Tea at Trianon: Good Humor Treats

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 28, 2012

Good Humor Treats

The ice cream truck is part of the magic of summer for many neighborhoods. (I like Blue Bunny, too.) To quote:

Good Humor treats date back to 1920, when Harry Burt, a candy maker in Youngstown, Ohio, stuck some ice cream on a stick and dubbed it the Good Humor Bar. Mr. Burt received a patent for "ice cream on a stick" in 1923, after years of debate among authorities about whether his creation differed enough from the Eskimo Pie. (Eskimo Pie, a contemporaneous chocolate-covered ice-cream bar, had no stick; it received a patent in 1922.)

Later, Mr. Burt waged a legal battle against Popsicle Corp., whose fruity ice on a stick, he claimed, infringed his rights. The companies struck a licensing agreement. Unilever, which bought Good Humor in 1961, today owns Popsicle, too.

Good Humor developed franchises, and the "Good Humor Man," with his trademark truck, became a fixture of the American summer by the 1950s. In the late 1970s, the company sold the trucks off to individual buyers.

Today, Mrs. Chimbolo, 46 years old and the owner of a classic 1969 version of the truck, is starting her fourth summer delivering frozen sweets in Madison, a seaside Connecticut village.

"Who wouldn't want to drive an ice-cream truck?" she says, ringing her brass bell as she rolled slowly past stone walls and Colonial style houses. "People recognize you and it's like, 'It's the ice-cream lady!' " (Read entire post.)