I’d be in better humor if Washington had a Good Humor ice-cream truck making the rounds, especially in my neighborhood.

In fact, I’d be satisfied with some retired Navy captain operating his own ice-cream truck – one that made a couple of stops each week in front of the Washington Daily News office. After all, the retired captain likely would have a leftover white uniform that would serve well as the working attire for an ice-cream-truck driver.

I’d be willing to buy the retired captain one of those mechanical coin changers so he could attach it to his belt. You know the type of coin changer I mean – a stainless-steel one with barrels that hold quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. The type that requires someone to push a small lever or levers to dispense the correct amount of change. And it must be made from stainless steel. I don’t want one of those newfangled plastic coin changers.

In my boyhood days (yes, they had ice-cream trucks back then), there were two types of ice-cream trucks. The one I have the most experience with is the ice-cream truck that was, for the most part, nothing more than a pickup truck’s cab with a large freezer compartment where a pickup truck’s bed would be located. The freezer box had three small doors – one on the right side of the freezer box, one on the left side of the freezer box and a slightly larger one on the rear of the freezer box – that provided access to the frozen treats inside the freezer box. If the side of the freezer box next to the pickup truck’s cab had a door, I never saw it.

All of my purchases from such an ice-cream truck were frozen products, from Popsicles to those orange-cream pushups to ice cream in little cardboard cups with paper lids, known as Dixie Cups. Those types of ice-cream trucks did not sell soft-serve ice cream, sundaes or other soft-serve ice cream treats.

While as a 10-year-old boy, I could not hear my mother calling me from the front door of the house while I was 53 feet away, I could hear the musical sounds of the ice-cream truck when it was five blocks away. On really hot days in the Florida panhandle, there were times I would have spent 50 cents to sit inside the freezer box for five minutes.

It’s a good thing the driver of the ice-cream truck never had to decide whether to allow me to do that. I probably would not have been able to resist temptation. At least a good portion of his inventory would have disappeared by the time I exited the freezer box after my five minutes.

By far, most of my purchases from a freezer-box ice-cream truck were grape and orange Popsicles and ice-cream sandwiches, with a few pushups and ice cream in cardboard containers along the way.

Some folks who are a few years older than me may recall that the lids for Dixie Cup ice-cream cups had pictures on them. Stars such as Roy Rogers, Bing Crosby and Ginger Rogers appeared on the lids. Other lids featured circus performers and circus animals.

By the way, do you remember those wooden “spoons” – wrapped in a white, paper sleeve – provided when one bought a container of ice cream?

Let’s not forget the soft-serve ice-cream truck, which in my boyhood days was a converted panel truck. Such a truck was brightly decorated and had one large, sliding  window on its right side. That’s where purchases of ice-cream cones, banana splits and sundaes were made. In addition to the machine that dispenses soft-serve ice cream, such trucks also had freezers that held frozen ice-cream treats and Popsicles.

As far as I was concerned, the only advantage a soft-serve ice-cream truck had over a freezer-box ice-cream truck was that it could produce dipped cones. I preferred a chocolate ice-cream cone dipped in butterscotch, which formed a crunchy, tasty shell around the soft ice cream.

If you see me walking downtown and appearing a bit cranky, just Good Humor me.

Mike Voss covers the city of Washington for the Washington Daily News. He would drive an ice-cream truck when he retires to supplement his income, but he knows he would eat all the profits.