The "Milkman Cometh...Every Day! Story

Mom bought Cream Dairy milk.  Known
as the milk with the cream on top.

It was an ordinary day.  Mom yelled to me to go out on the porch and get the milk so she could make creamed peas and eggs of toast for lunch.  At the time we were living on North Queen Street in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  On the front porch of our duplex we had an insulated metal milkbox where our daily Cream Dairy milkman would place our order for the day.  If mom would place an empty bottle in the milkbox, he would give us the same. I can still visualize her draining off the creme from the top of the bottle before she would reach the more liquid milk.  

Queen Dairy horse-drawn milk truck.

One of the biggest milk companies in the city was Queen Dairy which was located at 411 S. Queen Street in downtown Lancaster.  You could buy their bottled milk at local corner grocery stores as well as receiving your milk from your local milkman.  Other milk companies popped up from time to time such as Lancaster Sanitary Milk Company which was founded in 1921, but changed their name eight years later to Penn Dairy and eventually called themselves Pensupreme.  

Lancaster Sanitary Milk Company.

They were located at  572 North Queen Street.  Our local milkman delivered his milk in a truck, but at one time they were horse-drawn wagons.  I recently read a story dated Tuesday, July 15, 1947 that told of a local milkman who had just returned home form the Navy by the name of Ervin Laukhuff who drove a Pensupreme Dairy truck.  

Lancaster Sanitary became Penn Dories, Inc. 

The article was titled "Milkman Doesn't Ring Twice...He Already Carries the Key!"  Story said that milkmen are required to deliver milk to the doorstep, but they also may go out of their way to deliver their product.  Mr. Laukhuff carries more than 40 keys that had been given to him by his customers.  

Another local dairy was Walnut Grove Dairy in Lititz, PA.

They were the keys to their houses so when he arrived he could place the bottles of milk in their refrig- erator.  Talk about trusting someone!  Other milkmen report that householders leave their door unlocked  so the milkman can put the milk in the fridge and lock the door on their way out.  But, one very accommodating deliveryman would stop at a dorm at Franklin & Mashshall College in Lancaster, wait for his customer, a young milk drinker on the third floor, to lower a basket out the window on the end of a rope, and place the order in the basket.  

Click to enlarge to make reading it easier.

I sure hope the customer gave his deliveryman a nice gift at Christmas.  

Ervin Laukhuff, milkman extraordinaire.

Another customer who lives at the end of a long county lane would place a white cloth on a post along the road to save the milkman a trip back the lane if they didn't want any milk that day.  My mom would put a sign in the door window to tell our milkman if we needed milk.  Also, cut a piece of brown cardboard from a box and would place that in the window if we wanted a bottle of chocolate milk.  It was said that handsome milkmen would get love notes in the empty bottles they would pick up from their customers.  One good looking guy had a scrapbook of such notes.  But, they also had their troubles from being attacked by dogs to having customers yell "stop, thief" when the milkman would enter the house of a customer by mistake thinking the house was one who wanted their milk placed in their fridge.  Turkey Hill Dairy is the biggest milk producer in Lancaster County today.  They are located to the south-west of Lancaster along the Susquehanna River.  You can't miss the place being that they have two extremely large windmills which they use to supply power to their plant.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.