Buying Milk

Forrest Aikens' brothers Frank and Clifford left Vermont for Cleveland, Ohio. Forrest married a girl he had gone to high school with, Mildred Shaw in 1926 and settled in Bethel. The 1930 census lists Forrest as working as a salesman in a drygoods and clothing store. Mildred's father, Will Shaw, had a general store in the 1920's, and you have to wonder if Forrest didn't get his start working for his father-in-law. In the census, Forrest and Mildred lived almost next door to Mildred's parents. Forrest and Mildred seemed to be fairly prosperous. The census notes whether or not the families listed had a radio, and out of the 16 families on the page, they were one of the 5 families that did own a radio. Their house was the next highest valued on the page. The highest valued house belonged to Mildred's father.

You do have to wonder how much Mildred's father contributed to his daughter and son-in-law's comfortable lifestyle. Mildred had one brother, so she was the only daughter. Her brother lived with his parents while he was in his early twenties, but died before his thirtieth birthday. Will had made a living selling candy as a traveling salesman, and made enough doing that to buy a Cadillac.

In 1942, Forrest's World War II draft card shows him as employed as a store clerk at “Whitney's” in Bethel. During the 50's, Forrest, or “Tink” as he was nicknamed, was the Secretary of the Vermont Retail Grocer's Association, serving in that capacity for at least 15 years. It's pretty safe to assume that he was in the grocery business during the 40's and 50's, and probably into the 60's as well.

The post World War II era was a period of rapid change in every area of American life, and the grocery business was no exception. It is almost mind-boggling when you think of the way American grocery stores and food in general changed from the time of Forrest's birth, 1895, to the time he worked in a grocery store in Bethel in the 1950's.

In the 1800's, most people had a cow or two, or three, in the barn in back of the house, that they milked twice a day to get the milk to feed their family. If you had extra milk, you sold it to whatever neighbors didn't have a cow, but did have the extra money to buy milk. By the early 1900's, dairy

farmers with big enough herds of milk cows – think 20 – peddled their milk door to door around their town, often just using a dipper to dispense milk out of milk cans into whatever container their housewife customers had available. This was the age of tuberculosis, when people died of TB and other diseases they contracted by drinking contaminated milk.


                                                                                                             Horse drawn milk delivery in Vermont

As years went on into the new century, more and more dairy farms across the country shipped their milk to dairies. Dairies heated the milk to kill disease-causing bacteria, including the tuberculosis bacilli. This pasteurized milk was bottled and delivered to customers daily. In the hill towns of Vermont, most people continued to buy their milk unpasteurized, directly from the farmer.

Also in Vermont, this dairy delivers milk by truck, but
you can see the cans of milk.  Either he or the housewife
would use a dipper to dispense milk into a waiting container

 

If you lived in town and didn't own a farm, you went to the general store to buy your meat. Forrest's wife, Mildred, would have gone to the store and purchased cuts of meat by asking for a roast, a chicken, a ham or whatever. A fairly large store had a butcher, and in a smaller store the store owner himself cut up the meat.

The first refrigeration systems designed for food stores were developed in 1933 and the first self-service refrigerated display cases for grocery stores came into use in 1937. This new equipment was expensive and didn't really catch on until World War II. The larger stores in the cities employed

several butchers who were busy serving customers all day long. During the 1940's, it became harder and harder for grocery stores to find help, since all of the able-bodied men were fighting overseas. They started hiring women butchers, but even hiring women didn't solve the problem of being short-handed. Grocery store owners started thinking that maybe they should switch to a self-service method of selling meat.







                                                                                            Not so different from what we have now.

                         

Self-service display cases were already available but how would the meat be kept fresh? Meat dries out when it sits out in the air. The answer was to wrap it in cellophane. Cellophane is a thin, transparent sheet made out of cellulose. Cellophane is like plastic, but it is biodegradable, not as pliable as plastic wrap, is shinier and makes a crinkling sound when you move it or crush it in your hands Cellophane is still available today.

                                                                                                An example of cellophane from Wikipedia

After the war, some groceries maintained their self-service meat counters, although farms and wholesalers still delivered meat to stores still on the bone. Chickens, and sides of beef and pork arrived at stores whole and butchers still cut it up. After the war, many grocery stores went back to having the butcher cut meat for the customer, and grocers used the refrigerated self-service cases for dairy products like butter, cheese and eggs.

I was born in 1960, and my very first memories of grocery shopping took place in a small-town grocery store where the butcher prepared cuts of meat for my mother, and also gave her advice on how to cook it. His name was Kenny, and he was a nice man who knew my mother's name, and also knew my sister and I. We bought our cheese and eggs from the refrigerated self-serve case, but not our milk. I grew up on a dairy farm.

Gradually, milk became available in the self-service case next to the cheese and eggs, although milk continued to be delivered to people's houses, in some places right up until the 1970's. It is possible that Mildred, living in Bethel, got her milk delivered by Billings Dairy of Woodstock. This is the same dairy that is now Billings Farm. In the 1950's, Billings Dairy had a whole fleet of milk delivery trucks that delivered milk throughout Windsor County. It is also possible that she bought her milk at a grocery store. In the beginning, milk sold in the dairy cases came in a bottle.  Cardboard milk containers came out in the late 1930's, but didn't become common until World War II.  Glass bottles were still the norm until the 1960's.  When I went to kindergarten, our snack milk came in small bottles.  The next year, we got the little square milk cartons kids still have today with their school lunches.

 

Here's an interesting picture.  This woman was living in Washington, DC in the 1940's, and is buying milk packaged in a cardboard container, from a refrigerated self-service case.  These cases were cooled with ice.  The doors you see under the cases opened to the compartments that held the ice.  These compartments were filled with ice once a day or maybe more. I'm pretty sure these ice-filled cases didn't exist in the 1940's in stores in the Upper Valley, because most families here had easy access to farms and milk in one way or another, but in the cities, this was a more efficient way to distribute milk.

When Forrest was born in 1895, families that didn't keep a cow were buying milk from local farmers, possibly when they went to the farm and got their own milk cans filled. Sometimes the farmer delivered milk in a horse-drawn wagon. Later, in the 1920's, milk was pasteurized and delivered in bottles, and by the 1970's, was available nationwide in self-serve dairy cases in grocery stores.