Water Ice

Could we please get over the Rocky thing already? The original "Rocky" movie is 24 years old, yet - just when we think it's safe to take the back way into the Art Museum - the mono-syllabic boxer jabs us in the eye again. Witness the ghost of Rocky Balboa, as played out in the nation's press during the run-up to the Republican National Convention: In the New York Times: "We throw in a generous slice of 'Rocky,' the ultimate movie of Philadelphia and the redemption of the underdog.

I hold a drooping slice of Mack's plain cheese pizza up to Howard Trachtman's nose, and his eyes drift shut. "This is the smell that I think of," he says, breathing deeply, his nostrils just above the molten sheen of salty cheese. "If I were in Kansas City and you put this slice under my nose, I think: Wildwood. " If Marcel Proust had visited the Boardwalk, this obviously would have been his madeleine. Trachtman the real estate lawyer is suddenly transported to his youth. It is summer in the 1970s, and little Howard is pressing Kiss logos and Elks lodge decals onto T-shirts at Pegasus, the Boardwalk trinket store owned by his Grandpa Ruby and Grandma Gert.

With the third spacecraft to touch down on the surface of Mars now more than halfway to its destination, NASA yesterday announced where on the planet it will land. While the Viking and Mars Pathfinder missions landed in red, rock-strewn deserts, the Mars Polar Lander will touch down Dec. 3 in rolling hills of frozen tundra 500 miles from the Martian South Pole. There, at the fringe of a carbon-dioxide polar cap, the spacecraft will take panoramic pictures and send out a robotic arm designed to analyze the soil for traces of frozen water - apparently the remains of rushing rivers and vast oceans.

Future entrepreneurs of Philadelphia need your help. After three weeks of learning how to create their own businesses, student groups from the Summer Youth Work Experience will demonstrate their skills by selling products at today's Black Family Reunion at Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park. But they need your money to succeed. "We want to encourage them to learn the skills to start a business and use them positively," said Curtis Jones Jr., president and CEO of the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corp.

The Philadelphia Canoe Club held its annual open house and regatta yesterday. Sean McGreever, 10, from Overbrook Park, munches a water ice at the clubhouse on Ridge Avenue. Events included a 10-mile race, displays of antique water craft, a used-boat sale, and rides in canoes and kayaks.

Most people look at the corner of Lake Boulevard and Laurel Road and see the empty shell of a gas station, closed for more than a decade. Not Ed Hovatter. He looks at the old Puritan Oil station and sees ice cream. Lots of it. Water ice, too. "We're looking for the establishment of an ice-cream shop - window service, outside seating - and trying to bring a family business into the community at a location that has been vacant and deplorable for, what I understand, 15 years plus," said Hovatter, an entrepreneur.

The famous Rosati water ice name is still on the lid, but inside the old Philly favorite is a new twist - an icy blue-raspberry cotton candy swirl - that's been catching the attention of children on a hot summer day. "Kids buy with their eyes," said Rich Trotter, one of four partners who last year bought S.R. Rosati Inc., a water ice company that dates to 1912. So why hide what's inside, asks Trotter, who's putting a new spin on the slushy treat this summer with such offerings as the blue cotton candy, lemon-lime swirl and mango-pina colada in clear 10-ounce cups instead of the traditional white cups.

It was about 9:30 a.m. and Scott Leonard had come all the way from Florida to celebrate the Fourth. On the banks of the Schuylkill. "Shouldn't be any other place," Leonard said, "but Philadelphia on the Fourth of July. " The 26-year-old from Fort Myers meant not the patriotic celebrations but the Independence Day Regatta, a sculling competition which its director said began in the 1880s. And not incidentally, Leonard conceded, Philadelphia was a nice escape from the fires devastating rural parts of north and central Florida and clouding his hometown.