Now and Then Early morning chores included cooling the milk

— When you live on a country road, you get accustomed to certain traffic on the road.

You may come to recognize people and vehicles by sound as well as by sight.

This was especially true when I was a boy in the late 1940s and we heard the milk truck coming to our farm.

Early on we had a small dairy herd, and we sold milk to the Carnation Milk Company of Rogers, Ark. I suppose townspeople might think of a milkman as the man who delivers milk to the house.

(They used to do that!) But for us on the farm, the milkman was the milk hauler who picked up the milk our cows produced and trucked it to the milk plant, where it would be made into cheese and other milk products. I could usually tell when the milkman’s truck was coming by its sounds. In the early days, one might hear not only the truck’s distinctive engine roar, but also the muffled metallic clanging of empty milk cans as the milk truck hit potholes in the road.

In the 1940s, the milkmen I knew drove open flatbed trucks with low racks, carrying a load of dozens of 10-gallon milk cans. Some of the cans would be full cans of milk which had just been picked up from other farms.

Some were the “empties” being returned. The cans belonging to each farm were marked with a distinctive number. The milk plant always cleaned and scalded the milk cans before sending them back to us to be filled again.

One of the first things I remember noticing about the milkmen was that they would visit with you as they worked. If Dad was close by, the milkman would carry on a conversation with him. Your milk hauler became someone you saw and visited with nearly every day. Now, after many years have passed, I have forgotten the names of some of those early milkmen. I do remember Carroll Hall and Lee Otis Hall, and Lee helped me remember Kaye Dean, from whom Carroll bought the milk route. The Hall family lived just west of the Shady Grove schoolhouse on Arkansas Hwy. 94 northwest of Pea Ridge. I rode the same school bus with them, we attended the doings at SCUD (Shady Grove) with them, and so on. So I took some pride in having them as “our” milkmen.

Another thing I noticed about the milkmen was that they were strong. A full milk can weighed 75 to 85 pounds. Back then I was only able to move a full milk can by rolling it about on its bottom rim. So I was pretty envious as I watched the men hoist those full milk cans up onto the truck bed without even straining, so it seemed.

Getting ready for the milkman’s coming was an every day thing for us. We milked the cows early in the morning, not so much because of a great work ethic, but because we had to get the milking done and the milk cooled before the milkman came. In later years, by the mid-1950s, we would have refrigerated milk coolers to cool the milk;

but in the earlier days we had to rely on cold water drawn from the well. In those days, we milked the cows by hand, using three-gallon tin-plated milk pails. That was before stainless steel utensils. A really good milk cow could fill a three-gallon bucket at each milking. Each bucketful of fresh milk would be poured through a strainer with a white cotton strainer pad.

I used to like to watch the foamy milk slowly draining through the strainer into the milk can beneath. As soon as the milk can was full, it was carried to the cooling barrel.

We used wooden stave barrels made for shipping vinegar, sawing them off to the height of a milk can.

Before farm electricity (1945), my dad had to draw water from the well, bucketful by bucketful, pouring the cold well water around the milk cans in the barrels. I think in those days he keptthe barrels beside the well.

Otherwise he would have had to carry bucket after bucket of water all the way to the barn. It was easier to carry the milk cans to the well, by hand or by wheelbarrow, than to carry all that cold water so far. Cooling the milk became much easier once we had an electric pump in the well and running water to the barn.

Being a young boy and wannabe driver, I used to love to watch and listen as the milkman maneuvered his truck, shifted gears and revved his motor, building up power to pull out of our steep driveway. I didn’t exactly dream of becoming a milkman, but I always thought it would be great to be able to handle a big job like our milkman’s job.

Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 02/10/2010