Tonight, twickster and I were reminiscing about the milkman. (No, not in that way, ya pervs. :D)
It turns out that we’d both had milk delivered at home while we were growing up, she by Wawa in PA and me by Alta Dena in California.
I remember getting the glass bottles in the wire racks that had to be returned each week. Later on, ISTR the dairy switched to plastic bottles. I also remember the long order forms that seemed to have everything on them from milk to cheese to fruit punch.
As an aside, we also had our dog food (a strange substance called Pet Loaf) delivered.
I can remember that, I also remember my sister cutting her hand when one of the bottles she was playing with on the front porch broke.
Ours was Bordens, the milk of the gods. I miss the milk man ! He was soooo nice, always asking my grandmother if she was sure she didn’t want juice or punch for us too. Ha ! Yes he did our evil bidding the milkman did.
The glass bottles (with the paper caps – this is way before tamperproof packaging was even thought of) made excellent props for the kids’ party game “drop the clothespin in the milk bottle” – is there an equivalent game today?
Also – the milk wasn’t homogenized, so you could either pour the cream off the top and have skim milk, or shake it up and have regular milk.
Yes!
Here in Ohio, we sure did.
I recall begging the milkman to let us have a small ride.
It seemed so cool it didn’t have side doors, you could see right out.
But he only took us around the corner; a few houses, as he was afraid if we got inured, he would be in trouble.
Most fun ride I ever had.
Yep, the bottles had silver-foil caps with red lettering on them. Probably Wawa ("“means flying goose”), as I grew up in Penna., too.
We also had a Lancaster County farmer, Mr. Hunsberger, who delivered produce, and a doctor, Dr. Margolis, who made house calls, with his little black doctor’s bag.
Good lord, I feel like I grew up in the 1880s . . .
We didn’t have the milk delivered, but went to the dairy’s store to buy our milk and ice cream and such. The milk came in the glass bottles with the cardboard caps.
The really cool thing was that the dairy owners kid was in my class, and at least 4 or 5 times during my grade school years we got to go on field trips to the dairy, which was about three blocks away from our school. These trips always ended with a free ice cream bar. Thanks Eric, wherever you are.
I do remember milk delivered in glass bottles. We used the glass bottles at birthday parties to play a game where you’d drop clothespins in. Poor kids, ya know. For that matter, who remembers clothespins?
We had milk delivered in glass bottles with paper caps. I always made sure to get the first rich creamy gulp, every chance I had. We even had a special little metal box with a lid, that the bottles went into.
I lived in a little town (pop. 2000), which had its own dairy. They bottled their own milk from their own dairy farm, and delivered it, as well as the butter and cream and ice cream they made. In the winter, if you didn’t get up early enough, when you went out to the front step to get the milk, it would have frozen and popped the seal. We went to the dairy as a school project, in Grade 6, I think. I thought it was fascinating. Eventually they switched to plastic bottles, and now they put milk in 1-litre plastic bags. (My wife thought it was odd the first time she saw a bag of milk in a pitcher.)
We also had bread delivery.
And our doctor made house calls.
I posted recently in a thread about signs you’re getting old. This makes me sound positively ancient! I only just turned 46!
Since everyone in my household was gone in the morning before the milkman arrived, and didn’t get back home until around 4PM, keeping the milk from spoiling was a major problem. The milk company solved that by giving us a small wooden crate with a hinged top, and they left a small block of ice with each delivery. It worked quite well.
And I still carry a large scar on my knee from a broken milk bottle when a student crashed into me in the hall. The individual milk bottles were thick glass, not paper, in those days.
But I can’t remember just why we didn’t get milk at the store. We had grocery stores. Didn’t they carry milk? Maybe they didn’t have a refrigerated section?
Waaaaaay back in my memory (when I was about 4 or 5 years old) I remember a milkman who worked our neighborhood. He was an old guy who had a hook for a hand. I was afraid of that hook. I imagined that this guy was a pirate who lost his hand in some big sea battle :). His truck looked kinda like a UPS truck, except it was stainless steel. I think he delivered paper cartons of milk. I’m 28, so this would have been in the early 80’s. He didn’t last long after that. My parents tell me that he was too expensive compaired to the supermarket.
Sorry to double-post, but I remembered that right next to the side door of my grandmother’s house, there was a hole built into the wall. It was finished in wood and had a door on both the outside and the inside. This was so you could leave your empty milk bottles at night and receive full ones in the morning. I believe all the houses on her street had this feature. Have any of you ever seen such a thing where you live?
Papa Tiger grew up in an area with a lot of dairy farms, so would go down to the local creamery and wait till his farmer of choice would bring his milk in to collect the family’s milk for the day. Now that is being a dairy connoisseur!
We had milk delivered, but my mother was an early proponent of homogenized. I still remember my envry of my friend who got non-homogenized milk and there would be all that creamy goodness risen to the top of the bottles.
In the early '80s when I lived outside Dayton, Ohio, there was a dairy farm (Young’s, perhaps?) that was still licensed to sell non-homogenized milk in glass bottles. And whipping cream that was 46% butterfat. That was a special treat – although you had to be really, really careful whipping it or you’d end up with butter instead of whipped cream!
Delivered milk, into an insulated box which had a notice on the inside of the lid that “The man who made this box never saw it.” (Industries for the Blind) The same guy brought Ice, too, in blocks, or bags, if you wanted it.
I also remember weekly deliveries of eggs, and bread, as well as fresh produce, during the summer. The fruit guy used to yell out of his truck, as he drove down the street. My mother swears he said “Wasberries! Wed Wasberries!” although I don’t remember that on my own. He did bring cider in the fall, and if you asked, he would bring some of last weeks cider. (Well, if you were an adult.)
This was in both Arlington Virginia, and Philadelphia, PA in the early fifties. I think there was still milk delivery, as late as the late fifties, in Alexandria, VA.
Tris
“Swat my hind with a melon rind, That’s my penguin state of mind.” ~ Opus ~
I remember the milkman. I was a kid in Toronto in the 1960s, and I remember that we had (IIRC) our choice of home milk delivery from either Borden’s or Silverwood’s. Each used little refrigerated trucks, and you could get all kinds of things besides milk: juice, cream, chocolate milk, and the like.
Now for the real question: who ever lived in a house with a milkbox? That’s a small box built into the wall of the house. You’d stand inside your house and open the box from your side, putting in the empty bottle and a ticket for the fresh one in the box. Then, when he came with the delivery, the milkman would open the box from the outside, take the empty and the ticket, and leave a fresh bottle of milk.
Milkboxes were great for another reason–they were small enough for bottles of milk, but they were usually large enough for us kids to squeeze through. In fact, in my neighbourhood, that was how our parents got us into the house to open the door when they had locked themselves out.
On preview, I see that fishbicycle remembers milkboxes too!
Fishbicycle, the first house my wife and I bought had ome of those. We ( in the early years) sometimes used it as a cat door. A couple of times when our kids were young, and we had accidentely locked ourselves out of the house, we actually used it as a kid door!
