So, blast from the past on the air today. (Herman’s Hermits, 1968 If anyone wonders. I remember. “The company was gay”? Meant something else then, clearly.)
But it left me wondering, how did that kind of home milk delivery even work? From the song, I deduce the missing girl left a signal outside the house that told the milkman not to deliver milk. Ooookay. But what happened if she hadn’t? Did he always just leave a carton of milk if there was no message? Every single day?
I assume it was a service you signed up for? Because surely every non-milk-using household couldn’t be bothered to stick whatever signal out every damn day?
Obviously, we never had this kind of delivery or I’d know this stuff. I do know that one house we lived in had this little metal box on the front porch with a name painted on it (Something or other Dairy.) It was roughly a one foot cube, maybe minimally insulated? It was there all the years we lived in the house, but no milk ever appeared in it. My mom used it as a “drop off” box – she’d put things into it that a friend was supposed to come by for (like a forgotten sweater) or her friends would leave whatever in it for her if no one was home.
We still had milk delivery up until I was about 14 years old. The milkman (never saw a woman make the delivery) would carry a rack of bottles when he came up to the milkbox and he often had additional products that we did not regularly receive (e.g., chocolate milk, whipping cream, etc.) just in case we wanted them. My mother would leave a note in the box if she needed something extra or if she needed to stop the deliveries while we were out of town. Once a month, the milkman would leave a bill in the milkbox to be paid by mail OR my mother could leave cash in the milkbox. She almost always left cash in an envelope to pay the bill.
Not my favorite version of the adv, but the only one I can find.
(OP: commonly, we just left out the number of empty bottles that we wanted replaced. But sometimes you wanted to be more specific, and left a note or filled out the form.)
Well, yes. Certainly over here, lots of shops (grocers, butchers and so on) ran delivery services for signed-up customers. WW2 and supermarkets dried up a lot of such business apart from milk until the internet. Milk delivery (and dairies often supplied other dairy products and bread) was organised by putting a note out in the returned empty bottles (e.g., the opening credits of Keeping Up Appearances).
And the fact of the milkman touring lots of houses when the husband was out at work gave rise to many a ribald joke
On this specifically, when I was young we were told many a tale - most of them probably true or true-ish - of the observant milkman who realised that the (elderly, frail) occupant must be sick, injured or dead behind the closed door because the full bottles were piling up and there was no note cancelling the order.
In some variations, the witless milkman (and postman, and newspaper delivery boy) keep delivering until a neighbour catches sight of the growing pile of deliveries and raises the alarm.
This is all very community minded and shows the right attitude - there was of course another side of bored neighbours drawing various salacious conclusions about unexpected milk cancellation. In this specific case, I like to imagine a curtain-twitcher ringing round her neighbours with the breathless news that Herman has cancelled his milk, that free spirited flibbertigibbet must have found some other young man to work her wicked ways on, and that in all probability the mid-week partying would mercifully be over.
My Dad was a milkman in Lorain, Ohio for a few years in the early 1950s. I even rode in the wagon a few times. It was horse drawn and the horse’s name was Prince. Yeah, I’m old. Prince knew the route by heart and when Dad got out at one house he would amble along for several houses where Dad would get back in the cab.
The customers would leave a note sticking out of an empty bottle.
Then he leased his own GM freezer truck and made more money because he could deliver frozen goods.
“No Milk Today,” by Graham Gouldman, a wonderful songwriter who had a ton of hits for British Invasion groups before forming 10CC, says only the women who lived at that address moved away and nobody had yet replaced her in the dwelling. (Otherwise the bottle would have been tossed.) The singer goes there every day just to pine. (Which he tells Mrs. Brown’s daughter not to do. Hard to take our own advice.)
Nice houses built in the early 1900s in this area had milk boxes built into the walls of the house. The milkman opened an outside panel, put the order onto a shelf and the housewife opened an inner panel in the kitchen to retrieve the goods. A note could be left for the next day’s delivery. Very efficient and it didn’t involve climbing the stairs to a porch to put the milk into a tin box or leave it at the door.
I didn’t know any of this until I became a summer floater delivering mail to a different route every day. By this time - late 60s/early 70s - milk delivery was obsolete, so these houses used the double door system for mail. Probably illegal, but rules were lax in the old Post Office. I had entire streets in which I delivered to the boxes on the side of a driveway. Someone had to tell me what to do because I had never seen one and was baffled by the total lack of normal mailboxes.
We lived about a mile from the dairy and had a metal-covered wood box. Delivery was usually before we had gotten up for the day. They used delivery trucks that were some 25 years old. One day as a young’un, I got into a parked truck and pressed the start button, causing the truck to lurch forward several feet, because I had no idea about clutches at that age.
There are still some people around us with milk delivery. In fact once when we did not get our delivery from FedEx (short version)
Our driver dropped it off at your house. We confirmed via GPS it was 123 Fake St.
No, we never got it.
You’re a fucking liar! (yes they used the F word) He put it in your milk box.
We don’t have a milk box but the people at 213 Fake St. do. Guess where, despite FedEx’s protestations, the package was delivered
Milk delivery lasted longer in some places than others. I remember it in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s it still accounted for about 30% of all milk consumed at home. Now it’s less than 1% of all consumed. I lived in the U.K. in the late 1980s. There was still a reasonable amount of milk delivered then. There’s less now but still some delivered.
As I said, we lived about a mile from the dairy that delivered milk et al to the area. It was right on the edge of the city, so delivery was fairly practical. In modern times, dairy products come from outlying areas – local dairies are just not a thing anymore. One operation about 2 miles from where I used to work had to relocate its herd because a large fancy apartment complex was built near our workplace and there were complaints about the smell (which did get quite rank when the wind was coming from that direction). Americans want the good stuff but they do not want to deal with how it Is produced.
In my rural community in Aotearoa New Zealand we had milk delivery until the early 80s, we’d leave empty bottles in a caddy and coloured tokens to indicate type and to pay for them. Later it shifted to us having to go to the corner store, as leaving milk outdoors tended to cause it to curdle. Or that was the reason given by the store owners.
Milk delivery still continues here, but it’s down to 3 days a week, and its all done online - no more putting out an envelope with the money or a cheque. And if you want to vary the order you have to do it online the night before, not leave a note for the milkman.
The house we lived in as a kid in the late 50s had a milk delivery box beside the side door (small town outside Toronto). I’ve noticed a number of older houses from the 50s and 60s in my current neighbourhood still have visible milk box doors.
We had a group dinner last night where a friend told us about his brief stint as a milkman in the early 1970s. He worked for the Altadena dairy, and on his first day on the job he was given the keys to dozens of near-mansions on Orange Grove Blvd in Pasadena. He would just let himself in while the family slept and put the milk in the refrigerator. And this was shortly after the Mansion murders.
