AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Invented 71 years ago this month, the red, white and blue Bomb Pop popsicle is everywhere during the summertime. But its launch into pop culture wasn't entirely sweet. It reflected the country's fight for military supremacy during the Cold War. Mackenzie Martin from member station KCUR's podcast "A People's History Of Kansas City" has the story.
MACKENZIE MARTIN, BYLINE: The year was 1955, the first decade of the Cold War, and the ice cream industry was getting big. That's according to Laura B. Weiss, author of "Ice Cream: A Global History."
LAURA B WEISS: The baby boomers came along. That enormously mushroomed the audience for ice cream.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM, WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM")
HARRY RESER'S SYNCOPATORS: (Singing) I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. Rah.
MARTIN: The trendy thing at the time was packaged ice cream bars. According to Weiss, they accounted for almost a third of U.S. ice cream sales by 1951.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: It melts and keeps dripping. Made a special way, so it melts slow, drips less, lasts longer. More licks to the stick. Try no-drip Good Humor.
MARTIN: Merritt Foods in Kansas City wanted to stand out from the other ice cream manufacturers, so it specialized in weirder, more exotic frozen treats. There was Froze Toes, a pink ice cream bar in the shape of a foot, complete with a bubble gumball toenail. And my personal favorite, the UFO, the unidentified frozen object.
The Bomb Pop was pointed at the top with fins, and it came on the scene right before the Space Race, when America was looking to the stars and embracing a sense of national pride under President John F. Kennedy.
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JOHN F KENNEDY: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
MARTIN: People thought the popsicle was shaped like a rocket ship, but according to Patricia Lear, daughter of Bomb Pop co-inventor Jim Merritt, that was not the case.
PATRICIA LEAR: The Bomb Pop is literally a bomb because my dad dropped bombs in the war.
MARTIN: That's not to say the company didn't embrace the assumption, though.
RICK ABERNETHY: Like Doc said, we just rode that one. Hey, if you want to call it a rocket, it's a rocket.
MARTIN: This is Rick Abernethy (ph), the son of the other Bomb Pop co-inventor, Doc Abernethy. Rick says Doc got a lot of his ideas straight from his target demographic - kids.
ABERNETHY: Doc would come to a sixth-grade class or something and bring pictures, you know, and say, now, tell me, which one do you like? Guess what's the No. 1 thing they looked for?
MARTIN: Color?
ABERNETHY: Color. Red. If it's red, sweet and cold, they like it.
MARTIN: Interestingly, though, it's unclear exactly when that famous stacked trifecta of cherry, lime and blue raspberry arrived because Bomb Pops had so many other flavors. There were Spice Bombs, Bingo Bombs, Kowabunga Bombs and even Acme Missile Bombs, which was a nod to the Looney Tunes cartoons and the unreliable manufacturer behind Wile E. Coyote's gadgets that always seemed to blow up in his face.
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MARTIN: But as the Vietnam War took over American televisions, parents began expressing some very serious concerns about how images of war were infiltrating all aspects of their children's lives.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GI JOE THEME SONG")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS: (Singing) G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe, fighting man from head to toe.
MARTIN: And the Bomb Pop, that seemingly innocuous popsicle, didn't escape the scrutiny. In 1973, a Topeka, Kansas, mother wrote this to the Kansas City Star.
(Reading) I find it deplorable that even ice cream comes in forms that suggests that the bombing and killing of people is perfectly American, cool and delicious.
Merritt Foods always maintained the popsicle's innocence, though. In 1972, Doc Abernathy told a reporter they think of them as bombs for peace, not war. And today, more than 70 years after their initial invention, Bomb Pops are a symbol of something else entirely, the simple days of childhood - Fourth of July fireworks, cannonballs in the pool and staying up late because there's no school tomorrow.
For NPR News, I'm Mackenzie Martin in Kansas City.
(SOUNDBITE OF CORY WONG'S "TEAM SPORTS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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