The milk came in quarter-wide glass bottles at the base, narrow at the neck, with an outer lid that you threw away and an inner, flap-over lid that you put back on after serving a glass.
You were Sheffield Farms or Borden’s and a Sheffield Farms customer wouldn’t drink a glass of Borden milk any more than a Giant fan would cheer on the Yankees to win the pennant. My family was Sheffield Farms to the end and when we were brought to the plant in third grade, I think it was on Eleventh Avenue in the 1930s, I felt like one of the owners. We watched them machine milking cows, pasteurize the milk, put it into bottles, and listened to them explain how Sheffield Farms milk was never touched by “human hands.”
That was before the milk was homogenized. The cream always rose to the top and extended two to three inches down into the bottle. It was thicker and more yellow than milk and you would shake the bottle to mix it or your parents would serve it for coffee. The heavy and light cream bottles came in half-pint replicas of the milk bottles.
The milkman led his horse out of a row of brownstone houses, placed milk and cream bottles in a metal container with square slots and a metal carrying handle. The reddish stones had stairways leading to the first-floor entrance, a keyless exterior door with glass panels, and then a small hallway with a closed interior door. The first-floor windows usually had planters full of red geraniums on the windowsills, and the household family left yesterday’s empty bottles in the hall with an envelope telling the milkman how many new bottles to leave. He would put the new bottles on the ground, put the empty bottles in their container, and move on to the next brownstone. Some houses wanted to leave the milk outside the basement entrance. That was three steps from street level, and the doors and windows were covered by wrought iron railings painted black.
When he reached an apartment building, the milkman carried heavy wooden crates to the service elevators. The boxes had metal slots for the bottles and ties that held the boxes together when stacked inside the milk wagon. I would go from floor to floor, leaving the day’s delivery outside the service entrance of each apartment and picking up the empty ones. There were no self-service elevators in those days, so the elevator operator had to wait on each floor while the milkman made his deliveries. The delivery cart and horse stood outside, the horse with its nose in a duffel bag of oatmeal. We could go up to him and stroke him on the neck, or sometimes the milkman would take the duffel bag from us and we would hold an apple or a sugar cube on our palms, so that the horse could grab it without biting our fingers.
that my aunt Margareta said they were quieter, more efficient and less smelly, but she always saw the bright side of everything. I liked the clip-clop sound of them coming down the street and didn’t care about the smell and felt sorry when the horses disappeared.
The Japanese had occupied the east coast of China by then and controlled all ports except Hong Kong. Then France fell to the Nazis, the Japanese Navy entered Camranh Bay, transferred 30,000 soldiers to Saigon, and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Then the war began and the single-family houses became pensions. They replaced the glass paneled doors at the top of the stairs with solid doors that were locked. By then the dairymen were gone and we had to walk to Broadway or down to the Eighty-Seventh Street Market to buy our milk.
