Milk Hauling Days - Part 2

Across the Fence #358

I’ll try to describe a typical day in the life of this milk hauler. Up at 4:00 am, grab a sandwich that my mother had made the night before, and out to the truck, parked at the farm. I headed out in the dark toward Cashton, north of Westby, to my first farm. At each stop I’d maneuver the truck as close to the milk house as possible. Some places were set up so you could drive right alongside the milk house. At others, you had to back down a winding path or around buildings to reach the milk house, using only your sideview mirrors.

The first order of business was to unload the empty cans for the next day’s milking. Each farmer had cans with numbers painted on in red or black, so the hauler and the creamery knew who the milk belonged to. I always carried extra cans without numbers in case a farmer needed them and then used a red marker to write their number on the cans.

All milk haulers wore a large leather apron like blacksmiths use. This was used because you were always pulling cold, wet cans out of the milk coolers in the milk houses and carrying them to the truck. Without the apron you’d have been soaking wet. I pulled the full cans from the cooler and carried them outside where I loaded them on the truck. At first I’d carry one can at a time and with a swinging motion, hoist it up into the truck. After all, they weighed a hundred pounds when full. Eventually I could carry two cans at a time, because it saved a lot of steps and time. Depending on the size of the dairy herd, a farm could have as little as two cans or as many as twenty. The truck had doors on the back and sides to make loading easier. After the cans were loaded, I secured the door latch on the truck and headed off to the next farm.

As I became more familiar with driving the truck, I’d roar along the back roads as fast as I could go in order to save time. At the creamery I usually had to wait in line for at least one other hauler to unload, and also for farmers who hauled their own milk in pickups. That meant spending a half hour in line and another twenty minutes unloading and loading. If Magnus Sather beat me to the creamery, it meant waiting even longer. He also had two loads a day.

Magnus was a friend of our family. His daughter and I graduated from high school together. Magnus was built like a bull, strong and muscular from hauling milk for over twenty years. He had bad knees, arthritis in his hands, back problems, and aches and pains from all those years of lifting heavy cans. He told me many times, “Howard, go back to school, you don’t want to be doing this for twenty years. It’s too hard. You’ll end up like me.” I was still having fun, but I hadn’t gone through a cold Wisconsin winter hauling milk at that point.

Magnus and I helped each other unload, because it went faster and we’d be back on the road for our second load, and finish sooner. But there was a friendly rivalry to see who could get to the creamery first.

One day Magnus and I arrived at a crossroad on Highway 27 at the same time, about a mile north of town. I pulled onto the highway first and Magnus pulled in right behind me. I barreled down the highway toward town with him on my bumper. At that time there were two stop signs at the north edge of Westby where 14 and 27 split. One went straight ahead to go south into Westby, the other veered to the right to go toward Coon Valley. As we came to the intersection, I pulled to a stop and leaned forward to look out my right window, and see if any cars were coming. No cars were coming, but there was Magnus, barreling by and waving to me. He had taken the right exit and must have run the stop sign, in order to get ahead of me. I roared after him, both of us double clutching our way down Main Street. We might have exceeded the speed limit just a bit. We pulled into the creamery in the south part of town and screeched to a halt.

Magnus got out of his truck grinning ear to ear. “Thought you were going to beat me, didn’t you?” He let out a big laugh and I had to laugh too.

Another milk hauler, Cal Anderson, pulled in behind us and got out. “Where’s the fire? I saw you guys racing into town as I was coming down 14.” He knew why we’d been in a hurry. Cal was probably trying to get there ahead of us so he wouldn’t have to wait an extra hour!

I felt sorry for some of the farmers who hauled their own cans when they got behind a line of our trucks. One woman arrived about the time I did. I always let her go ahead of me and helped her unload the four or five cans she had in the back of their pickup.

(Continued next week)

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