Lending the soundtrack to hundreds of summers for thousands of kids, Les Waas, the Philadelphia-based advertising executive who penned the famous jingle for ice cream company Mister Softee, has died at the age of 94.
As NBC reports, Waas wrote the song in 1960 for the company's ice cream trucks to play on approach. Though many neighbourhoods came to expect its unique music box-like jingle, the song actually had lyrics too and was called Jingle And Chimes.
Today there are over 650 Mister Softee trucks across the US, all broadcasting the same nostalgic jingle from a loudspeaker atop their ice cream throne.
As NY Times writes, Waas penned nearly a thousand jingles over the years through his own ad agency, Waas Inc., with Jingle And Chimes becoming "known to millions of people and a cultural icon throughout the United States", according to a research paper in the Oxford Handbook Of Mobile Music Studies Vol. 2.
