Final Salute: Ice Cream Man Touched Kids' Lives
The Columbian
MARGARET ELLIS, Columbian staff writer
February 26, 2001
Like many heroes, Tom Hardesty had an alter ego. He was known as the ice cream man.
On most weekends for eight years, he brought ice cream to every child in the Juvenile Justice Center in Vancouver.
There was something more to these treats. Hardesty's presence week after week showed the kids, many with troubled backgrounds, that someone cared about them, said the Rev. Jim Cox with the First Christian Church-Disciples of Christ in Vancouver.
The church supplied the money, and Hardesty bought and delivered the ice cream, usually vanilla.
Hardesty died Feb. 10, at 88, but Cox has pledged to continue his ice cream tradition.
"It was a kind of nice, consistent, never-fail kind of service," said Mike Riggan, the detention manager at the Juvenile Justice Center.
"Ice cream, I guess, is kind of a comfort food," he said. "When you can say, 'Look, behave yourself and you can get a snack,' it's a nice thing to provide for kids."
When the center started a new policy forbidding food to be brought into the facility, it made a special exception for Hardesty's ice cream.
"One thing we weren't going to do is stop Tom," Riggan said.
Hardesty also was very involved in the Boy Scouts. He started when his son, Thomas Gary Hardesty, now of San Jose, Calif., was a Cub Scout and continued working with the organization for years afterward, said Irene Hayden. She and her husband, Bernard, lived next door to Hardesty for 40 years and were close friends with him and his wife, Helen, who died in 1999.
Hardesty worked as warehouse manager for the Washington Cannery Co- op for 30 years. When he retired, the couple often went traveling.
"They had a trailer and did the usual snowbird thing and really enjoyed it," Hayden said. The couple would travel to Arizona and Mexico, she said. They also traveled to the South to see Civil War sites. Hardesty was fascinated by the Civil War and loved to read about the history of the conflict.
The couple, married for 66 years, gardened together and shared a love of roses. They also had a large vegetable garden and filled their friends' pantries at harvest time.
Hayden said that she once heard Hardesty tell the story of how he met his wife. Hardesty and a friend decided to attend the First Christian Church, "because the prettiest girls were there." Hardesty told Hayden both he and his friend eventually were married at the church.
But church meant a lot to Hardesty, and he was active in church events.
"I would like to clone him 100 million times over. The world would be a better place to live," Cox said.
It certainly made the world better for the children at the Juvenile Justice Center. The ice cream treat he brought every week or two made a big impression on the kids.
When Hardesty went into the hospital, they sent him a huge, poster- sized "get well" card. On it every child wrote a sentence or two. They hoped to see him soon, wished him well, and blessed him.
"We hope you found God and God's heavenly beam. We hope you get better so we can get some ice cream," one child wrote.
"I read every line to him; he knew all these kids," Cox said. "I guess that says something."