The Ice Cream Truck’s Surprising History

When John Harkins was 5 years old, his parents were called into school by a concerned teacher: “We’ve got a bit of an issue with John,” she told them. His class, she explained, had been learning about colors. “All the other kids were saying brown,” she said. “John’s telling us it’s cola.” The pink, he told them, was “strawberry.” And most worrying of all, he was sure the blue was “raspberry.” John’s parents were able to assuage the teacher’s worries; the Harkins ran an ice cream truck (known as a van in their native UK), and little John spent a lot of time riding on it, near a lurid, triple-barrel slushy machine, churning out three flavors (or colors) of the icy stuff—cola, strawberry, and raspberry.