Frozen rite

The moment unfolds with the casual precision of a memorized ritual.

Three young children are playing Frogger on a computer inside Lilli Babcock’s single-story tract home close enough to Huntington State Beach for a cooling sea breeze to waft through the open front door. Outside, two other children play quietly in the afternoon sunshine; it’s another perfect day in suburbia.

Babcock sits on the couch, her dark hair pulled back in a pragmatic mother-in-charge ponytail. Any minute now, her smile says. Wait for it. Then it comes, softly at first, weak in the distance but growing until the electronic version of “The Sting” breaks through Frogger’s sonic fog.

“Ice cream man! Ice cream man!” and the stampede begins, a thundering horde of size 4 sneakers and bare feet toward the battered white Mel O’Dee truck driven by the temporary center of the universe, George Davis, 53.

Afternoons have gone like this on the 9000 block of Huntington Beach’s Nautilus Drive for as long as Babcock, a 34-year-old mother of three, can remember.

Babcock’s parents moved into this house when she was a few months old. By the time she reached third grade her family moved into a bigger place a mile away. When it came time to start her own family a decade ago, Babcock moved back into her original childhood home.

Throughout that generation of time, the ice cream man has always come.

Yet these moments don’t happen in as many suburban neighborhoods as they once did, a function of the changes in how we lead our lives. Busy people mean empty neighborhoods, and empty neighborhoods don’t buy much ice cream.

Suburbia is changing in other ways that have diminished the ritual. Some neighborhoods have guards and gates. Some cities bar ice cream trucks over liability concerns or have strict and expensive licensing requirements.

And as urban centers and new exurban areas fill with young families, older suburbs are becoming communities of empty nesters, home to retirees who came of age during World War II and now to their baby-boom children, according to an analysis of 2000 census data by the Brookings Institution’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

You can read the difference in the numbers. In 2000, the median age of Huntington Beach residents rose to 36 from 32.5 a decade earlier. In the more urban Santa Ana, the median age barely shifted to 26.5 from 25.9, and in Anaheim to 30.3 from 29.9.

The pattern is repeated across the Southland: in Torrance, the median age in 1990 was 35.5 and 38.7 in 2000; in Burbank it rose to 36.4 from 34.7. Over the same period, the median age in the urban enclave Beverly Hills dropped to 41.3 from 42.3.

Even families with children at home are different from a generation ago. With most suburban households relying on two wage earners, there are fewer young children -- the ice cream vendor’s key customers -- home after school. Add in the other competitors for a kid’s attention, from sports to church functions, and there’s barely time for an ice cream sandwich on the sidewalk.

“Life is now more fast-paced,” said Babcock, a former elementary school teacher who quit her job in Riverside when she started a family. “There are a lot more working mothers, and a rush to get your kids into all sorts of activities, where that wasn’t the case when I was growing up. I didn’t have something going on five days a week.”

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Catering to adults too

So the ice cream vendors have changed the way they hunt. Some, like Davis in Huntington Beach, still cruise neighborhoods, but they are just as likely to camp out near schools, parks or commercial strips. Others stick to carnivals and street festivals. Pushcarts, concentrated in communities with high immigrant populations, also compete for the traditional ice cream truck customer.

A generation ago, up to 80% of those customers were children in neighborhoods, and they bought ice cream or other frozen treats almost exclusively, said Ali Pakravan, an owner of Arya Ice Cream Distributing in L.A.

Now trucks are just as likely to stock small sandwiches and other more adult fare. “Now we have variety of products and they seem to have probably half and half adults and children,” said Pakravan, a director of the International Association of Ice Cream Vendors. “Ice cream trucks have developed commercial routes to stop at commercial and industrial places to catch workers on break time.”

At the same time, firms like Good Humor got out of the direct vending business, leaving it to small companies or individual drivers. The reason: Skyrocketing insurance premiums and fears of liability lawsuits arising from children getting hit by other vehicles as they rushed to the ice cream truck.

Dandy Boy, a North Hollywood wholesaler of ice cream and other treats, used to manage its own fleet of 300 trucks, said owner Mark Trop, whose father began the business in the years after World War II. Trop sold off the fleet in the early 1970s after changes in liability laws meant that truck owners could be liable for damages even if it wasn’t involved in the incident. “The truck is an ‘attractive nuisance,’ so it’s our fault,” Trop said.

One thing that hasn’t changed: the experience.

“The kids enjoy it,” said Trop, himself a one-time ice cream truck vendor. “They can make a buying decision. It’s still a little bit of a luxury, and of romance.”

Most drivers time their neighborhood visits for late in the day, hoping to spark a feeding frenzy.

“The kids are less in the streets, so the business becomes a little stronger between 4 and 6 when the parents get home from work or bring the kids home from school,” Pakravan said.

There’s more at play here on Nautilus Drive, though, than a calendar reset to “Ozzie & Harriet.” For this suburban neighborhood, the ice cream man is a barometer of communal health and social interaction. Every day at 3:45 p.m., in front of Babcock’s house, he draws the neighbors together in a social ritual.

For the kids, there is the ice cream and playtime that follows, the incidental moments that give rise to fond childhood memories. For the parents -- particularly stay-at-home mothers like Babcock -- there is the hour or more of sanity-delivering adult conversation.

For the neighborhood as a whole, there is the indefinable sense of togetherness, the bonding of lives and habits that transform an ice cream-happy moment in the sun into the soul of friendship and of community.

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Treats in trucks

If you look at it right, you can see social evolution in a bowl of ice cream.

Initially a treat for the elite, by the late 1800s ice cream spread to the hoi polloi through mass production.

As the nation became motorized in the 1920s -- car registrations quadrupled to 23 million in the decade -- so did ice cream, following the lead of Good Humor’s fleet of trucks navigated by uniformed vendors.

With the building boom after World War II, when suburbia changed from the province of the wealthy to the dream of the middle class, the ice cream trucks followed the people.

Donna Brehm, Babcock’s mother, bought the two-bedroom house on Nautilus Drive in 1968, soon after getting married.

It was a neighborhood of starter homes, she said, still only about 5 years old but already in transition from owner-occupied to renter dominated as the original owners moved on to larger homes while often keeping the bungalows for income. With the shifting flow of residents, Brehm said, social connections were temporary and the sense of neighborhood cohesion weak.

But the ice cream man always came.

Babcock remembers buying Popsicles, Brehm remembers her daughter opting for the sno-cones. No matter. The treat itself wasn’t -- and isn’t -- the point, Brehm said. It’s the doing, and the mixture of youthful imagination with anticipation. “It’s the excitement,” Brehm said. “I think they enjoy that more than whatever they get. They hear the music and they get excited, they go through this emotional thrill. Is it enchantment? It’s the thrill of it.”

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A neighborhood custom

On this afternoon, under a glistening sun, Babcock and the five kids -- three are hers, two are neighbors -- are the first ones to reach the curb. Dana Gendry has wandered down the street from her house with her daughter, Jaden, 3, and they join the queue, too, followed by other assorted neighborhood kids.

The process is orderly. Each kid looks at the decals on the side of the truck listing what George -- they’re on a first-name basis here -- has in his freezer. The most expensive item is a $2 Dove bar, but most of the treats are a dollar or so and run from ice cream sandwiches to freeze-pops to various treats on sticks.

George’s window is a little higher than the reach of an average 5-year-old, so when it’s his turn Adam Babcock stands on the tire rim and pulls himself up to order a push-pop.

Some kids order the same thing each time. A toddler who lives next to Babcock always orders an ice cream sandwich, takes one bite and makes his mother finish it. Proof, Babcock said, that the magic in the moment has little to do with ice cream itself.

“I think it’s the whole ice cream man experience, running out and stopping him and telling him what you want,” she said.

Davis, who has been driving through Babcock’s neighborhood for nine years, has come to rely on the daily interplay with both the kids and the parents. “I’ve known some of these kids since they were born,” said Davis, a gangly Coloradoan who first slipped behind the wheel as a part-timer and liked it so much he quit his job delivering produce.

Over the years he has watched both neighborhoods and families change. He’s seen neighborhood tiffs -- families who were once close coming out to the truck at different times to avoid each other. And he’s gotten to know the fickle likes and dislikes of scores of youngsters. “You do the same route for so long you get to know the parents and get to see the kids grow up,” David said.

As the kids eat, the mothers -- and they are all mothers -- gather around the sidewalk and catch up on the last 24 hours. “We talk about whatever’s going on in our lives, with our kids, shopping,” Babcock said. “We talk about current events -- the war. Kind of a little of everything.”

For Gendry, there is deeper meaning in ice cream on a stick. Gendry, who moved into the neighborhood seven years ago, sees in the daily gathering a sense of belonging, part of the interconnections that make a neighborhood.

The families barbecue together and the mothers gather every few months to catch up on the kids’ scrapbooks. Some of the husbands play on the same softball team, and a few months back a fisherman in the neighborhood came home with a mess of crabs so they all gathered at his house for an impromptu feast.

“It’s like an old community,” Gendry said later. “It brings the big community smaller, and brings it back to the old days when everybody knew each other and you could trust that everything was safe.”

For Gendry, those intersecting lives lie at the heart of neighborhood and are why she and her husband decided awhile back to not move out of the neighborhood even though the family of four has outgrown its house.

And daily visits by the ice cream truck are an inextricable part of it, helping lay the base for their own children’s future fond memories. It’s an intangible inheritance, rooted in Gendry’s own childhood visits to the Helms Bakery Truck as it cruised through her Claremont neighborhood.

“Once they hear that sound coming, the kids are like Pavlov’s dog,” she says, laughing. “It’s fun. It brings back memories.”