HELPER TO MILKMAN – by Bill Venrick (in the middle 1940's)

Remember when? Books and stories are written every day taking us back to yesteryear so why should we at THE WORDWRIGHT be any different? When I was in high school I had a job helping a milkman. My job was simple—in fact so simple, to this day it seems I may have been just a slight extension of energy available to the milkman to go up to every porch and pick up empty bottles and take them back to the truck. I got a whopping 50 cents a day and free milk to drink while on the truck. I just happened to work with brothers – both worked for the Home Dairy and had separate routes which helped me by having a spare route in case one brother was off.

Milk was delivered house-to-house every other day as ice boxes were still in use by some homes while others had refrigerators and milk came in three sizes of bottles: ½ pint, pints and quarts. Chocolate milk and cream were usually reserved for half-pints but cream may have been bottled in pints as well, if my memory is correct. There were no gallon glass jugs delivered when I worked on the milk truck, gallon jugs became popular later when refrigerators became more popular and also stocked and sold at larger stores. Some dairies even bottled what was called Half & Half (half cream and half milk) as a richer milk for cereal. Other dairy products like cottage cheese and butter were delivered to the houses as well.

Back then, milk was sold in glass bottles and the product container had gone through different shapes of bottles. In the winter time these tall bottles often provided a real treat to the first person who brought in the milk – the cream in the top of the bottle would often freeze and push the cap right off the bottle and there was nature's treat: frozen cream! When I worked on the milk truck the dairy I worked for had square shaped bottles and a different cap than the older tall bottles and the winter treat of frozen cream was gone because of the “new idea” of homogenized milk -- a processing method that broke up the cream, thoroughly mixing the cream and milk by shooting it through a very fine nozzle breaking up the fat globules. Then the cream did not separate and rise to the top and thus the milk was creamier. Homogenized milk was touted as being easier to digest.

My job was definitely short-lived for a reason I never gave much thought which was probably a no-brainer—a kid just finds a better job! One experience that sticks in my mind was the time the brakes grabbed on the truck and the milk crates stacked behind us came smashing against the front of the truck breaking bottles all over the place. The shame was the crates involved were buttermilk! Not exactly the most pleasant fragrance to me at the time and my old army field jacket got soaked and bits of broken glass were in my pockets, like forever. Let's face it, “forever” didn't really last long and I got over that job and the spilled buttermilk.

Somehow I envied my buddies who had paper routes and made “real money”, at least compared to the 50 cents a day I made helping the milk truck driver. Later when I got my driver's license I drove a truck for a dry cleaner. Made a good bit more money than the milk route helper's pay for sure.

MY NEWSPAPER ROUTES by Robert J. Tinsky (in the middle 1930's)

When I was only about 9 or 10 years I started selling newspapers on the street corners. My first job as a newsboy was to stand at the end of the street car line and offer papers to people as they emerged from the trolley. This was during the big depression and the newspaper sold for only one cent. Half of that was my profit.

My next job as a newsboy came when I owned my first bicycle. That job required me to ride up and down several streets in the evening selling a newspaper that always had the first page printed on green paper. It was called the Evening Journal. I think it sold for three cents. I was always told the most exciting headline and I would yell this out as I rode along to entice people to come out of their houses and get their hands on the latest bit of news. If something really spectacular happened that day, they would publish an extra edition and I would go up and down the street yelling, “Extra, extra, read all about it” followed by some sentence to persuade people to buy this special edition of the newspaper.
I was probably about 12 years old when I got my first paper route. Each day I would faithfully go to a little shack called “the station” where I would pick up my supply of newspapers. We had a bench in the station just the right height where all the boys could fold their papers before heading out on their routes.

Sundays were the hardest days for me since the newspapers were so large. I had a little wagon that I used to haul the papers home. There I would divide my supply for the day in half so I would not have to carry such a heavy load all at one time. The Sunday papers all had to be delivered before 6:00 A. M. Some people would be on the porch waiting for me to come and they were not very happy if something happened to make the delivery of their Sunday paper late.

I not only had to deliver the paper but I had to collect from them each week. If someone failed to pay, it came out of my profits. Most people, however, were very honest and nice to me and at Christmas time I could expect some nice tips from most of my customers.

Since we lived near a university campus I also had the job of selling newspapers to people on Saturdays after football games. If our team won, I could expect to sell a lot of papers and to receive some big tips. When we lost it was an entirely different story.

We had some big contests to pick up new customers. We earned points for each new customer we signed up and won some neat prizes. The one I remember the best was a live turkey. I will save the saga of that incident for another article.

When my two sons got old enough I felt they should follow in their father’s footsteps, so both had paper routes at different times. Although no one got up and drove me around on Sunday to help deliver the newspaper on cold snowy days, for some reason my boys had it a lot easier than I did since they insisted that Dad had to roll out of bed before dawn on Sunday mornings to help them deliver their newspaper in his heated automobile.

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THE WORDWRIGHT
and his friend, Robert J. Tinsky, in Oblong, Illinois