Clinging to the Slow Lane : The Ice Cream Man, like his predecessors 50-odd years ago, is a Rockwellian fixture in many Valley neighborhoods.

He’s the Ice Cream Man, an American institution as refreshing as a month of sundaes.

He comes across as every body’s amigo , a Santa Claus for summer and all other seasons.

As he sweats out his workday’s journey into night, making his rounds behind not eight reindeer but eight cylinders, he lights up faces of kids from 3 to 93--especially on scorching afternoons that can turn Popsicles into puddles.

To visit an Ice Cream Man named Don Pierson at a park in upscale Encino--or, to ride with another named Percy Parra through working-class Van Nuys--is to tour swatches of Los Angeles’ multiethnic tapestry, pop culture and grass-roots free enterprise.

In a world of sweeping change--of fast food and fast bucks, of boom boxes and gangbangers--the Ice Cream Man clings to the slow lane, forever stuck in rewind.

Like his predecessors 50-odd years ago, he’s a Rockwellian fixture in many neighborhoods. He still plays those music-box strains of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” or “Yankee Doodle” or “The Band Played On,” sometimes looking the other way if a child customer comes up a dime or a quarter short, always peddling a product that tastes great and doesn’t pretend to be less filling.

“Naw, there’s nothin’ wrong with kids today,” one Ice Cream Man tells a customer. “I hear that story every year. You treat kids with respect, and they treat you with respect.”

Pierson, a chunky, poker-faced fellow of 53 with a shock of white, curly hair, reaches deep into the freezer and hands the customer a frozen Drumstick.

He sits at Encino Park as dozens of youngsters converge on his white 1969 Harvester International truck, which he says he bought from the U. S. Postal Service for $1,500.

The truck is ablaze in colorful stick-on labels of treats named for icons such as Tweety Bird, Bugs Bunny, the Flintstones and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Also in stock: trading cards that bear likenesses of World Wrestling Federation stars Sid Justice and Bret (Hit Man) Hart.

“Kids are always the same,” Pierson says. “Naturally, they’re a little more hip now than they were in the old days. But then, maybe not.”

This Ice Cream Man, like others, offers not just ice cream but cold drinks, candy, gum, chips and a potpourri of snacks named Screwball (strawberry ice), UFO (Unidentified Frozen Object: vanilla ice cream between two dipped-in-chocolate oatmeal cookies) and Choco Taco (wafer cone shaped like a taco, filled with chocolate ice cream and nuts), among others.

He also tries to put an upbeat spin on an often downbeat world, serving up a homespun work ethic that took root in his native Nebraska, where he long ago drove a bakery truck.

“Now this is gonna be a positive article, isn’t it?” Pierson asks, his question a commentary on our times, when even ice cream vendors strive to polish their already squeaky-clean image.

For 27 years, Don Pierson has toiled in Encino, serving a clientele that he says has included celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Annette Funicello (and her children) and watching many of his first customers grow up to rear children of their own.

“This guy is literally the Pied Piper of Encino,” says Hal Lifson, a screenwriter and an Encino child of the 1960s. “The kids have always loved him. Imagine! The same guy--in the same neighborhood--all these years!”

It’s a journey that has whisked Pierson and his ice cream truck from the Vietnam ‘60s to the rough-and-tumble ‘90s. Never mind, he says, that violent crimes have occurred near his apartment in North Hollywood, or that whenever someone “who looks shady” approaches his truck, “I start tapping one of the these.” He rapidly taps the handle of a small ice pick against the steering wheel.

“You take a negative look at things, and that’s what your mind’s gonna be,” he says. “You need positive thinking--yes, sir. Like the old story goes, if I’m beaten out of $5, I’m certainly not gonna beat somebody else out of $5. I refuse to do it.”

Pierson’s seven-day-a-week work schedule begins at 10 a.m.--when he loads up at his wholesale distributor, Dandy Boy of North Hollywood--and lasts until 6:30 p.m., or 7:30 on nights when he caters to crowds at sandlot baseball games.

A decade ago, Pierson abandoned cruising residential neighborhoods and set up shop at Encino Park.

“The neighborhood business pretty well went kaput ,” he says. “I used to make a pretty good living driving the truck--but then the kids grew into young adults and the parents still stayed in the homes.”

Like the other 600 licensed vendors who drive ice cream trucks in Los Angeles County (another 700 own pushcarts), Pierson operates independently. His most profitable days, he says, bring him about $80--after he purchases his snacks and pays for fuel, upkeep and insurance for his truck.

Independent vendors have proliferated nationally since the early 1970s, after companies such as Good Humor and Tropical Ice Cream dominated the industry with their own drivers and fleets of trucks. Ultimately, distributors say, when business no longer became cost-effective, the big companies gave way to wholesalers and independents. Today, Good Humor ice cream is packaged only for supermarkets.

Still, the “Good Humor Man” tradition endures--those music-box tunes setting off Pavlovian stampedes by children so hungry for Drumsticks, Eskimo Pies and other snacks that they all but devour the truck.

“It’s a business that sustains itself,” says Mark Trop, 47, who presides over Dandy Boy, which supplies Pierson and about 100 other vendors. “Even in bad times, people still like to buy ice cream. It’s both a luxury and kind of nostalgic. It reminds us of the good old days, when we also had the Helms (bakery) man and the milkman.”

Trop’s father, now retired, owned Tropical Ice Cream in the 1950s.

Then, as now, the Ice Cream Man’s arrival in many neighborhoods became the “focus point of a young person’s day,” says Mark Trop, himself a onetime driver.

“All day long in school, kids are treated like children,” Trop says. “But when the ice cream truck shows up, they feel like adults . It’s the one time of the day when they conduct their own business transactions. Suddenly they feel special.”

An erstwhile Good Humor Man--Billy Ohannesian, 64, of Studio City--prides himself as a friend to generations of children in Porter Ranch and other communities. “I kept the kids home at night, waiting for me,” says Ohannesian, who retired in 1990 after 30-odd years as a vendor. “Otherwise they might have gotten into trouble.”

Not everyone, however, has warmed up to the Ice Cream Man. Some have alleged that a few vendors peddled drugs, sold bug-infested candy, short-changed customers and caused excessive noise.

San Fernando enacted a 1984 ordinance requiring street vendors of paletas --a Mexican-style, mango- and tamarind-flavored ice cream bar--to purchase $150 business licenses, a response to complaints by local merchants concerned about competition, noise and litter.

In 1991, a crackdown on ice cream vendors in Vista, near San Diego, led to laws that regulate decibel levels of music, restrict forays through neighborhoods and mandate safety inspections.

That drove many vendors to nearby Oceanside, where residents complained loudest to police about the tinkly music.

“You get ‘Old MacDonald’s Farm’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ both at once,’ ” a police spokesman said before Oceanside in February passed an ordinance similar to Vista’s. “It’s pathetic, it really is. It can be raining out, and they’ll be going up and down the street.”

Los Angeles County health officials, who issue licenses to street vendors countywide, say those who peddle prepackaged ice cream, as Don Pierson and Percy Parra do, cause no major problems.

“I know of only one person who’s done drugs,” Pierson says, “and that was so many years ago I can’t even remember his name. And one woman complained that I was playing the music too late at night. No problem. I just shut the music off.”

He pauses, once again asking: “This is gonna be a positive article, isn’t it?”

“Hey, amigas !” Percy Parra greets his customers. “What do you want?”

A tiny girl in her mother’s arms says nothing. She points to the label of a frozen orange bar, one of at least three dozen labels plastered on Parra’s white 1973 Ford Econoline van.

Her smile, which seems to stretch all the way from Van Nuys to Ventura, speaks volumes about the Ice Cream Man’s popularity on Parra’s route near Van Nuys Airport, on streets lined with auto body shops, light-industry plants, warehouses, graffiti and “Beware of Dog” signs.

The girl’s mother places a few coins on the countertop. With one hand, Parra sweeps the coins off the countertop into a 2-by-1-foot metal tray on the floor. He hands the orange bar to his customer and drives on, his loudspeaker blaring a tape of “The Band Played On.”

Parra’s route in Van Nuys sits galaxies away from Pierson’s stop in Encino, where kids named Harmony, Jessica, Ashley and Shawn join others who arrive with designer tote bags or on in-line roller skates, clasping dollar bills.

In Van Nuys, Percy Parra, 49, and his wife, Maria, 32, both Peruvian immigrants, drive their own ice cream trucks, their routes (and those of other vendors) prearranged with their Van Nuys supplier, the Valley Ice Cream Distributing Co., so they don’t overlap.

As Percy Parra maneuvers in and out of traffic, stopping at tiny stucco houses, serving adult customers at shops named All-State Radiator and George’s Auto Body & Repair, he chatters in broken English, shouting, laughing, gesturing animatedly like someone playing a game of charade.

Suddenly his taped music stops.

“No music! No business! Nothing!” he says, in mock frustration. He fiddles with the tape player. Like magic, “The Band Played On” plays on.

Hours later, Parra counts a fistful of bills--mostly ones and a few fives--like a blackjack dealer.

“Sixty!” he shouts, grinning.

By nightfall, at his workday’s end, Parra will have collected about $100. About $40, he says, will go toward expenses, including purchases from his distributor and supermarkets, as well as $10 for gasoline.

Along the way, he whistles to the music and sings praises of America, a land that he says enables him to scratch out a better living than he did in Peru, where he drove taxis, sold furniture and worked for a clothier and bill collector.

“Here, I have right to work in what I want to do!” Parra says. “Here, in United States, it’s free country.”

The very notion of an Ice Cream Man in his homeland, he says, would be laughable. “In Peru,” he says, “they would steal the ice cream and run.”

In eight years as an Ice Cream Man in Van Nuys, Parra says, he’s stayed free of crimes or danger.

“My God has been beautiful!” he says, looking toward the ceiling of his van and spreading his arms wide, in gratitude.

Then, Parra unwittingly echoes the Ice Cream Man who works in Encino--Don Pierson, a home-grown American whom Parra doesn’t know but probably would like, if only for the war stories the two of them could swap, long after their workdays end, long after the music stops.

“You treat ‘em bad, they treat you bad,” Percy Parra says. “You treat ‘em good, they treat you good.”

What’s Hot From the Ice Cream Vendor

* Drumstick: Vanilla ice cream in wafer cone, topped with chocolate sauce and nuts. * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Sherbet-bar face of a Ninja Turtle, with bubble-gum eyes. * Choco Taco: Wafer cone shaped like a taco, filled with chocolate ice cream and nuts. * Super Pop (also known as “Big Stick”): Large Popsicle. * Disney Shapes: Ice cream bars shaped like Mickey Mouse and other Walt Disney Co. characters. * Squeeze Pops: Flavored ice in long plastic tube. * Snow Cone: Flavored ice in a paper cone. * UFO (Unidentified Frozen Object): Vanilla ice cream between two oatmeal cookies dipped in chocolate.

Where to Find Ice Cream Man

* Balboa Park, 17015 Burbank Blvd., Encino. * Encino Park, 16953 Ventura Blvd. * North Hollywood Park, 5301 Tujunga Ave. * Parthenia Park, 21444 Parthenia St., Canoga Park. * Reseda Park and Recreation Center, 18411 Victory Blvd. * Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks Park, 14201 Huston St., Sherman Oaks. * Woodland Hills Park, 5858 Shoup Ave.