A reader in Milwaukee sent me a weird story about a car. She believed the story to be true and commented that, in this instance, truth proved to be stranger than fiction. I wonder.
Midway through a scorching Texas summer, a local auto dealer sold a woman a new car. Within a week the woman returned to the dealership with a very odd complaint. The car, she explained, sometimes refused to start. Not just now and then, though. In fact, the car gave her problems only when she drove to the ice-cream parlor to buy a carton of vanilla ice cream.
If she bought chocolate ice cream, or strawberry, or pistachio—any flavor but vanilla—the car started right up without any trouble. But consistently, whenever she bought vanilla ice cream, the engine turned over but refused to start when she came out of the store.
At first the dealer thought the woman was putting him on. But she insisted that she was serious, and eventually the dealer was curious enough to send a mechanic to check her story.
The mechanic drove to the store and bought strawberry ice cream, and the car started fine. But when he bought vanilla, he had to have the car towed to the shop.
He concluded that the problem was a very special mechanical one. What was making the car stall, he figured, was this: Most flavors of ice cream were sold prepacked and took just a few minutes to purchase. But vanilla ice cream was hand-packed for each customer. While the woman waited for her order to be made up, the hot Texas sun created a vapor lock in her car’s engine, which caused it not to start
.
My suspicions were aroused by the number of times the story made me suspend my disbelief. Did the woman take her car out of the garage only to buy ice cream? Did she never leave the car in the sun at any other time? Would anyone make enough separate trips to the ice cream parlor in one week to discover the nature of the problem?
Besides, wouldn’t any Texas-based car dealer worth the plaques on his showroom wall adjust a new car to prevent vapor lock? After all, I can’t remember any of the characters in “Dallas” experiencing any problems with stalled cars.
My incredulity, it turns out, was warranted. In my files, under the heading “Miscellaneous Car Legends,” I uncovered one other version of “The Ice-Cream Car.”
The June 1978 issue of Traffic Safety
magazine printed the story, citing as its source the car magazine Automotive Engineering
. In this version, also set in Texas, pistachio ice cream causes the car to stall, since pistachio is the only flavor the shop sells in hand-packed form.
It is possible that the incident did happen, but it seems unlikely. If nothing else, the appearance of two versions of the story with minor variations indicates that it is an automobile legend in the making.
Postscript:
My column prompted a note from Betsy Henley, who does not give her exact address, but writes:
“I have heard the ‘Ice Cream Car’ story, but don’t remember it being associated with Texas or a new car. The flavor of the ice cream was pistachio. I can’t remember where I heard it. We live in Indiana now, but it might have been Tennessee, California, or Georgia.”