Auroraadvocate.com - The Way It Was: Remembering the old days of milk bottles, delivery

by John Sraka

Correspondent

Our cold winter weather reminds me of bottles of milk delivered to our front porch by the milkman.

If not taken indoors promptly, the milk would freeze, expand and push the cardboard cap up about a half inch or more. Milk bottles with raised caps were a common sight in cold weather 75 years ago.

Before home delivery of bottled milk, a man with a large container of milk in a horse-drawn wagon came down the street and housewives came out with their own containers to buy milk.

The man used a ladle, or dipper to transfer the milk from his large container to their small jars or pitchers. In England, the man rode a bicycle with an attached container.

Some families had an insulated box on the porch for their delivered milk. The box delayed freezing.

Later on, houses were made with a built-in milk chute and you could get your milk without even opening the porch door, just like a mail chute.

In very cold weather, even a milk chute didn't prevent the milk from freezing.

Home delivery of milk was just one of the many home delivery services until the automobile and the self-serve supermarkets came along.

The milkman usually wore a white uniform with a cap and a black bow tie. He carried six or eight quart bottles in a wire basket and exchanged full bottles for empties.

THE GLASS bottles carried a cash deposit and if you broke a bottle you lost the deposit. Every bottle had a company name and would be returned to its dairy to be washed, sterilized and refilled.

After being filled, a cardboard cap was pressed into a groove to seal the bottle and those caps were difficult to remove. They had to be pried out.

If not done properly, milk would splash out all over everything. Removing the cap became easier when dairies added a tab to the cap to help get it out of the bottle.

At first, the caps were plain white. When they were printed with information and advertising, they became collectors items. At least one company covered the entire top of their bottles with an outer layer of paper.

For a brief time, milk came in amber bottles that were supposed to keep the sunlight from spoiling the milk.

The Belle Vernon company sold its milk in cream-top bottles that were smaller in diameter at the point where the cream separated from the milk.

By using a special spoon, that separation point could be closed and the cream could be poured off to be used in baking or in coffee.

Homogenization prevents the cream from rising to the top of a bottle today and I'll bet not many people have ever seen cream separated from the milk.

I remember when milk came in waxed cardboard containers and a time when selling milk in plastic bags was tried.

That idea was a flop. Just fill a plastic bag with water and try to pour some from the bag into a cup and you will see why the idea didn't work.

THERE ONCE was a law in Cleveland that made it illegal to sell milk in containers larger than one quart. Supposedly, that was because it would spoil before it was used up since few people had refrigerators.

To avoid the Cleveland law, Lawsons began selling Milk in one-gallon jugs in stores in the suburbs close to the Cleveland border. I remember there was a 20 cent deposit on a Lawson jug and in those days, it was a real loss if the jug was broken.

When I was a boy, we lived about two blocks from Soika's Dairy and on a hot summer day, we would take Mom's two-quart pitcher, hike through the empty fields to the dairy and for about $15 cents get the pitcher filled with fresh, cold buttermilk with flecks of butter floating in it. What a refreshing, healthy, summer treat!

Today, stores sell whole milk, 2 percent, 1 percent and skim milk in half-gallon plastic jugs.

That's a lot different than the highly advertised, high quality 4 percent claimed to be better than regular whole milk. Why is it that 4 percent was supposed to be good back then, and now it's bad?

The milkman is part of our history. The horse that pulled his wagon knew the route and followed him from house to house while he tried to comply with the words of a song that said, "Milkman, keep those bottles quiet!"