Dairy Tales - History of the Milkman

Longing  for simpler times when fresh milk magically appeared on your doorstep? Join us on "Dairy Tales: The Hilarious History of the American Milkman," a brand-new episode of Dirt Nap City that delivers a hearty laugh along with a fascinating look at a bygone era.

In this episode, we uncork the surprising story of the American milkman, from his early 20th-century heyday to his eventual, almost complete disappearance. We'll explore the ingenious (and sometimes absurd) innovations that made daily milk delivery a household staple, delving into the charming quirks of milk bottles, the iconic milk carton, and the unique bond between customer and dairyman.

Discover why the milkman was once an indispensable part of American life. We'll uncover how these dedicated delivery heroes navigated everything from rutted paths on a horse carrying milk to the societal shifts of the post-war boom. Ever wondered about the rise of the "milk chute" or the ingenious ways milkmen kept your dairy products fresh in all weather? We've got the scoop, served with a splash of good humor.

But just as every good thing must come to an end, so too did the milkman's reign. What led to his decline? Was it the rise of the supermarket, the invention of longer-lasting milk cartons, or simply a shift in consumer habits? We'll explore the comedic (and sometimes tragic) factors that sealed the milkman's fate, leaving us with nostalgic memories and a few lingering questions.

This episode isn't just a history lesson; it's a rollicking journey through Americana, packed with amusing anecdotes, forgotten facts, and plenty of laughs. Whether you remember the clinking of glass bottles on your porch or you're simply curious about a peculiar slice of the past, this episode is udderly fantastic!

Transcript

0:06

Alex, what do you do if you're thirsty? I get something to drink. Yeah. Where do you get it? Well, I think you've asked me this before, and you wanted me to say the drinking fountain. Yeah. But if you're home, if you're home, like, let's say we were just taking a little break, and you went to get something to drink. Yeah, I go to the refrigerator. Refrigerator. Okay, and what? What are your options? What do you got in there? Oh, probably water. Get some soft drinks. Get some lemonade, some beer. Is that all seems like you're missing a few options. Oh, pretty much covers it in my house. Milk, yeah. What about milk? I love a glass of milk. I know you do. I know you do. And you know, back in the day, you couldn't just go, as a matter of fact, way back in the day, you'd have to go out to the barn and squeeze some teats to get that milk right into the mouth. Sure people. Did people do that? They just lay down? Yeah. Did they? Well, I don't know if they even have to lay down. You could just bend it upward and just kind of it squirts with a lot of pressure. Okay, senior, have you ever milked a cow? Not into my mouth? Well, you're missing out you have, yo, yeah, yeah, I've milked the cow and tried the old try it right out, unpasteurized, as they say. I'm not going to do that, but it's nice that you've done it. Well, I want to talk about milk men, the guys that brought us our milk back in the day, or brought guys their milks, bring your milk and sleep with your wife. I thought that was the postman. Well, your mileage may vary, I guess. Well, the milkman was kind of came up. You know, the thing that caused the milkman is also the thing that kind of killed the milkman, or eliminated the milkman. The originally, people had their own cows. Most people had their own cows, or they lived somewhere where a cow was right next door, you know, just down the road a little ways, and people shared their milk. And you could trade some alfalfa for some milk, or some some of your barley for some milk. But in in in the days that people started to become more urban, they started to need milk delivered, because everybody drank milk back in the day. Why is that? Well, I think it was considered to be healthy. I think it was easily accessible. I think it was healthy. It was kind of one of the healthy choices. There wasn't any Coke, there wasn't any sprite, there wasn't, you know, you couldn't just go to the convenience store and get a mountain dew or a Red Bull, but it's easier to get milk than ever, and I'm the only person I know that drinks it. Well, let's go back. We'll talk about modern times. But I first of all wanted to run two possible titles for this episode by you and see what you think. So this is a dirt nap city dead end about milk men. And if you're not familiar with dead ends, we talk about things that used to exist but don't anymore, kind of in the in the fashion of things that are dead, right, right? And milkman is dead. Milkman is something you've been familiar with for 40 years. Been into them for a long time, but we'll get to that as well. But right now we're talking about the title of this podcast. So here's option, a got milk not anymore, the rise and fall of the milkman? Oh, wow. Okay, okay. And here's number two. What else you got? The utterly ridiculous, the utterly ridiculous history of milk delivery. What do you think? I think the second one was written by chat GPT. I'm trying to use more SEO friendly titles. I don't know if you've noticed this about our podcast, but I kind of did some evaluations, and it was recommended by by the AI overlords that we use more search friendly titles. So I think I'm going with got milk not anymore, the rise and fall of the milkman rather than what was. What were milkman. Let's talk about back in the 1700s Now this was a time when people had cows, you know, had cows around, and could go get milk if they wanted to. But then this industrialization started to happen, and cows were less of a common thing. Houses were getting smaller and closer together, and there wasn't land for cows, and people didn't have barns anymore. So around 1785 that up in the northeast, newly minted United States, there was people that started to deliver milk in Vermont actually is where it all started. And they. Would deliver it in barrels. Now, these milk men would drive around on a horse drawn carriage that had barrels full of milk, or maybe just one, and you didn't even have a container that it came in. You basically had to come out and dip your container into the man's milk to get the milk. Oh, so they don't, you don't buy the barrel. No, the barrel was for the whole town or for their whole route. You know, they might, they might deliver, they might deliver to 15 houses, and everybody got just a little bit of this barrel. And it wasn't cold. It was not cold. No, there was no way to keep it cold, really. You got to drink it out. It out pretty soon, kale or your jug or your jar, and you would dip it in and pull out the milk you wanted for the day, and you better drink it pretty quick. Yeah, it was not pasteurized. But then a major thing happened, and that is the glass milk bottle, which was invented. It's actually called the Lester milk jar, which was invented in 1879 and this was a glass bottle. And there's a lot of discussion online. I kind of went deep into this about the taste of milk out of a glass jar versus out of a cardboard or plastic carton. Do you have any opinion on that way better out of a glass, out of a cold glass? Yeah, do you think that's it? The temperature? No, I think the glass is a smoother. Goes down smoother too. Yeah, for sure, doesn't, doesn't leave like you don't get that sort of cardboard taste or wax taste that you might get. No, just, just crisp. Yeah. Well, that's glass jar was invented, you know, by it was called the Lester milk jar, so I'm gonna assume it was a guy named Lester that invented it. But the problem was, it didn't have a cap. So about five years later, that seems like like, a long time to go from the bottle to the cap. Yeah, yeah, this bottle. I mean, it took him a long time to invent the bottle, right? We started in 1785 and it was almost 100 years before they started doing bottles. So the cap, the cap, was the next big innovation. And this was a guy named Thatcher, Henry Thatcher that came up with the bottle cap, and this meant that the milk men could be a lot more flexible in their delivery. It was a lot easier to deliver a whole bunch of small glass bottles than it was to deliver in a giant jug, where you had people coming out and dipping in it, and it was more sterile too. So what would happen is, you would place your order with the milkman. You know, you might place it for the week or the month or however long, and the milkman would show up the next day and bring it, and he might come up to your porch a lot of times they would. And a lot of houses back then had little boxes. Have you ever seen one of these boxes for milk Yes, yes. I believe my grandparents house had one of those. Yeah, okay, was that in Michigan? Yeah, yeah. So these would be little insulated boxes where he would leave the leave the bottles, and then they would sometimes just leave cash on the on the porch for the milkman. Sometimes they had an account where they would pay, you know, weekly or monthly or whatever. But then a really cool thing happened, where the milk men would start to collect the bottles and sterilize the bottles and then reuse them. So this is, like the original recycling that was going on. Great idea. Yeah, yeah. But you know, this kind of went on for quite a while, until World War Two, ish, 1930s 1940s and can you guess some of the things that started to get in the way of milk, milk. Men delivering their milk now, of course, they also went with technology. They had trucks now, or cars instead of, instead of these carts that they used to use. So they were trying to progress, but they couldn't keep up, because after World War Two, a lot of things happened. Any any thoughts, I'm guessing people started living further away from each other. So the you had to you so you without refrigeration. That seemed to be a problem. I think you said part of it there refrigeration. People could refrigerate things. So instead of having to have fresh milk every day or every two days, they could now get milk once a week and put it in a refrigerator. So that was, that was a big thing also, I guess, to your point about them living further away. People started getting cars after World War Two, so they could now drive to the general market, the grocery store, and the grocery store had refrigeration, so now they were keeping their milk for a while, and people were buying it from there. And so the. World, milk men kind of got squeezed out. I would especially in hotter climates, like like Houston. I can't imagine how long milk would last just sitting outside, outside before you picked it up. You've heard the term ice box, right? A lot of times they would have these ice boxes where they would place the ice in a box that was insulated a lot of times with sawdust, and the milkman would leave it in there, and it would stay. It would it would keep. If it was in the icebox, I would imagine, you know, the ice would begin to melt, but, but for some reason, I've heard that sawdust is a really good insulator. Hmm, wouldn't want to put that ice in a in a Shirley Temple or a gin and tonic after Ted sawdust in it? No, no. So, you know, things like meat and milk and other things that had a shorter shelf life became more popular because of the refrigeration that was available to people, and also because people could actually drive to a supermarket and pick these things up where it was refrigerated, put it into a bag or an ice box, bring it home, put it into their refrigerator and keep it for a longer time. But along with these other things, another thing that changed was the glass bottles, so they started to use waxed paper, these little cardboard cartons, as they called them. And you know what they called these things? The they called them Gable boxes. Never heard that term. Well, can you imagine the shape of an old milk carton, where it had the little point on top, and the thing up on top that you would open, it looked like a gable of a building, right? Oh, yeah, I guess it did. And then the opening where you would actually pull the where you would pull the two pieces of cardboard apart, rip them and then create that little spout that was called a gable loop. Was a big innovation, underrated design, yes, yes, very much. So, I mean, it was self contained. It was all one material, once they figured that out. I mean, the gable loop was a was an industry changer in the 1950s and now today, you don't really see those as much now. No, do you think the plastic think, if you give a kid a milk carton today, they would know how to open? Oh, that's a great question, because yeah, I don't know that they would. I mean, they probably have better chance of dialing a phone than they do opening a milk carton with a gable. Yeah, nowadays, although doesn't water come in cardboard? Oh yeah, there are some water companies that are doing cardboard because it's more sustainable and, you know, lighter weight and stuff like that. But I don't know if those have Gable loops. Or if those have a, like, a little foil piece that you punch a straw with, kind of like a Capri Sun, there's, there's lots of, I mean, I'll say drink container technology is really a fascinating subject, often overlooked, but when you really think about it, yeah, how do you get that out of there in a sustainable way. But a gable loop with a milk carton is not an obvious thing if you don't know how to do it. No. Usually has a usually has an arrow that says, open here. But all you have to do is teach a kid once and they've mastered it. I find opening those things very satisfying, like that little, that little spout that comes out of it. It It is very and it's very, like you said, it's a very innovative design, because it seals itself back up. It's very hygienic. It makes it very easy to pour, right? If you're pouring out of a milk carton that has one of those triangular Gable loops, yeah, I forgot about the reseal part of it. You're right, yeah, yeah. They didn't need caps anymore. As a matter of fact, that's one of the problems with a lot of modern milk cartons. Even the gable cartons that have the gable, they'll have a plastic cap on the side, right? The milk we get has that, yeah, it's like, it's like, Why? Why did you add this extra plastic? It just makes it harder to recycle. It makes and those things can actually have you ever had one that's like, really hard to open. You have to get a pair of pliers or something to open the table one or the plastic the plastic cap can sometimes be really hard to twist. Oh no, I haven't had that, but you're right. Why would they go through the trouble of a gable design only to put us a spout on it or a plastic cap, because people don't know how to use the gable design the cable loop, we've dumbed down too much, yeah, well, I got good news. Like a lot of our dead ends, this one might make a comeback. There is a milkman Renaissance going on. There's companies from New York. To California. Top of the Top of the morning farms, there's the Manhattan milk companies, and what they do is they actually contract dairy delivery from several different dairy farms in an area with trucks, and you pay a premium. But would you do that? I mean, as a milk fan, would you actually maybe have fresh milk delivered. Um, you know, I don't know how much I've I don't know if I've ever had fresh milk, so I don't know if, how much better it would be. See, here's the thing here, here's, here's the reason people do it. A, they know where it's coming from. B, they know how long it's been out, because these companies tout that as part of their service. As a matter of fact, with some of these, they guarantee you teeth to mouth in less than 24 hours. I don't know if that's important, or maybe I should say utter, utter to utter, them out before in less than 20 hours. I don't know how important that is, honestly. I mean, I'd have to, I'd have to do a taste test. I could probably be won over, yeah, if it tasted the same to me, I don't know if there's any value in that. Tea to mouth, 24 hours, utter to lips. That sounds worse. Well, it's it's also, along with this milkman Renaissance, there's also the comeback of the glass milk bottles. People are starting to realize that now we sometimes buy fair life milk. Have you ever had that? Yes, it's pretty good. And I think, I think you can get that in a glass container. I don't know. I mean, would you pay an extra dollar for a gallon of milk for a glass container? No, because one out of every 200 times I would drop it and it would shatter and there would be glass all over my phone. Okay, okay. You like the unbreakability of the Yeah, we got rid of a lot of glass of bottles back in the day, and we don't have to walk around with glass on our feet anymore. But you're right. From sustainability perspective, it's probably better than all the plastic we have. Well, the last thing I want to talk about on this is the counter, counter to the milkman. Do you know? Do you know who the counter to the milkman is in history? As soon as I say it, you'll you'll realize, what do you mean by counter? The the fair, the fair gender of milk man, because it is milk. Man, right? Milk men, milk made, milk maids, right, right. Now you don't have milk maid was, I don't they actually didn't just deliver. They milked the cows, they churned the butter, they made the cheese. They were just kind of Dairy Queens, if you will. So I would pay for that for a milkmaid, absolutely. So a milkmaid was a pretty common sight back in the time of these original dairy farms. But for some reason, men kind of took over. I guess part of it had to do with men being more more likely to drive the horses or more likely to drive the motorized vehicle to deliver the milk. I don't know, but I want to tell you about some famous milk maids in the world. There was Abigail Adams, who was the wife of John Adams, sure she was actually a dairy farmer, lived on a dairy farm, grew up on a dairy farm, and did all those things. She was, she was, she was very comfortable around cows and milk and cheese and butter and all that stuff. I'm very comfortable around milk and cheese and butter. Well, maybe you're a milkmaid. There's goodness though. I like, I like the idea of bringing back milk maids, yeah. I think that would be a great Halloween costume. Yeah. I mean, men could be milk maids too. We can't just, yeah, and women could be milk men, right? Women could be milk delivery people. MDPs, so there was ADA F Howey, who was famous for being one of the first elected Wisconsin people, women, elected to the Wisconsin State Board of agriculture, and she was also a dairy farmer in the late 1800s and she revolutionized dairy practices by focusing on cleanliness. Back in the day, they didn't realize that dirtiness, cow poop and dirty hands and whatever else spread disease. But yeah, out of how he did, Clara Steele, she was a successful commercial dairy farmer who built an empire of cheese and butter, establishing five dairies in California in the 1800s you ever heard of her? No. And then there was Anna Baldwin, who took the idea of hygienic milking to the next level with her hygienic glove milker, which was a. A thing that I guess went over the utter and made it cleaner. I'm not exactly sure, but it basically took hygiene to the next level. And then there's a woman named Anna Burns who was a novelist, a writer. Have you heard of her? Maybe she wrote a she wrote a book called milkman, but the milkman was actually a stalker. Oh no, I've never heard of I haven't heard of that 1958 this guy named Arthur raidbaugh, or maybe radebaugh, I'm not sure. R, A, D, E, B, A, U, G, H, RAID BA. He had a comic strip, a weekly comic strip called, closer than we think you ever heard of that one? No, well, this was sort of a future, future looking one, and he envisioned robotic milk men delivering milk, kind of going around with little antennas sticking out of their heads. And then he had another one, where milk men would deliver the milk via jet pack. Okay, that's not gonna happen. Maybe drones, except, except. Again, glass would be a terrible idea for that. Milk isn't that hard to get anymore. We're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist here. Well, again, if you want to know where it's from, if you want to know how long it's been around, like how quickly it came from the cow. You keep saying where it's from. Where else could it be from? Though? No, no. I mean local. You want local milk. If you want to support your local farmer and your local dairy farm and put money back into your local economy, you'd want it from your area, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you like milk that was made in Sugar Land, or milk that was made in wherever the hell you live, Clear Lake I don't live in, clearly Pearland, whatever, Houston area. Do you want milk from New York City? All I gotta say is, get a rope. I don't really. It's not like honey. Where it I mean, maybe it is, I don't know. It could be, actually. And are you talking about allergies? How, if you, if you eat honey from a region, you become immune to the maybe it is, yeah, yeah, but it is. I mean, we do have lactose intolerance these days where we we probably always had it. We didn't know that people that was the problem. Well, here's to here's to the the milkman and the milkmaids of your We miss you, and we do hope you come back and bring back the glasses, the glass containers and the hillbilly punk rock that you used to play. I ran over my neighbor fishing Camaro. Fishing Camaro down there all got papers like, no fun, Neo fishing Camaro and no, it starts to match. So if I have to run you down, please don't leave us scratch. I ran over some old lady one night at the county fair, and I didn't get arrested because my dad's a bear fishing Camaro, fishing Camaro. Donuts on your lawn, fishing Camaro, fishing Camaro. Tony, Orlando and Dawn. When I drive too fast to kids, they all spin and cuss because I've got a pitching Camaro, and they have to ride the bus. So you better get out of my way when I'm going through your yard, cause I've got a pitching Camaro, an Exxon credit card, pitching Camaro. Pitching Camaro. Amen, where you headed? Kitchen Camaro. Kitchen Camaro. Arm. Jump on. I'm ready. You.