Rainbows A Summer Tradition

Hailey Brackett heard the sound of music and came hopping.

“Four Bugs Bunny bars, please,” said the 9-year-old, pulling on a strand of light-brown hair.

“Wait a second, Missie. You’re talking $6 here. Sure you have that many carrots?”

Sometimes I really crack myself up.

Hailey grinned. “Yep. I’ll go get my money.”

Two minutes later, she materialized in front of me. With a mason jar of pennies mingled with a few stray buttons and paper clips.

Nothing tests a man’s soul like having to count out 600 pieces of dirty copper in 95-plus heat. “Two. Four. Six. Eight. …” Life can be a rocky road for an ice cream man.

On Thursday I worked a noon-to-9 p.m. shift selling frozen goodies out of a Rainbow ice cream cart. They have become fixtures in Spokane, a part of the summer landscape. Call me tutti frutti, but I wanted to see what it was like.

It’s impossible to miss the Rainbow brigade. Their presence is always heralded by the bouncy strains of Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic, “The Entertainer.” The music blares through loudspeakers mounted on top of the carts.

“Ta, ta-da, ta-da, ta-dah.”

Over and over again.

“That’s your money-maker,” Jerry Paul told me before sending me out. “Without it you won’t sell anything.” Jerry owns Rainbow Ice Cream and Novelties Inc., 608 N. Maple, with his wife, Dorie.

Repetition is a powerful weapon.

Pavlov’s dogs slobbered for dinner every time they heard a bell. Spokane humans slobber for snow cones, fudge bars and ice cream sandwiches whenever these putt-putting Pied Pipers come rolling along.

“When I hear it I think back to when I was at my grandfather’s house,” says Heather Erickson, who bought some ice cream for a 5-year-old named Miranda in a residential area near Joe Albi Stadium. “I’d run out into the middle of the road and try to get the cart to stop.”

The woman mercifully paid me with dollar bills.

The music has a more insidious effect on the poor drivers. It’s not uncommon for Rainbow rookies to have nightmares about being in “The Sting” with Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

“Ta, ta-da, ta-da, ta-dah.”

Being a Rainbow driver is asphalt capitalism. They are independent contractors who lease the carts from the Pauls on a day-to-day basis. Drivers must pay for gas and the dry ice that keeps the ice cream cold. They keep a percentage of whatever they sell.

You have to be careful not to eat up your profits.

Turnover, as you might expect, is high. “I can’t get attached to anybody,” explains Jerry, who can never be positive who will show up.

Rainbow is located in the back of a steel warehouse, where the Pauls keep a walk-in freezer and a fleet of 10 carts. The vehicles are modified versions of the same rigs used by the city’s parking meter patrol.

Jerry and Dorie were Everett bus drivers when they decided to peddle ice cream on the side. They bought a cart and worked themselves crazy. Then the business grew into a fulltime thing.

The Pauls quit their jobs and never looked back. In 1990, they saw Spokane as a lucrative market and moved east.

It’s no mystery why Rainbow drivers don’t last long. Hawking ice cream for nickels and dimes is sweaty, tough work. Jerry gave me a territory on the North Side, west of Monroe from the river north to Francis. I prowled the streets, eating buck-and-a-quarter snow cones to keep cool.

Not that there weren’t rewards. “You can keep the quarter,” says 17-year-old Amanda Beaty, who gave me my first tip.

A 12-year-old boy outside a swimming pool gave my second tip: “Can you shut that song off? It’s getting annoying.”

Now if I could just get it out of my head.

“Ta, ta-da, ta-da, ta-dahhh.”