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Found at nearly every ice cream truck and public pool snack bar in America, the red-white-and-blue Bomb Pop defines summertime. The culprit of millions of stained tongues, melting down thousands of sticky hands.
These sweet, thirst-quenching treats call back to the simple days of childhood: Fourth of July fireworks, cannonballs in the pool, staying up late because there’s no school tomorrow.
Jim Heeter remembers trying his very first Bomb Pop around 1957, as a kid growing up in Pierce City, Missouri. “ I was actually a big Bomb Pop fan,” Heeter says.
Heeter loved the way each stacked section was its own vibrant shade of red, white and blue. Its three distinct flavors: cherry, lime, and blue raspberry, in that order. And then there was the shape: huge, pointed at the top, with fins.
“Fins like a rocket,” Heeter says. “Not like a bomb, like a rocket.”
Invented in Kansas City in the middle of the Cold War, the Bomb Pop has become a curious icon of American patriotism, especially as the country celebrates its 250th anniversary this year.
But its launch into pop culture wasn’t entirely sweet — a reflection of the country’s nuclear arms race and fight for military supremacy.
And, to some parents, a symbol of everything wrong about America.
One hot summer night in Memphis
The creation of the Bomb Pop starts with two men in Memphis, Tennessee.
Durant “Doc” Abernethy was an engineering student at the University of Illinois until around 1941, when the U.S. entered World War II. Doc had severe asthma, so instead of serving, he started building airplanes at a factory in Memphis building B-25s, B-26 Marauders, and B-29 Superfortresses.
“He was a problem solver and a people pleaser,” says Rick Abernethy, Doc’s son. “He would look at any problem that he would face and turn it on its head.”
He was also a consummate salesman: “ Oh, he could tell a story. He said he would kind of go around the tapestry of truth.”
Also living in Memphis at the time was Jim Merritt, a 30-something businessman and graduate of William Jewell College. His daughter, Patricia Lear, remembers Merritt as the kind of guy everyone noticed when he entered the room.
“He was just this great big, tall, dark, handsome guy with a great big smile and white teeth,” she says. “Hugely charismatic. Hugely charming. All their friends sort of gravitated towards him.”
Merritt served as a navigator in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He retired as a major and received several air medals and battle stars.
“He flew so many missions bombing the Germans and whoever else needed to be bombed back then,” Lear recalls.
The experience turned Merritt into a go-getter and risk-taker. After all, when you’ve fought in an actual war, how dangerous can a business plan really be?
After the war, Merritt made a big pivot into an entirely different business: Ice cream.
Golden age of the Good Humor man
Doc Abernethy soon joined Merritt at the Southern Ice Cream company in Memphis. Together, they produced premium pints of ice cream, tart cartons of sherbert, and the crowd-favorite Bananza Bar.
“It was half of a banana dropped into ice milk ice cream,” Rick remembers. “And I'm telling you what, that was the greatest tasting ice cream bar you ever ate.”
Doc told a reporter he ate 32 Bananza Bars his first day on the job.
After World War II was a good time to enter the ice cream business. Early in the century, most people were buying their ice cream from street vendors, or at their local soda fountain. Then the home refrigerator in the 1930s opened the freezer door to cartons of ice cream that families could keep at home.
By the middle of the century, U.S. ice cream consumption reached an astonishing 537 million gallons a year, according to Laura B. Weiss, author of “Ice Cream, A Global History.”
“The Baby Boomers came along, and that enormously mushroomed the audience for ice cream,” she says.
Soon, there were more varieties than ever on the market. The 1950s saw ice cream bars, novelties and popsicles increasingly vying for consumers’ attention. It was the golden age of the Good Humor man driving down the street in his signature white truck.
By 1951, Weiss found packaged ice cream accounted for almost a third of U.S. ice cream sales.
One of the most popular novelties back then was America’s first chocolate-covered ice cream bar: the Eskimo Pie, which has since been renamed Edy’s Pie. Invented in Ohio around 1920, Eskimo Pies got their chocolate coating from Kansas City’s Russell Stover chocolates.
It was such a hit that a year later, Good Humor replicated the treat with their very own version: the Klondike bar.
The invention of the Bomb Pop
But Memphis was a hot market for cold treats. So in the early 1950s, Merritt and Doc decided to open a new ice cream company in Kansas City, Missouri. They called themselves the James S. Merritt Company (later Merritt Foods).
But this time, to compete against all the dairies already operating in Kansas City, they decided to ditch the ice cream tubs. Instead, Merritt and Doc went all in on the biggest, weirdest, and most exotic ice cream bars, novelties, and popsicles they could think of.
In order to find out what the customers wanted, Doc went straight to his target demographic: kids.
According to Rick, Doc would go to a sixth grade class with pictures of various popsicles he had dreamed up, in various colors and shapes, and say, “Now tell me, which one do you like?”
In 1958, the Kansas City Star reported that Merritt wanted to add notches to leftover popsicle sticks so that kids could use them to build stuff, like Lincoln Logs. That was one of the many focus groups Patricia Lear and her brother participated in as a child.
“The way the Bomb Pop happened is, we'd be sitting around in the den watching television, and everybody would be given some clay,” she says. “We'd be sitting there trying different shapes. ‘What do you think of this?’ ‘What do you think of that?’”
The Bomb Pop was born in July 1955, right in the middle of the Cold War, an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union marked by constant threats of nuclear attack.
It was a weird time to be a kid. You’d be in school and then all of sudden have to run a drill, learning to duck and cover under your desk in case a nuclear bomb went off. (Because your desk would totally protect you.)
Out of this fight over military dominance formed the Space Race, the quest to conquer the moon and prove which country was the most technologically advanced. For Americans, the space program gave them something to be proud of, and a reason to look up at the stars with delight.
Rick says Doc Abernethy, ever the salesman, leaned into that positive association with their new missile-shaped popsicle: “Like Doc said, we just rode that one. If you wanna call a rocket, it's a rocket.”
But if you ask Patricia Lear, there’s nothing celestial about it: “The Bomb Pop is literally a bomb because my dad dropped bombs in the war.”
The popsicles’ signature fins may just seem like a flourish, but they actually sped up the entire process, Rick says, because they allowed the popsicles to freeze faster.
Interesting, though, not even Rick knows exactly when that famous trifecta of red, white and blue arrived. Because Bomb Pops had so many other flavors, too: Spice Bombs. Super Star Bombs. Candy Bombs. Bingo Bombs. Bubble Gum Bombs. Crunch Bombs. Fruity Patooty Bombs. Cowabunga Bombs.
And, directly on the nose here, Acme Missile Bombs, which was a nod to Looney Tunes and the unreliable manufacturer behind Wile E. Coyote’s gadgets, anvils, and TNT. (You know, the ones that always seemed to blow up in his face.)
By 1970, Merritt Foods was killing it. The Kansas City Star reported that their product output multiplied by more than 12 times over the course of a decade.
“The red, white, and blue Bomb Pop was the biggest thing to hit the market in the past 10 years,” an ice cream distributor told the Tampa Times in 1980. “Kids went crazy over them and they started a flood of different novelties.”
In 1981, Merritt Foods was acquired by Southland Corporation, the parent company of 7-Eleven — meaning their novelties ended up in convenience stores across the country
On its way to deep-freeze dessert dominance, though, Bomb Pops acquired a few enemies.
Equating ice cream and war
Images of war became inescapable during U.S. involvement in Vietnam — beamed into home televisions from journalists abroad. And it infiltrated other aspects of life, too, even if you were just a kid.
Action figures like G.I Joe were everywhere, along with explosives-centric children’s games — and parents developed very strong feelings about this trend of violent media and entertainment.
The Bomb Pop, that seemingly innocuous popsicle, didn’t escape the scrutiny.
In fact, to some parents, the Bomb Pop was actually indicative of everything that was wrong with America at that particular moment:
“It seems irresponsible to make a product so attractive to children and call it a ‘Bomb Pop’,” Maxime Golub wrote to the editor of the Ithaca Journal in July 1974. “This certainly does not help to promote any realistic notion of what a bomb is. In fact, it would almost seem to imply that bombs are a fun thing to be enjoyed. I think it is necessary for all of us to take responsibility for teaching children what is right. Certainly equating war and ice cream is not in this effort.”
“I find it deplorable that even ice cream comes in forms that suggest that the bombing and killing of people is perfectly American, cool and delicious,” Oma Miller wrote to the editor of the Kansas City Star in June 1973.
“It is bad enough that people who deplore war must guard their children against war toys and violent TV programs, but now ice cream comes in the shape of an American red, white and blue bomb… that suggests that bombs are not only O.K. but taste good and can be fun? Obviously, I will not allow my children to purchase such ‘food’ again.”
When a six-year-old child in Trenton, New Jersey, came home with a Bomb Pop in August 1972, his mom made him turn around and take it right back to the 7-Eleven store where he bought it.
According to The Times of Trenton, the mother then yelled at a reporter over the phone, “I AM READY TO SCREAM! THEY GLORIFY EVERYTHING!’” (Emphasis theirs.)
Another person spending a lot of time thinking about Bomb Pops in the 1970s was Steve Chinn. Now a 79-year-old retired lawyer in Kansas City, at the time he was a law school student. During the summers he wasn’t in class, Chinn filled orders at the Merritt Foods factory in Kansas City’s East Bottoms.
The factory was kept ice cold, according to Rick Abernathy: “It's gotta be 60 degrees below zero in front of the blowers and about 20 degrees below zero, generally around the rest of the cooler.”
Despite that, Chinn enjoyed working at the factory. He got free Bomb Pops that he could bring home to his kids, and it was the kind of job that gave Chinn a lot of time to think and reflect — particularly about the time he recently spent in the Army, fighting in Vietnam.
“My parents were Republicans, and so I went over there thinking that this was a patriotic thing for me to be doing, you know?” Chinn says.
Once he returned from overseas, though, and found himself picking up box after box of patriotic popsicles shaped like weapons, Chinn started to see his role in a different light.
“I just knew that we were there under false pretenses. I realized that,” Chinn now says. “It wasn't probably until I got back that I really was able to process intellectually what was going on.”
Merritt, the Army veteran who gets credit for the shape of the Bomb Pop, thought a lot about Vietnam, too.
“He wanted to talk to me about the Vietnam War 'cause I was in college,” Lear remembers. “But I had nothing intelligent to say other than obviously it's bad, you know, we shouldn't be there.”
In 1972, Doc Abernethy told a reporter he had personally received around 30 letters from “Moms for Peace” and other advocacy groups complaining about the Bomb Pop.
Merritt died back in 1970, so he wasn’t around to defend his product, but Doc maintained that the Bomb Pop was just a popsicle to them — not a political statement. Doc told the same reporter that at Merritt Foods, they “think of them as bombs for peace, not war.”
An everlasting symbol of American summer
The Bomb Pop survived the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, and today, it’s far outgrown its Kansas City roots. National Bomb Pop Day comes around every year on the last Thursday in June, reinforcing its associations with fireworks and Independence Day.
The Original Bomb Pop is now made by Wells Enterprises, a family-owned ice cream manufacturer out of Le Mars, Iowa. And it comes in more than a dozen tricolored flavors, including Nerds and Shrek.
On top of that, you’ve got your Bomb Pop imitators, like “Freedom Pops” from Walmart and “Firecracker” Ice Pops from Popsicle.
Bomb Pops stopped being manufactured in Kansas City in 1991, when Southland Corporation closed down its Merritt Foods subsidiary.
Doc Abernethy, however, lived the rest of his life in Kansas City. He died in 1994 at age 73.
“He was the life of the party,” Rick recalls. “I remember at his funeral — I think we had eight inches of snow and you couldn't get into the funeral home. I mean, there were so many people there.”
That checks out: What’s trudging through a little ice to honor one of the most prolific ice cream inventors of all time?
Doc’s frozen treat portfolio was stacked with so much more than just the Bomb Pop. He was constantly sketching out ideas.
We can thank him for the Dole Frozen Dessert Bars, in addition to novelties in the shape of the Pink Panther and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There was also the slightly unconventional “Froze Toes,” a pink foot-shaped ice cream bar with a bubble gum ball on the big toe. Plus the U.F.O., the “unidentified frozen object.”
No matter what Doc or Merritt invented though, Lear admits they never came up with anything stickier than the Bomb Pop.
“What struck me is when it hit big, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, I would say, when I started seeing it in Gap ads, in Fendi ads, in Neiman Marcus ads. When it hit as this giant, symbol of Americana summer,” Lear says. “That just blew my mind. I was thinking my dad wouldn't believe how big this thing's gotten.”
“I kinda feel when I see them all over the place, ‘This is my dad,’ you know. Reaching out to me and making sure I know he's still there, he's still around me.”
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported, produced, and mixed by Mackenzie Martin with editing by Suzanne Hogan and Gabe Rosenberg.
