Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Who's Old Enough To Remember The Milk Man?

There was be a tube testing machine in the drugstore. Dad was handy with electronics before the age of the integrated circuit, and I remember going to the Katz&Besthoff store to test suspect tubes with him.

My grandfather had a flock of chickens, probably about 75-100 laying hens. Every Friday night, he would go to the basement, clean the eggs, and put them into cartons. On Saturday morning, he my grandmother would head to town, and deliver those eggs to customers that they had been selling to for years......at 50 cents a dozen. After the eggs were delivered, they would go to several grocery stores, always looking for the best prices. One of the groceries would save their old produce that had gone bad, and give it to my grandfather for his chickens. The last stop would be the co-op, where he would buy chicken feed. They did that every Saturday, never missing one. I'd sometimes go with them, and can remember the trip home, where we'd have bologna sandwiches and a banana for lunch.

That was back in the 1950's and 60's.......a totally different era from the one we live in now. My grandparents were old school, and the best grandparents a kid could have ever had.

We were too poor to get the hot lunch. My mother packed a brown bag everyday and we bought these little half pints of milk in a triangular box thing for $.03. I remember when the price went up to $.05. My mother almost had a heart attack.

Our town was too small for milk delivery. We did have the Fuller Brush Man and the Culligan Man.

Not particularly handy with electronics myself but have done the same a few times back in the '60s and '70s. They worked fine for testing small basic most common tubes. Anything beyond that though you were still dead in the water. It's been a long time but IRCC you simply matched up the type, size and pin configurations of the tubes you wanted to test to their like receptacles on the machine and turned it on. The tube testing machines usually had an assortment of new replacement tubes in a storage cabinet beneath the machine itself. Hopefully there would be the replacement tube you needed in stock because often the same tubes were the ones to go bad most frequently.

If Dad needed to get serious he could. He had built vacuum tube Ham radios from loose parts.

We still have a company that delivers here in So. Idaho. My grandparents house had a metal ring poured in the curb in front of their house. He told me it was to tie the milkman horse wagon too while he delivered.

We had Thompson's Dairy. The milk box was galvanized with Styrofoam inside. We got 1/2 gallon glass bottles with the paper cap.

When we'd go on vacation, my mother would call the dairy and stop the deliveries for that period of time. I remember one time we went away for a week in the summer time. I guess she forgot to call them, or the milkman delivered anyway, but when we got home something smelled real bad. Looked in the milk box and there were three 1/2 gallon bottles in there that looked like some kind of science project from outer space. The milk curdled and blew the tops off and expanded into this weird looking glob of cottage cheese.

"My daddy was a milkman" Kentucky Headhunters ;]

Turn it up!

Them guys were the duck’s nuts way back when! Good stuff!

Still kicking some butt!

I remember the beer truck stopping at the people’s house down the street. They drank a lot of beer, Jax as I recall.

This was a plea for quiet to forestall COITUS INTERUPTUS.

When I was a kid half the neighbors had the Smith Farms milkman, and half had the Darigold milkman.

A friend who's family had owned a local brand name milk and dairy product processing plant told me once that all of their milk came in in a powder form and was reconstituted into liquid again at the factory then bottled with their family brand label.

I think he was pulling your leg.

That would be like adding the heavier distillates back into gasoline to make diesel...

Cost prohibitive.

One of my uncle's owned a small dairy supplied by their farm just outside of Des Moines back in the day of the glass bottles and foil sealed tops. Before I got very old he sold out to AE dairies in Des Moines. He made the best homemade ice cream I have ever had before and since and brought it every other Sunday when the family got together at my Grandmothers house and for every special event. I still make it today.

On the flip side to all this Dairy Stuff...

I have a good friend that grew up on a dairy. He and his brother both left home when they were just legally able to... 17, I believe.

To hear the hatred those two have towards anything having to do with a dairy was eye opening as to the work they had to put in. He said they were made to get out of bed at 3:30am, milk the cows, do the chores, clean up, then go to school, then do the same thing in the afternoon... 7 days a week. Unless there was no school that day. Then they got to work ALL day.

All I can add to this is when I was old enough to join the military I did.
Boot camp was a stroll in the park on a nice spring day compared to what I was use to.

That sounds about par. I grew up on a dairy farm. Fortunately my dad was in charge of the hay and corn operation and another guy did the milking. Dad only had to do the milking when the old guy was sick or gone on a trip. I hated having to help with the dairy part. There was one cow that I swear would wait until you were directly behind her and unload a nasty load of fresh manure straight at you.

On another note, I remember Bunny bread had residential routes. There was this one bread guy who got in trouble for trading bread for sex. It made the local news. Our milk came from my grandfather's farm. I had to walk down the lane to his house and pick up the gallon glass jar and take it back home when I got in from school.