Milk Hauling Days - Part 3 (Long Days)

Across the Fence #359


Last week, I mentioned that I always let a woman go ahead of me and helped her unload the four or five cans she had in the back of her pickup.

A couple years later, when I was home on leave before heading for Vietnam, I ran into Neil Nelson in Westby. He wanted to buy me a coke at the drug store and thanked me for always helping unload their milk when I had been a milk hauler. He told me to wait at the counter, and he went next door to the bank. He came back and gave me two silver dollars. Neil said, “Now that you owe me money, you have to come back safely.” He wanted me to carry them as good luck and when I returned, I had to give one back to him and I could keep the other. I returned that dollar to him a year later, and I’ve carried the other coin every day since he gave it to me.

But I digress, back to the milk hauling. After I arrived at the creamery, I waited for my turn and then opened the large doors on the right side of the truck, and pulled in around a corner post and positioned my truck as close to the track as possible. As time went on, I could line it up with an inch to spare instead of a foot, as I had done when I first started. That made it much easier to unload. I then climbed up into the back of the truck and started unloading.

The cans belonging to one farm all had to stay in a group. I used a special wrench to knock the can covers loose and then placed one can at a time on a track of rollers that carried them into the creamery, where the milk was weighed for each farmer and dumped into a large vat.

After the load was emptied, I drove ahead and the empty cans, washed and sanitized, came through a small door on more rollers. I put them back in the truck, making sure all the cans for one farm stayed in a group and in the position I wanted them in the truck, depending on where I would load the cans from that farm. If the milk house was on the right side of the truck, I put them on that side of the truck. All this was pretty much learned on the fly, with one quick lesson, when I rode along that first day.

As soon as the empty cans were loaded, I headed out for the second load and in many cases, back to some of the same farms to pick up the morning milking for those who had too many cans to fit in the cooler. This was a problem in the summer when milk could sour very fast. The second load was the same routine as the first. I had a couple of farmers who were always late. Even when I left them until the end of my route, they were still milking when I arrived at 11:00. Sometimes, if they still had several cows to milk, I just took what they had ready. The rest could sit in the cooler until the next day.

Most dogs were very friendly and liked to have me pay attention to them when I arrived. But one dog always had to be watched. As I got out of the truck, he’d come running with his lips laid back, his teeth barred, and growling. I’d yell and he’d usually stop, and just growl, but I never trusted turning my back on him. When the farmer was around, he’d chase him off. One day he told me I should smack the dog if he got too close. A couple days later I was ready for him. I had placed a can cover in the seat next to me. When I got out of the truck he came charging as usual. This time I didn’t yell, and when he got close enough, I nailed him in the head with the can cover and sent him sprawling and yelping. He never bothered me after that.

When I was done with my route, I filled up the tank with gas and headed home to our farm, parked the truck, and helped my dad with farm work the rest of the day. It got old real fast. The days were long, and the milk route alone, would have been enough physical labor for one day, but then I had to spend the rest of the day helping farm, and of course, chores and milking in the evenings. I lived for the weekends when I could go cruisin’, let loose, and raise some H with my friends.

However it was pure H to get up on Sunday morning and climb back into that truck with only a couple hours sleep. Cows don’t stop producing milk on the weekends, so hauling milk was a seven days a week job. Neither rain, sleet, snowstorm, sub-zero temperatures, sickness, don’t feel like working today, or hangover, could keep the milk hauler from his appointed rounds. I managed to survive those wild weekends of my youth, and got all the milk picked up. I never missed a day hauling milk in those 14 months.

(Concluded next week)

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