-to-nature enthusiasts. But it is not enough for Lifson, who sees in Pierson something more mythic than a guy who has found contentment hawking Ice Tickles, Screwball ice-cream sandwiches and Bubble Play bars shaped like baseball gloves.

“He’s a phantom in the sense that he hasn’t aged,” Lifson said, though Pierson does in fact have gray hairs amid the blond. “He’s like a guy fixed in time, a Pied Piper bringing joy into a world filled with so much cynicism.”

That’s a lot of baggage to bear, but Pierson bears it like everything else, lightly. Plain-spoken and possessed of a dry Midwestern wit, he doesn’t take himself so seriously. You can tell when he is excited because he rolls his eyes heavenward and says, “Holy Shmolly.”

Pierson was raised in Lincoln, Neb., and came West in the ‘60s when a doctor advised him and his wife to find a drier climate for his asthmatic son. He worked for some bakeries when he first arrived, but that ended and he was “loafing a bit” when a friend advised him to look into driving an ice-cream truck.

“It may work out for you,” the friend said.

It did. He used to drive a route through the hilly neighborhoods of Encino, with stops at filling stations along a section of Ventura Boulevard that now is lined with burnished high-rises.

But over the years, the business changed. Prices doubled, then tripled. Some ice-cream novelties now cost $1 each. And the children who used to come running up to his truck in the neighborhoods grew up and moved away, leaving aging parents alone in their ranch-style homes. Needless to say, they did not come bounding out their front doors when he drove by playing his trademark “Yankee Doodle” theme.

Across the Valley, the same phenomenon repeated itself and ice-cream trucks began disappearing from the streets, according to Bob Trop, manager of Dandy Boy Inc. of North Hollywood, which supplies ice cream to 100 truck vendors in the Valley.

Pierson now parks his truck and waits for business to come to him. He begins at Encino Park, then moves at the end of the school day to several campuses in the area, ending up at local baseball fields in the evenings in summer.

When it’s hot, he may work 14 hours a day.

“He’s a throwback,” Trop said. Of all the vendors Trop’s company supplies, Pierson has served “by far the longest” time on the job.

On a recent warm afternoon, Pierson sat at the wheel of his onetime postal truck waiting for the mothers and nannies with whining children. The truck looked as if it had seen better years, but he smacked the steering wheel and sang its virtues. “This is American-made. It was made to go,” he said.

As the line grew and parents grew impatient, Pierson offered a friendly word to each customer. “Everybody’s got problems,” he said. “A few kind words might help.”

“Where you been, stranger?” he said to a young foreign-sounding woman with dark hair. She said she hadn’t been to the park all winter.

“I missed you,” he replied.

Dee Thebith, 34, of Encino bought two ice creams and presented a $20 bill, for which he had no change. “Pay me later,” he said, handing the bill back.

Concealed under the placid exterior is a free spirit with a mischievous sense of humor that takes some by surprise.

A trim, athletic man with a mustache and fanny pack stepped up to the truck to buy a Fudgsicle. “There’s a limit of five on those, but you’re well under that,” Pierson mumbled.

Accepting his change, the man looked confused, smiled hesitantly and wandered off.

Lifson said that as a child, he never considered whether Pierson had a personal life, or even a last name.

He does. His private life is nothing exciting, but it is just about the way he wants it. He has a beer or two after work when it’s hot, likes to watch baseball on television and even takes a vacation now and then, though it has been a few years since the last one. He used to go out more at night, but now prefers staying home.

“I yakety-yak from 10 in the morning until 7 at night,” he said, “so I like to take it easy.”

It doesn’t take long to realize that freedom, the sense of personal independence, is about the most important thing there is to Pierson. It is clearly far more important than money.

“That’s what this country is based on, independence,” he said.

Pierson and his wife separated years ago, but he has a girlfriend and is thinking about going into full-time business with her, selling clothes at swap meets. That would close the freezer on Don-the-Ice-Cream-Man.

But Lifson and the rest of the regulars shouldn’t begin panicking yet because Pierson still likes life in the curb lane.

“All in all, I am very fortunate. I enjoy going to work,” he said, taking in the lush trees and deep green grass on a sleepy afternoon.

“I could do this the next 10 years.”