Mello Roll ("Up your hole with a mello roll!")

[Paul Johnston]

I'm from the NYC area, but I don't know Mello Rolls...I always heard
it as "...with a ten-foot pole".

Yours,
Paul Johnston
On Oct 19, 2007, at 4:17 PM, Barry Popik wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Barry Popik <bapopik at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Mello Roll ("Up your hole with a mello roll!")
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> ---------
>
> OT: I wonder if you can sue "Balderdash & Piffle" under Britain's
> strict libel laws. My "bloody mary" work is on my website and also on
> Wikipedia. It was posted first on ADS-L and clearly known to OED. No
> one at OED can know this?...Maybe Jessica Seinfeld (famous cookbook
> author) can take credit for my food work...Gotta do some work on "wet
> burritos" and "saddle-style" burritos. Any OED entry under
> "saddle"?...This unpaid, unloved work never ends.
> ...
> Maybe some old New Yorkers here remember "mello rolls" and can help
> with the below. There's surprisingly little on the web, and the term
> does not appear to be trademarked..."Up your hole with a mello roll"
> ("Up your nose with a rubber hose") is a shocking omission in the
> otherwise brilliant Yale Book of Quotations.
> ...
> ...
> ...
> http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/
> mello_roll_or_mell_o_roll_up_your_hole_with_a_mello_roll/
> ...
> Entry from October 19, 2007
> Mello Roll or Mell-O-Roll ("Up your hole with a Mello Roll!")
> Mello rolls (also sometimes spelled "mello-rolls" or "mell-o-rolls,"
> perhaps like "jell-o") were ice cream treats, somewhat like ice cream
> cones. They were popular in the Bronx and in Brooklyn; many people
> remember them served at Jones Beach in the 1940s and 1950s.
>
> The television show Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979) was based on
> comedian Gabriel Kaplan's life, as expressed in his comedy album Holes
> and Mello-Rolls. One joke line on the tv show—"Up your nose with a
> rubber hose!"—was originally recalled by Kaplan as ""Up your hole with
> a mello roll!"
>
>
> Back in the Bronx:
> Celebrating the Experience of Growing Up and Living in the Bronx
> (http://www.backinthebronx.com)
> Volume III, Issue IX, pg. 10:
> Proverbs & Sayings
> (...)
> 14. Charlotte Russe...Sponge cake in a cylindrical body of cardboard
> with a lot of whipped cream and as you eat it, you push it up from the
> bottom.
> 15. Mello Roll...Ice cream wrapped in a cylindrical shape that you
> peeled off the wrapper and pushed in a special mello roll cone.
>
> Newsday
> New Yorkers share Jones Beach memories
> (...)
> "I have been going to Jones Beach since 1955. I remember Field 9 and
> when I hike around out there now, I find pieces of the old parking lot
> coming up through the sand. They sold Mell-Rolls at the concession
> there—a concession shaped like the pilot house of a ship. Mello-Rolls
> were a cylindrical chunt of vanilla ice cream wrapped in paper which
> would be unrolled and placed into a wafer cone." —Bill Picchioni
> Rockville Centre
>
> Boomer Baby Memories; Food
> Mello roll and Charlotte Russe
> Growing up in Brooklyn there was a candy store on practically every
> corner and a bakery a few blocks away. Two of my favorites were Mello
> Rolls and Charlotte Russes. The challenge was to get the Mello Roll
> onto the cone without it falling on the floor. It took a lot of
> practice but it was worth the effort! --- Jeannie M. South Florida
> (formerly Brooklyn) - 1946
>
> 6 December 1970, New York (NY) Times, pg. 229 ad:
> Complete Mello-Roll Machine and Hardener
>
> 11 January 1976, New York (NY) Times, "Comedy Disks From Carlin to
> Kaplan to Klein" by Shaun Considine, pg. D17:
> A blurb on the cover of Gabriel Kaplan's "Holes and Mello-Rolls"
> claims that his hit TV show, "Welcome Back, Kotter," was inspired by
> this album.
>
> Internet Movie Database
> Memorable quotes for
> My Favorite Year (1982)
>
> Sy: We're talkin' future generations here. We're discussing morals.
> Alice Miller: [for Herb] You're not qualified to discuss morals, Sy.
> Sy: Up your hole with a Mello Roll, Alice! You too, Herb!
>
> Google Books
> Loving Women: a novel of the fifties
> by Pete Hamill
> New York, NY: Random House
> 1989
> Pg. 192:
> "Up your hole with a Mell-o-roll, coppers, you ain't takin' me alive!"
>
> 12 February 1989, New York Times, "On Language" by William Safire,
> pg. SM10:
> "All my age cohorts [sic—should be "all members of my age cohort"]
> fondly recall the fat cylinders of ice cream called Mello-Rolls,"
> writes Ruth B. Roufberg of Kendall Park, N.J. "They were wrapped in
> two overlapping strips of paper, which, when pulled from opposite
> directions, exposed the cylinder and neatly deposited it into the
> ice-cream cone."
>
> Funny how so many people miss Mello-Rolls. "When you licked the ice
> cream," explains Patricia Maloney Bernstein of Great Neck, L.I., "the
> roll shape caused it to turn round in its cone, so as the ice cream
> melted it did not run down the outside of the cone, but rather melted
> within the cone, running down into the hollow in the handle."
>
> 31 December 1989, New York Times, "Looking Back at a Disappointing
> Decade" by Marcia Byalick, pg. LI14:
> For me the last decade had no memories as sweet as charlotte russes or
> mello rolls.
>
> 18 October 1992, Chicago (IL) Daily Herald, section 7, pg. 6, col. 2:
> "And Mello Rolls in a cup with sprinkles. Mello Rolls were sort of ice
> cream cones, but they weren't scoops, they were more oval-shaped."
> (Review of the book When You're From Brooklyn, Everything Else is
> Tokyo by Larry King with Marty Appel—ed.)
>
> Daily (University of Washington Student Newspaper)
> January 25, 1996
> Welcome Back, Kaplan
> Another show, another time
> Hans Ruegamer
> Daily Staff
> (...)
> Part of the show's living legacy is the number of catch phrases it
> developed. Ranging from Lawrence Jacobs' deep-voiced "Hi, there" to
> Ron Palillo's high-pitched "Oooo!"
>
> "Most of the stuff came from my high school," Kaplan said. "The real
> phrase was 'Up your hole with a Mello roll.' A Mello roll was a like
> an ice cream they sold in New York and that was a standard catch
> phrase on the street. If you insulted anybody, you said something like
> that or something about their parents. And that became part of the
> beginnings of the show and then we got away from that."
>
> "We had to change it of course for television - to 'Up your nose with
> a rubber hose.' And then one show the censor got upset about us saying
> that and he said, 'You have to say, "Up your nose with a garden
> hose."'
>
> "I said, 'Why,' just out of curiosity, and he said, "Well, you can do
> a lot of damage to someone with a rubber hose.' They had these weird
> censorship things. And after the next week they said we could say
> rubber hose again. But there's one show where we say 'Up your nose
> with a garden hose.'"
>
> BronxRoots-L
> From: Mike < kombucha at ticnet.com>
> Subject: Re: Mello-Roll
> Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 15:05:19 -0600
>
> References: <20010328203751.24626.qmail at web1301.mail.yahoo.com>
> Marc et-yoozal,
>
> The mello-roll cone was of the "waffle" variety, and not of the
> "sugar-cone" variety which was crunchy. The stem of the cone had a
> flat bottom instead of a point. On the top it had a rectangular
> opening about 2.5 inches by about 1.25 inches which nested the
> mellow-roll. The ice cream was a cylinder a bit larger than a
> flashlight battery, and it had a paper wrapper with a tab that ran
> along it lenghtwise. There was an art to placing the roll in the cone,
> and then pulling the paper off as the roll rotated. I remember
> vanilla, but am not sure if it cam in other flavors.
>
> It was a favorite cuss to say
>  "Up your nose with a garden hose, and
> up your hole with a mello-roll!"
>
> Food of the Eighties
> Shayne Genoway - May 04, 2007
> I was trying to find information about Mello-Roll ice cream with not
> too much luck. Try explaining the concept to your grandchildren and it
> becomes a task in futility, and much laughter on their part. They
> can't grasp the concept of ice cream that came wrapped in something
> that looked like the center cardboard roll on our toilet paper, with
> ice cream stuffed inside. That was the only way I could think of
> explaining it to them. You then had to unravel the cone around the ice
> cream which sat inside a cone that was also round so the ice cream sat
> neatly into the cone. Weird, isn't it, just trying to describe it. I
> remember them well because my dad had a variety store at the time, and
> I remember him serving them to the kids coming into the store. He
> would pull a part of the paper off, and fit the exposed part of the
> ice cream into the cone. When he figured it was in tight enough, he
> unrolled the rest of the paper off and handed the cone to the
> customer. The Mello-Roll ice cream could be handled with his hands at
> all times because it was protected by this paper. It was about the
> size of the inside cardboard roll of toilet paper, and that's exactly
> what it looked like standing on end inside the cone. For it's time it
> was convenient for the store keeper, he didn't need to worry about a
> scoop, just reach in pull one out, and unwrap it. Simple, easy, and
> efficient when I think about it now. It'd sure be nice if someone came
> up with a picture of one from somewhere.
>
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