When I was a kid back in the 1960s, it was almost unthinkable to go anywhere to buy milk. Milk was something that was delivered to your home by a uniformed man in a van, and placed in your milk box. The bottles were glass (which went back in the milk box when empty, for later pickup), and the tops were wax paper pressed into shape over the bottle mouth. I remember in nursery school and kindergarten, those tops were regularly used for arts and crafts.

I remember it was a novelty to see milk at the grocery store. I think we kept getting deliveries till some time in the middle 1970s. We might have only stopped getting it because they stopped the service, forcing us to pick it up during grocery shopping trips.

son of bitch ran over my dog when i was a kid.

Had one as a kid. Probably stopped in the early 70's.

Gandy's Milk.

Me,
And the Thunderbox changer as the people over the road didn't have sewer yet, not like us rich fold on our side of the street.
John

I remember the milk cow. My dad and granddad milked cows, and put the milk in cans, where it was picked up by a truck. The milk we drank was straight from the cow, and I disliked it so much, that even to this day I don't drink milk. Later on, after we quit milking, and moved to a new house on the farm that was closer to the main highway, we had a milk man. Also had a dog that didn't like him, and he didn't like stopping because of that.

LMAO.
Damn, that's tough on a kid.
You'll never forget that, Roger.

And the Charles Chips delivery driver.

We had that, and a guy that sold cleaning products like bleach and laundry soap. Same deal, returnable bottles.

Like James, the milk truck stopped here to haul milk we sold.

Golden Grain would leave a couple gallon every week outside in a cold box they provided.
Wish I had that old box.

Must be an Australian thing.

I remember the bottles on the porchs AND how I tried to avoid hitting them when throwing the papers on my paper route!

Another thing I remember from the past is driving out to the local dairy and buying whole milk.

We'd take our own jugs.

Damn, but that was some great milk! Had to shake it up when you used it because the heavy cream would separate when sitting in the fridge...

Our USDA cured us all from that though.

My mom had the same story about milk from the cow. When she was a kid, her folks bought fresh milk from a neighbor who had a cow. She hated it. Thought it was too creamy, especially at the top, but was forced to drink it down. She regularly had to take cod liver oil, too, and despised it.

I remember it not fondly.
I and my brothers milked 3-6 cows twice a day, by hand. No fancy milk machines on our farm in western Ks. And we had a cream separator that we used to process all the milk. The cream was sold, the skimmed milk fed to pigs.
We kept out enough whole milk for us to consume.
I hated milking with a passion.

Dad.......Is that you?

Remember the milk man? For a few years my dad WAS the milk man. It didn't pay much but times were tough and any job was better than no job.

Yeah, we got those, too. Delivered in a big tin can.

We had one until the mid-70's. The last one we had was a really nice guy. We all got along well with him-- finally invited my dad and me to go fishing down at Dale Hollow. I still have our milkbox down the basement-- haven't figured out what to do with it. Back then, I was still growing, and putting down a gallon of 2% a day.

The milk man
Charles Chip man
and an old man who had a horse drawn wagon who would come around to sharpen scissors and knives.
My uncle would come in the summer and sell ice cream in neighborhoods....if I was lucky I got to go with him once
in while.....sitting on a cooler cause the truck only had one seat.

Rumor has it he fathered my younger brother.

Yeah we had one. Mom said she thought he had a thing going with one of the neighbor ladys. She'd never say who!

Oak Farms in Ft. Worth

Superior dairy in Austin

Any of you San Antonio crew remember Metzger's dairy???

LOL, I've been drinking only that kind of milk for ten or fifteen years now. By law, the bottles have to read "Not For Human Consumption," but its production and bottling method is much more stringent than that for pasteurized milk. Not pasteurized and not homogenized. The bottle has to be shaken before you pour. Cured my hay fever instantly, which was a lifelong plague for me prior to discovering raw milk.

I remember him. I also remember the ice man. I am pretty old.

No, silly...... You're thinking the mailman.

The Ice man? Do you get nostalgic while watching Three Stooges videos?
I watch them thinking that's how my parents grew up.

I temember grandmaw going to the dairy and buying little Holstein bull calves to put on her wet cows at times. She'd give like $2 or $3 for em. Sometimes mebbe less.

Wow. My folks remembered the ice man, but that was before my time.

And my aunt killed the Jersey milk cow one morning before leaving for school!!!

Yup. Brown Swiss ran until around 1978.

Dad drove tractor trailer for Brock-Hall Dairy and my uncle was our milk man. Milkmen drove Difco (spelling) trucks and could drive them standing up. Also no refrigerator the milk was packed in ice. Trailers were refrigerated and dad would be done by noon, and asleep by 1:00 or so. My uncle was medically unfit for the service during WWII and being a milkman was pretty lucrative. Refrigeration in stores and homes doomed his job ultimately but he retired with a pension after outliving 3 different dairies.

I remember our milk man delivered whole milk, real orange juice and butter but I sure don't recall home deliveries still being made beyond the mid-'50s. The whole milk would have a thin layer of rich cream floating on top.

Laundry trucks made home pickups and deliveries back then, too. Had an uncle who drove a home pick up and delivery truck for a laundry service that washed baby diapers only back when cloth diapers were the only kind available. He'd have his truck crammed full of big white draw string bags with more tied on the top and to the sides.

Used to have an elderly gentleman come through the neighborhood every once in a while pushing a hand cart with a bell ranging that sharpened kitchen knives, scissors, or whatever needed sharpening, He had the bell rigged where it would only ring whenever the cart was moving.

Our milk man had ice cream and/or orange juice too.

We had a milkbox on the porch and milkman until the mid 60’s. In the summer he would give us kids a chunk of ice if we would leave him alone..

I was the milkman for a lot of years.
We sold out the Brown Swiss herd in 88. I was 35 and had gotten tired of the grind.
We sold bottled gallon sized milk at the farm till the Feds put a stop to it, but mostly shipped on the Co-operative truck line in bulk. I wanted to farm crops and beef, but ended going to town and learning to program CNC equipment. Finally retired last summer.

Pelican Creamery. They had ice cream on the trucks. That was a rare treat.

I don’t remember the glass bottles, just the cartons.

I am.

What's interesting is that in some ways we are coming full circle. You can have just about anything, including chips and milk, delivered to your door and for a fair price.

Used to be pretty common back in the day when cows had been eating the green tops off of wild onions even store bought bottled milk smelled and tasted like wild onions.

Yup, I think they came in 1 quart glass bottles (could have been 1/2 gallon) with a paper pull tab for the lid. Now when I go to the grocery store I always grab 3 gallons for just my wife and I.


We might have gotten some cottage cheese once in a while too I think.

I can still remember his name, Marvin Marsh.

We skimmed that cream off of the top and made butter. I loved milk then, and still do today. Todays milk is not as good as that direct from the cow. Even processed milk today is not as good as it was 20 years ago. I think that I heard/read that they remove all butterfat and then put back what % they need for that jug. miles

Yes, the milk man, the ice man, the Mason Shoes guy and the insurance guy that would drop by every month. Grit newspaper also.

"Used to be pretty common back in the day when cows had been eating the green tops off of wild onions even store bought bottled milk smelled and tasted like wild onions."

Did Y'all have bitterweeds? miles

In the mid 60's we moved to a new city and had just flown in the night before. We were hungry in the morning and there wasn't a crumb of food in the house. Somehow the milkman knew there was a new family in the neighborhood and he left a free box of doughnuts and 1/2 a gallon of milk on the doorstep as an introduction. I can still remember how good the chocolate covered cake doughnut and glass of milk tasted.

We still have a milkman but since the kids are all out on their own now, no need for milk delivery.

I lived both in town and on farms at different times as a kid. and knew both ends of milk delivery.
Always drank raw milk on the farm. Loved it. My sister did not.
When we stayed at Granddad's, he separated his milk and sold the cream. In little cream cans; much smaller then our milk cans.

Plus you can buy a funky looking tall utility van that looks similar to the old milk trucks.

HA! My Dad was the Milk Man in the mid to late 60’s for Crystal Dairies here in the Central Valley of Kalifornia.

Constantly joke with him about brothers and Sister coming out of the wood work when he dies to collect. As he gets older he’s not laughing as much though.😳

Milk man did not make rural delivery.


Grandpa and great Grandpa were milk men...sort of.

Haul milk and cream to town to buy groceries.

That's a cool memory.

Once in a while my Mom would buy us boys some chocolate milk in pint bottles.I think they had strawberry also.I remember the iceman would take his ice pick and pick out chunks of ice and gave them to the kids to suck on when it was hot out.There was also the ragman who rode down the alleys shouting out for discarded rags.Then there was the guy who had a cart drawn by a donkey with a grind stone that sharpened scissors and knives plus the junk man who picked up scrap metal.Crap I'm old.

I remember my grandma would milk her old cow before sunup and bring a bucket full of warm milk still steaming on chilly mornings into her kitchen and strain the nastiness off by pouring the raw milk through layers of cheese cloth. There was some awfully nasty looking stuff sometimes too. She hand churned butter, made butter milk and slopped the hogs with leftovers which by then was pretty much nothing but skim milk

We had Noah's

My uncle ran the last small Grade A dairy in Missouri, probably the country, until they sold the cows and retired. Up until the late '80s they'd still deliver to homes, too. They made the transition from glass bottles to plastic jugs (I can remember them washing those damned glass bottles every day)., and later, they had to quit deliveries and just sell to the local grocery stores. They covered three counties in N/C Missouri, and people said drinking their milk was like drinking ice cream, it was so rich.

You can't get good milk like that now.

I can only remember the Mormons coming around on their 10speed bikes. Us kids called them "The Morons"

We got thier bikes once while they were several houses down. We pushed their bikes off down a steep hill and they crashed into a sewer ditch. Hahahahaha.

Haha! Great description.

Our milk man would leave me a chocolate milk every Saturday morning along with the regular order, that was something to look forward to. I also remember the Standard Coffee guy, the Avon lady, the vacuum cleaner salesman and some other peddlers that would be in the area.

My grandfather was the milkman,he worked for dellwood here in n.y. for 27 years and retired in 1972.
i have a vivid memory of him picking me up from school when i was sick in the div co stand up truck.
he put me in a blanket in his ford falcon,and i watched him shovel out the ice into a big pile before he took me home

At least one dairy still delivers just like then:
https://www.royalcrestdairy.com/

Yep, 'til the mid-50s, you left a note in the empty glass bottles telling how much to leave tomorrow. Quart bottles.

In elementary school, milk was still in 1/2 pint glass bottles. Lunch room supervisor came out one day and announced that breakage was a problem and replacement jars cost $0.02 each, so any one who broke a bottle would be sent to the Principals office. Luck would have it, that very day I dropped and broke my bottle. Didn't have to go to the principals office. 200 kids threw their bottles on the floor also. Next day milk came in waxed cardboard cartons.

In high school, lunch was $0.50 and you paid the cashier as you entered the line. No money, no lunch. Extra milk was $0.03.

Our next door neighbor was the milkman for Old Home Milk Co. He also delivered eggs and ice cream. I remember when they went from glass bottles to the square-top cardboard containers.

Old Home sponsored a free Saturday morning movie for kids at the Crest Theater in Reno. Admission was two carton top opening disc inserts from their milk. We would write our names on the discs for the drawing for a Schwinn bike every week.

This is back when Saturdays and kids' events were special occasions every week.We weren't desensitized by the glut of mass media kids are exposed to now. I hate the digital age and even this computer.

My great uncle drove the last horse-drawn milkwagon in Denver.....

In elementary, we paid for our milk, but not for the hot lunch. Hot lunches were great back then. Many times better than the crap public schoolers get for hot lunch today.

Fish every friday?

Milk had gone up to a dime by the time I was in grade school.


I got pinched for taking an extra milk that I could not pay for.


I got two weeks of scrubbing lunch tables instead of recess.


First day of reporting for scrubbing duty the lunch lady asked what the hell was I doing there. I should be outside playing she said.


Told her the principal said I had to wash tables for two weeks for taking a milk.


She said BS....go outside to play.

As a kid in the 40s - our milk man delivered thrice a week in a short/high Divco truck and set the bottles in that box on the front steps. In cold weather the milk might start to freeze and, if it did, the cream at the top of the bottle would push that round lid upwards and we would have a short tower of cream above the top of the bottle. I loved finding that. Our bread guy used a horse-drawn wagon and delivered twice a week - Bond bread products. The ice guy also came by in a horse-drawn rig - kept the ice covered with burlap sacks. And, the "rag man" (junk collector) - an old Jewish fellow in an overcoat driving a horse-drawn wagon rode down our back alley once a week constantly yelling something like "addy addy yay" which I eventually came to understand as "any old rags?". We would run out and stop him if we had some scrap iron/steel or old rags to sell - seems like we only got pennies for the stuff. Where did all of those good scenes go?

Yup, and the milk chute as well which was a great way for kids to get in/out of the house. Even remember when doctors made house calls on a routine basis!

We got milk delivered up to last year when we cancelled the service. Milk, butter, eggs..........we’d get cheese and muffins as well.

Cheaper to buy at Costco and with the new baby coming we cut costs.

Probably a few babies came from the milkman

Pop converted an old Divco into an RV. Lots of memories growing up in that old truck. Don’t hear of them hardly at all anymore.

He sold it to a fella down in Dothan AL in the late 80’s. Wonder if it’s still around.

In school, the cafeteria ladies were absolutely the salt of the earth. I still remember them well. They were ALL old ladies, and they could damn sure cook!

I guess I'm lucky to have gone to school where I did. They put it the best meals I can remember getting on a regular basis.

And those old ladies always made enough for you to go back for seconds! Bless them! (There were kids there that I'm convinced just didn't get near enough to eat at home.)

I jazz a close friend of mine about that. His older brother has a full head of black hair, and he tans easily. My friend's hair was blonde when he still had it, he is fair and sunburns. His younger sister has brown hair and tans easily. His youngest sister is blonde, fair skinned and sunburns.

So I ask him was it milk, mail, milk, mail or mail, milk, mail, milk?

Milk man and the bakery/bread guy that rode thru the neighborhood in a panel truck blowing a whistle to let you know he was there.

I was a milkman for about a year. Ran two city routes. Twice a week on one and three times on the other one. . I was in very good shape because I usually ran or fast walked most of the day. Over two hundred stops on each, best I remember. Had to know the houses from the back as I drove the alleys behind the houses and could hit two streets at once.

I could drink all the chocolate milk and eggnog I wanted, company policy. You have to get up very early! I 'd finish the route by around 2pm, then go try to pick up more customers.

Not a long term career job, at least not for me.

Grew up on a farm milking cows by hand and selling cream so I've been on both ends of the milk industry.

I think doctors stopped making house calls in the 1970s.

We had our milk delivered growing up, I remenber going from a wooden milk box to a steel insulated box finally to an aluminum insulated box. Eggs were delivered door to door by an old German gentleman, Mr. Spinler he gave my sister and I each a nickel to buy a candy bar each time he delivered eggs. The knife grinder made his rounds to sharpen the knives from the mom & pop stores that had meat counters and the greasy spoon restaurant on the corner. Insurance man came every month to collect premiums and the umbrella man would call from time to time for umbrella repairs. The iceman made deliveries to the mom & pop grocery stores and gave all the neighborhood kids ice chips in the hot summer weather. The junk man drove a horse drawn wagon with a string of cowbells to announce his coming and then there was the huckster crying out what kinds of produce he had for sale on his truck. This was all during the 50's and early 60's, most had died out by the mid 60's when most everything was store bought.

Yeah, I remember the milkman. My Dad was one back in the early '50s. Small town, local dairy, start early, out late. Went along with him if I was awake before he left . . . gave Mom some alone time before my sister came along.

Absolutely. Left milk in galvanized box on the front porch.

I remember the milk man, or should I say the milk boy.
It was me, I carried a jug of milk from the milk processing room in the barn to the kitchen.

Been buying almost all of our milk at a local Walmart for a good while now typically priced at any where from .88 cents to $1.25 a gallon due to a discount grocery store that opened in the same town and started selling milk at .99 cents a gallon and continues to keep it within a few cents +/- of that price.

Times sure have changed..

In the spring of the year, when the onions first began to grow, that was a common thing. It was also the only time I didn't have to drink milk. I loved it when my grandpa came in the house..."the cows have been in the onions again." I also could dodge drinking milk if we had fish to eat, because the old folks had a superstition about that.

And, supposedly, from the mailman as well.

Ditto. "Mr. Jackson". The milk was packed in crushed ice and sometimes in the summer he'd give us kids little chunks of ice to eat although most times we'd just throw them at each other.

Our dog Candy bit him on the ankle one day. He was at the kitchen door talking to my mom and he stepped toward her to hand her the milk and Candy lunged and nipped him good. I was a few yards away and remember he said a bad word and wasn't real happy about that, but this was before the days of lawsuits for everything so nothing came of it.

So you're old enough to remember ice delivery, then?

We had all kinds of delivery people in our town. The milk man, egg man, the local laundry would pick up and deliver your dry cleaning. The Charles' Chips guy was weird. He would let himself into the house whether anybody was home or not. Also, the local clothing and shoe stores had people who would go around collecting for the suit, dress, & shoe clubs. You gave them a dollar or whatever a week towards credit in their stores so when you needed something it was already paid for. I used to deliver groceries for my Dad's little market too. I wish we could go back to those days.

No. I grew up in the 1960s and '70s. Americans had been using electronic refrigeration and freezers since the 1940s. My folks remembered ice deliveries, though.

Yes I was one!! Cheers NC

Heck, we still have milk deliveries in our neighborhood. We had a hot divorcee living two doors up who used to get "the service" on Mondays around 8 p.m. every week. Funny thing is, Johnny the Milk Man finished his route at 7:00. 'Guess he had to stop back to drop a load of non-dairy creamer!

Our local dairy stopped door to door delivery in the late 60's, was the beginning of the end for our small town dairy.

No,I meant Jim.

Interesting that there were so many people who'd fix things back then, like umbrellas. That was before we became a disposable society. Today, umbrellas are made so cheaply that you expect them to fail after a couple of years, and they're cheap enough that you throw it away and get a new one. Same with just about everything. Toaster stops working? Toss it and buy a new one.

Back then, keeping things running was a way to make a living. Everybody wasn't chomping at the bit to get the latest version of everything. Telephones were made to last, basically, forever, for example. In the 1960s, we bought a GE upright freezer unit, and it was still working well into the 1990s. I don't recall anyone ever coming to repair it, either. It spent the second half of its existence in the garage, but still plugged in and still used. I don't think 30 years of operational life is typical anymore with these units.

My grandfather used to go apechit ballistic if you had the refrigerator open for more than 5 seconds. Hahaha

My have been some psychosis held over from the "ice days"

I remember the bottle. My mother used to pour off the cream on top to use for coffee.

We still have a small local dairy that sells milk in glass bottles although they don't deliver. Bottles are no longer made so when he can't get used ones, he has to switch to plastic.

This is a huge dairy area. We have over 1/2 million cows within 75 miles of here. Some dairies have as many as 10k cows and 5k dairies are common. They milk around the clock, using a very large amount of illegal labor. Now they breed the cows with what you might call GMO semen. They've genetically altered the semen so only X chromosomes are present. A heifer calf is worth $500 or while a bull calf is only worth about $50.
Almost all the milk goes into cheese and other manufactured foods. Needless to say, they don't deliver door to door.

Myself and my entire family, in-laws included are part of that generation. Build anything, fix anything, won't pay anyone to do any type of repair work.

Guess that's why I butt-heads with imbeciles on here that question me when about building a custom home for less than $100 sq ft. Because we do most all the work ourselves inside the family with several licenses among us.

We used to get milk in small milk cans that had a rubber hose at the bottom. Bring it into the house and put into the “milk machine”. It was a small refrigerated cabinet that held two cans and when you needed milk you took a pitcher, pulled out the appropriate knob and filled said pitcher. Think they switched over to the glass gallon containers in th mid 60s. Funny how some things still stick in your mind. Dave

Family lived in Southern California during the war years. There was a popular song then "MILK MAN, KEEP THOSE BOTTLES QUIET!"

We had a milk man up until 1982 or 83.

Still have an old McColl's Dairy truck deliver milk to the little old lady down the street once a week.

Here's what they looked like when I was little.

Electronics is a big part of that. Not every shade tree repairman can fix some of the electronic stuff. I've bought stuff that can't be repaired because the company won't sell new chips or boards for them. You have to buy a whole new unit.

In Oklahoma City the local Townley's dairy provided the milk.

The milkman would walk right into the kitchen while we were eating breakfast with his milk, chocolate milk, and orange juice. Us kids would beg mom to buy some chocolate milk and orange juice. He would sometimes sit down at the table, at mom's insistence, and eat some breakfast. As he was getting ready to leave, he would walk over to the refrigerator and reach on top for the check. Good old days.

Sure do remember the delivery and the Bottles were marked " Jersey and Guernsey Milk " . Not as good as fresh on our Farm , but close . After moving from the Country , for many years I used to buy Farm fresh from one of the Farmers for 50 Cents a Gallon every weekend . We raised Chickens among other things and as a kid I helped my Uncle collect a wood carrybox full of Chickens and haul them into town . My Uncle had a 49 Pontiac which he kept in immaculate condition . My relatives lived in the Italian section of town and those Ladies wanted to see Live , Active Chickens . They would grab the Chicken they wanted , my Uncle would give them a price , and then they would fling the Chicken between their knees ....... squeeze it , then ring its neck , throw it on the ground until it stopped flopping around , and then take it home to cook . We would sell maybe 15 Chickens in a half hour . Just imagine what would happen if someone tried that today ! Them were the good ol days .

All of my early life state law required that milk sold in the state had to be produced in the state. Milk was usually from $3-$4 a gallon then. Some time in the early 70s the law was changed and milk could be brought in from out of state. Prices went down for a while. Now milk runs about $3.50 a gallon, just like the old days.

Archie Bunker. He had to have surgery and the doctor was a black woman. You can imagine the fun they had with that. Archie stared at her and asked if she was a real doctor. She said "Only during the day, Honey. At night I strangles chickens for the Colonel."

Just like the rest of the older crowd, we had whole milk delivered by horse and wagon. Milk was put in the milk chute where a note and change for tomorrow was left. During the winter if there was no one home the cream would be a couple inches above the bottle by the time it was brought inside. Our ice for the ice box(chest) was also delivered all year round by horse and wagon at first but there were trucks filled with sawdust to keep the ice from melting that replaced them. Never drank milk after they replaced real milk. We always made our own ice cream. Just one of the advantages of living in Canada in an igloo

I remember the home delivery of milk up until the early to mid 60's and our insulated aluminum (?) milk box but all the older homes had the milk box built right into the wall next to the side door as a pass through. Most of those older built in milk boxes are still there but you can't see 'em from outside because over the years the houses got re-sided with aluminum or vinyl and they just sided over them. Couple years ago I was reading something about those little old Divco milk delivery trucks that were so common. "DIVCO" was an acronym for " Detroit Industrial Vehicle Co." and they were powered by small Continental industrial engines but I don't recall where the rest of the drive train was sourced from. The Charles Chips potato chip delivery was pretty common circa early 60's and up until the late 50's or so we had a guy with a truck that would drive very slowly down the street ringing bells that sounded like the ice cream truck, (remember those?) but he was the guy who sharpened anything from scissors & knives to axes. He only came around in summer because that's when all the windows were open ( nobody had A.C.) and he knew people would hear him coming. My parents both grew up during the depression with ice boxes and I've heard all the ice man stories like how they could get free ice to chew on in the summer. Guy I worked for in the 70's who was about my dad's age got his foot run over by the ice man's horse drawn wagon in the mid 30's or so. Speakin' about ice boxes, that's probably why my parents and other folks from that era would freak out if us kids took longer than 3 to 5 seconds to open the fridge, put in or remove something, and get the door closed.

They may think so but not everyone is on board with that. Same deal we take our own gallon glass jugs shake the cream up. If you never had milk like that you have no idea how good real milk tastes.

My grandfather raised chickens and pigs, and had the whole property planted, along with a grape vine for jelly. My mom told me how her mom (grandma) would go out, grab a chicken, and wring its neck like it was nothing.

Except you can only buy twenty cents worth of anything else with that $3.50 now.

Had a great aunt & uncle with a small dairy herd and lots of chickens....... I never saw it or was too young to remember but my great aunt was the one who would go out and grab a chicken and chop its head off. My mom said that when she was a kid it was a real show to see the headless chicken running around for a few seconds. Had another great aunt that regularly made chicken wings back during the depression when the money was so scarce. Some sources I've seen claim chicken wings were created circa early 60's or so but long before that they were just something that poor folks made on a regular basis because they didn't want to waste anything edible. Getting back to the milk man topic; the only time I recall having real milk right from the cow was in the mid 1970's when one of my girl friends families had a couple cows.

I am the milk man around here. Often my daughter and oldest son milk, too.
This year we will have our cow plus two heifers in milk, if all goes well. We don't need three milk cows, so we will sell two. Let me know if you want to buy a cow.

Will a pet milk cow let bum calves nurse?


That would be sweet for calving time.

It will! And it would help at calving time!

Just think, you could ride that one to gather the heifers...

Betcha he may throw the saddle in for a 'Fire member..

As much as a bag of milk cost the milk cow would probably pay for herself in short order!

Around here the best selling cow was always a stump broke Jersey heifer.

We moved off the farm to the suburbs at the end of WWII. The milkman drove a horse drawn wagon and what amazed me was the horse knew the route. It would stop at the houses that were on the route without any guidance from the milkman. On hot summer days the kids would gather around the wagon and the milkman would chip off a chunk for each kid from the ice blocks in the back of the wagon that kept the milk cold. A couple times a week the street sweeper would come by to sweep up the horse $hit in the street. That was in the mid 1940's

Ya young whippersnapper.

You remember American Bandstand? Howdy Doody? Chewin' on your pencil in 2d grade?

Some right here at the Fire would go for one

I'll bet you before it's over someone asks what "stump broke" means...

The original Col. Sanders was a guest on Johnny Carson show years ago and when Johnny asked him what his favorite part of a chicken to eat was he said,"the wings".

An old codger I used to know that was prone to joke around a lot and tell a few whoppers too said back in his day grown ups ate first and kids ate last. He claimed it wasn't until he was a grown up himself and got to eat first that he found out there was more to a chicken than just the boniest parts.

I remember having bread delivered to the country also. I do remember that at the table boys got second helpings before the girls did.

Ours lets anyone nurse, any time. We got sick of milking outside in winter. We can't dry her off until May. We bought a bull calf from a local dairy to handle milking for the rest of the winter. Here they are the morning after we brought him home.


She also will give us milk and feed a calf.


She was giving us 8 gallons a day last summer. It fed her calf, us, 4 pigs, and supplemented any other calf that was hungry.

Damn!


I bet she has a healthy appetite!


Sweet little cow.

If I were to have a milk cow, it'd be a little Jersey like that one.

I reckon I'm just too lazy to have a milk cow.

Yeah, I doubt many city boys ever knew much about that. I heard a guy say that his first girlfriend broke up with him, when she kicked him off the bucket.

I would rather ask what "stump broke" is


Than explain it.

Kaywoodie, she killed the cow? Come on man, tell the story.







Ritchie's Dairy, Martinsburg Pa. Still home delivers, the best products around here. Their milk is processed, but it is the closest to what I used to get from the bulk tank that I have ever had.



There are some farm to table, dope smokin' hippie types who are permitted to sell fresh milk around here.
I will not buy it. The burner types don't inspire sanitation concerns, and there are real concerns. Also, they are special, of course, and their products are real $pecial.

I do..also remember the "ice box" we placed the milk in...and the "ice man". Unlike the milk man who came every day, the ice man came every 4 days.

You do make a good point.

neighbors had milk, bread and snacks delivered. their house was like fuggen disney land to us poorer kids. they had candy, chips, pop, dirt bikes, christmas gifts out the wazoo, you name it. funny thing is all the kids looked different, and i mean real different, and the old man worked like 2 jobs 7 days a week. never saw him. i'm thinking the milk and bread men were delivering more than milk and bread.

We had a milkman until I was about 10. We moved to a rural area, and had to stop by the local dairy for milk. When I was about 16, I started working at a small dairy. Milked 35-40 head morning and evening. They would send as much home as I needed every day. My mother sure loved all that sweet cream off of the top of the milk.

Miles, when I was a kid, at the end of winter, the farmers would clean out all of their cellars. Potatoes, beets, onions... what ever root vegetables had been in storage through the winter. They would feed them to the cows. Made for some interesting flavors once in a while.


Jeff

Yeah, a lot of cuts of meats that used to be what poor people ate because they were inexpensive have become expensive because everybody started making them, so there's less supply available.

I remember the milkman coming by motor vehicle, and my sibling remembers the milkman on horse and cart
coming down the street with large pails on the back from which one got their household serve of 'moo juice'...

Fresh to you, from dairy land
Try our milk in the little red can
No tits to squeeze nor hay to pitch
Just punch a hole in the son-of a-bitch.

"Kaywoodie, she killed the cow? Come on man, tell the story."

She was about 10 or 11. And grandmaw and grandpaw generally always had 3 milk cows. A Jersey, and Guernsey, and a Holstein. This old Jersey biotch was typical Jersey. Always wait for you to finish milking and try to side kick you or whatever. PITA.
Naturally she gave good milk. Well, she finished milking and my aunt couldn't get bucket up fast enough Before the biotch side kicked it all over her. Well she picked up a piece of 2x4 or some kinda wood that grandpaw had layin' against the side of the barn and hauls off an waylaid her up side her head. Old biotch hit the dirt. Wont get up. She goes in and tells grandpaw "I think I just killed the old Jersey!" He comes Out and takes a look. Shonuff. Old gal is dead as Julius Caesar!! They both spent the day butchering her! LOL. Now a family legend!

Dastardly deed occured at left end of this barn. That's a young Kaywoodie with his grandpaw on the tractor, circa 1958!

KDub, that right there is America.....

Thanks Sam! Later, I remember riding with him up to the highway to get the mail on that old tractor. About a mile ride. He was a neat old man! His name was Cassius!

Wings was poor mans food? My great aunt cooked the feet too. Never tried them. Couldn't figure out what part of it to eat.

I remember when my Grandpa was the milkman. He would come in with a bucket before he went to work and came in with a bucket when he got done for the day.

I remember being on a churn thinking it was a helluva lot easier at home where we bought our butter. That's some pretty deep thinking for a five year old.

Good story Kaywoodie. One thing much worse than a Jersey cow, the flippin' bulls.
Never a question of if a Jersey bull is mean.
He is mean, and he would like to kill you.

Dayom, they didnt know what 2% was when I was a kid, Sha.

Girls got all the good parts and half the money too, and they still couldnt find anything that would keep them happy even though they could have had fun and good feelings every day.

I was a participant in a large training exercise in Texas in the mid '80s. Following the TrainX several of us ended up in the Nuevo Laredo boystown.

I awakened the next morning in the blazing sun w/ my head resting on a dog on someones back porch to the sound of the milkman's clanking bottles. I staggered around the house to see him placing an icy 1/2 gallon of O.J. in the neighbor's box across the street.

Displaying far more stealth than I had of the TrainX I flowed across the street, exchanged a $20.00 bill for the O.J. and skulked back to the dog. That milkman saved my life.


mike r

We have local delivery here. Pricey, but damn it's good. Makes it easy to empty a box of Girlscout cookies too...

An older member of my family was a milk man that owned the local milk company. Lots of daughters were born around that time............ He had 3 daughters and lots of folks in the surrounding area had all daughters. Dunno haha

That's what we did, since we had no milk delivery in the country. We skimmed the cream off and churned butter. My mom would buy 4 gallons every three or four day (three boys drank a lot).

I remember the milk man from Pure Milk. We only bought ice cream off him though. We got our milk from cows and goats that we milked.

I remember:
The milk man
The bread man
The oil man
The fuller brush man
The Avon lady

We bought our milk from a local dairy for 50 cents per gallon. Also I grew up when televisions had tubes that were always burning out. The tv repairman would come by with a big fold out box full of tubes. Remember how the vertical hold would go out and the picture would start to roll?

Those were the great old days.

My Grandfather was a milkman before I was born, but I sure remember his many stories.

He was a milkman in Chicago when they still used the horse drawn vans. He loved that job as it gave him the opportunity to do his two favorite things every day. Care for horses and shoot the chit with neighbors and friends.

He told me many times how, if he was spending too much time talking at a stop the horse would move on to the next stop and he'd have to run after it. Guess he had a stubborn horse as he said it would take several days to get the horse used to stopping at a new place.

All good things must end for "progress" I guess and when they dropped the horses and went to trucks he found a new line of work.

Grandparents had 3 cows and 50 chickens. Grandma would churn and make butter and buttermilk. Sure drank a lot of buttermilk when i stayed there summers. Every Saturday morning they loaded up the old jeep and delivered butter and eggs. Any left over eggs they sold to the local store.They couldn't sell milk because they were told they needed a new floor put in where they milked. Gramps said no way was he putting in a new floor so the pig got a lot of milk.
Grandma had 2 big gardens and grew about everything they needed. Only remember them buying sugar and flower. Any bull calves that were born were kept for a while and then in the freezer it went. She got new chickens every 2 years. Butchered how many of the old ones she wanted and sold the rest. Had pork, beef or chicken with potatoes and home grown veggies for every meal.
Yes i do remember the milk man delivering milk to the neighbor but that was 35-40 years ago.

Had a little Jersey bull that was mean as hell!!! His momma was a wild as any cape buff! Wifey called me at work one day as two Old Black men wanted to buy the bull! Made her a price over phone and they took it! Them old fellas got him loaded and carted off in no time! LOL

LMAO

You know there's a good country song in that! Gotta be!

I still have our old galvanized milk box. For years, working at UPS, I thought about making it a lunch box. Those "Brown Trucks" can get up to 130* in the back during summer. The box is insulated and I thought it would be cool, and keep my lunch cool. I never tried it, was afraid some one would steal it or get bashed up. Now I keep clean shop rags in it. I do remember the milk truck running through the neighborhood. They still used big ice blocks to cool it. The milk man would chip off chunks and give them to us in the summer. Was a better treat than ice cream, Joe.

In 1956 I was 5 years old and spent a month on my grandparent's farm in Bristol VA.

My grandmother milked her 7 cows and put the can out front of the house, where it was picked up by the milk man who, at the same time, dropped off bottles of milk we drank.

They had no running water, no electricity, no car, no tractor.

They pulled up water with a rope from their well.
They used kerosene lamps for light and cooked on a wood stove, and took a dump in the outhouse.
They walked to get places.
They had two plow horses.
They had a tabaco patch for money. I helped weed it.

Looking at the 1940 Census, my grandmother was married at 12 and gave birth at 14.

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.

Sounds like the bread man had a good deal going for awhile!

Lots of jokes about that for a while.

Never had a Milk Man, but we use to have what we called the Bread Man come to the house once a week. He sold bread, & rolls and such. Remember it was a treat for us kids as Mom would let each of us get a candy bar of our choosing. Later we also had the Schwan man stop by every week or every other week. He always had a special on something like breaded tenderloins or ice cream or something. All this was back in the early 60s. I still see Schwan trucks on the road time to time so they must do home delivery .

I checked on Schwan's not too long ago.

There sure ain't no bargains to be found there. While it would be nice to have some of their stuff to pop into the oven, I am not about to pay their prices for it. I could go into town and eat at Roadhouse cheaper...

May be but I really don't believe he was. This was back around 1970 or so when he told me. He and his siblings worked there during high school and while in college. Made a lot of sense to me when you think about the pluses of powdered versus liquid regarding shelf and storage life, need for constant refrigeration, adding vitamins, transportation costs, more accurate and consistent quality, bacterial contamination, and can be used in many other dairy based products besides just liquid milk too (they also made their own brand of ice cream, half and half, chocolate and butter milk, etc.).

Remember as a kid both sets of grandparents had a lot of these in their cupboards.

Since my dad was a milk man they had full sets with pitchers.

No one knows where they went after Grandparents passed.

Buncha lying relatives. I still randomly search their cabinets at get together s under the guise of looking for a water glass.