Deliveries in the old days

Lashann

Senior Member
Location
Ontario Canada
I remember as a kid seeing the milk man come in his truck to deliver milk in glass bottles to our front porch in the mornings. Hubby still has memories of a horse driven ice wagon coming to his street to make regular deliveries of ice to an elderly neighbour. Back then we were so dependent on these deliveries to our neighbourhoods. When our kids were growing up about the only regular truck I saw on the street was the ice cream guy in the summer. How times have changed.
 

I remember the milkman and the Watkins vanilla man. The Watkins man didn't come often but when he did it always seemed to be a long visit. My mother or my grandmother would always try to think of an inexpensive item to buy in an effort to send him on his way. Our Watkins man didn't have a fancy van like this one he worked out of the trunk of his old car.

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I'm sure that some of today's kids get just as excited about seeing the FedEx and UPS delivery people pulling up in a big truck.
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I can't remember my mother ever actually shopping for groceries. Everything was delivered. She would send me to the shop with a list, and it would be delivered later in the day. There were various tradesmen who called in their horse and cart vehicles...knife-grinders, tinkers, gypsies selling things. There are still a few mobile shops, but not like it used to be.
 

I remember as a kid seeing the milk man come in his truck to deliver milk in glass bottles to our front porch in the mornings. Hubby still has memories of a horse driven ice wagon coming to his street to make regular deliveries of ice to an elderly neighbour. Back then we were so dependent on these deliveries to our neighbourhoods. When our kids were growing up about the only regular truck I saw on the street was the ice cream guy in the summer. How times have changed.
I used to be a milk delivery girl.. getting up at 4am when I was 12 & 13 years old.. delivering milk to a thousand houses which included 6 blocks of high rises, 20 floors high ... with the milkman ( my father).. and the milk boys my brother and his pal... in all weathers, MIlk bottle iced up in winter and in the freezing dark mornings.. Home by 7am, to just a cup of tea and half a bread roll... then ready for the 2 mile walk to school...
 
I can't remember my mother ever actually shopping for groceries. Everything was delivered. She would send me to the shop with a list, and it would be delivered later in the day. There were various tradesmen who called in their horse and cart vehicles...knife-grinders, tinkers, gypsies selling things. There are still a few mobile shops, but not like it used to be.
It's been a very long time since we had mobile anything here in the South.. I miss the greengrocers, the bakers, the butchers... all coming round.. ( I married the butchers boy) :D... but we didn't have them in the city in Scotland where I was raised, we had to go supermarket shopping... but here in the sticks where I moved when I was a young adult, we had all those delivery people..
 
In the 1950s and 60s, we too had home delivery of milk and other dairy products from a local dairy. Our house had an insulated compartment built into the wall near the side door. The milkman would put products into it via a small exterior door and we would access them by a another little door on the inside. Everything stayed cool in the summer but wouldn't freeze in winter.

When we moved from our former community a few years ago, one could still get home delivery of glass-bottled milk from a local dairy.
 
In the 1950s and 60s, we too had home delivery of milk and other dairy products from a local dairy. Our house had an insulated compartment built into the wall near the side door. The milkman would put products into it via a small exterior door and we would access them by a another little door on the inside. Everything stayed cool in the summer but wouldn't freeze in winter.

When we moved from our former community a few years ago, one could still get home delivery of glass-bottled milk from a local dairy.
we still can get milk deliveries here in glass bottles from a milk delivery man if we wanted , a very few neighbours still do .. the milk comes from a local farm, but not many people do , because the price of the milk is 4 times higher than the supermarket
 
We had a truck come through daily that carried huge blocks of ice. As kids, we would occasionally 'snatch' one from the back when the driver was gone and use it as a street sled! I should be ashamed.

Hubby and his buddies also ran after the ice wagon, hopefully to scoop up small chunks of cold ice.... quite a nice treat for some kids during the hot summer weather. :giggle:
 
In the 1950s and 60s, we too had home delivery of milk and other dairy products from a local dairy. Our house had an insulated compartment built into the wall near the side door. The milkman would put products into it via a small exterior door and we would access them by a another little door on the inside. Everything stayed cool in the summer but wouldn't freeze in winter.
A friend on a nearby street still has her milk box near her side door and driveway. She uses it for mail and other small parcel deliveries to keep them safe (hopefully) from the "porch pirates" in our neighbourhood.
 
I remember as a kid seeing the milk man come in his truck to deliver milk in glass bottles to our front porch in the mornings. Hubby still has memories of a horse driven ice wagon coming to his street to make regular deliveries of ice to an elderly neighbour. Back then we were so dependent on these deliveries to our neighbourhoods. When our kids were growing up about the only regular truck I saw on the street was the ice cream guy in the summer. How times have changed.
Topics like this are my favourite! Thank you so much for starting it, Lashann!

I remember milk trucks and diaper service trucks, we got neither to our home, but there were many I remember that did.

One thing I do remember, is riding our bikes down to the dairy on weekends... just blocks away from our house, and the worker in the warehouse would always bring us out a treat, like those ice cream push-ups that came in a tube, and you used your thumbs to push the ice cream out of the heavy cardboard tube as you ate it.

On extra special days, we'd get a fragment of dry ice to play with, and what a ball we had playing with that!

Anyhow, one thing I remember related to the milk truck drivers, they allows waved and tooted their horn for us kids, and every now and then they'd stop and talk with us for a few minutes. It was a more personable day back in the day, people (IMO) cared more for others, respected others more, and there was more of a sense of closeness and care.
 
Yup.

Shenandoah's Pride. Milk and eggs. If you wanted anything special (like cream or cottage cheese) you left a note.

We also had potato chips and other snack stuff delivered by Charles Chips in the DC area. I don't recall if there was an Utz truck as well...

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I remember Charles Chips! My parents used to buy those large canisters when they had an eldercare home.
 
1950s: Scissor grinder used to walk the back alleys of the city pushing a grinding wheel that had its own set of wheels. The homemakers would run out to have their scissors sharpened.

Also, men in horse-drawn wagons sold produce. People referred to them as "Street Ayrabs" for some reason.

The horses would deposit their own apples in the alleys. On one occasion, after hearing how farmers used manure to fertilize their fields, my bro and I scooped up some of the horse's deposits and put them around mom's rose bushes in our back yard.

Mom wasn't pleased.
 
Yup.

Shenandoah's Pride. Milk and eggs. If you wanted anything special (like cream or cottage cheese) you left a note.

We also had potato chips and other snack stuff delivered by Charles Chips in the DC area. I don't recall if there was an Utz truck as well...

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Oh yeah, Charles Chips. (y)(y):)

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