“It was for the safety of the children,” Lt. David Young with the Lufkin Police Department told the Lufkin Daily News.

Sploid reports from a small town deep in the dry, shrivelled heart of Texas, where the children cry tears of dust.

The ice cream man is gone. Forever.

Unlike most kids, those in Lufkin won’t have their summer daze interrupted by the faraway ringing that signals the approach of cool refreshment.

No, the city elders have decided it’s best if the ice cream man not round these parts any longer.

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Young says the law was passed several years ago to stop children from running into the street and getting hit by a car. He makes no mention of it ever happening, only the ever-present danger.

No word on whether or not he’s stopped children from running into the street, or actual cars hitting them. But the half-ton slab-sided gaudy monstrosity painted with Day-Glo cartoon characters, moving at five miles per hour and playing Turkey in the Straw at 80db, nope, no kids kilt by them since the ban went in.

Nor by no dragons neither.

“I remember the ice cream truck when I was young,” Ibarra said. “It’s something I wanted to do for the community.”

So Ibarra bought himself an ice cream truck, got a vendor’s license from the county and started making 240-mile round trips to Houston for supplies.

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Sadly, no one at the county office warned Ibarra that Lufkin was the only town in Angelina County where the ice cream man was not welcome. It wasn’t until a member of Lufkin’s finest pulled him over that Ibarra learned about city ordinance 97.03.

The law states “It shall be unlawful for any person … to sell … commodities or any goods or merchandise upon any part of the public streets or public squares of the city, including the sidewalks thereof.”

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Texas in July is a sweltering nightmare. On Tuesday the mercury hit 101. The forecast calls for more of the same tomorrow. The kids in Lufkin have already had the cannonball taken away from them. Now the ice cream man’s gone, too. It’s gonna be a long, hot summer.