Things I forget to remember

These aren't all from Chatham where I grew up, but these first two are. The point is, I am the last generation on earth to remember milk being delivered by horse and wagon. I loved this as a child. Anything to do with horses was magical. That cloppa-cloppa-cloppa sound is still intoxicating to me.

It's hard to find photos of the era - some of these no doubt go back before my time. It's even harder to find any information at all about the actual practice of delivering milk door-to-door. There's just nothing there, no one who remembers anything. All of them have died, I guess.

This was anti-technology, and Silverwood's Dairy (horse and cart pictured above) in Ontario kept it going until about 1962. I don't know why: did it keep costs down? Eventually it became impractical to keep all those horses, and I would imagine most of them went to the slaughterhouse: Darling's glue factory, where the stench from rendered hoofs and hides was simply sickening in those hot Chatham summers.

With the cicadas buzzing. 

Every so often I go on Chatham historical sites - there are tons of them, Chatham people being preservation-minded and not inclined to rip down old buildings to slap up cardboard condos that go up instead of out. Last night I found a site listing old houses that looked very ordinary to me, but went back to 1850 or so. It honestly made me wonder, not for the first time, how old the house I grew up in was: some say 1920s, but it looked older to me than many of the 1850 ones. It had wrought-iron grates on the heat registers, a dumbwaiter, a weird closet-within-a-closet thing, a working fireplace with a terrazzo hearth (very rare then), a foyer, and ceramic fruit on the ceiling around the base of the old-fashioned glass chandelier.

I know people are living there again, because I got an email from one of them, which is nice because for about forty years it was used as a commercial building, a doctor's office. Now it has been changed back to a house again. A home, with a young couple and children. It has been a long, long time since small children (such as me) ran around in that place.

Anyway, in my late-night historical foraging, I found the house I used to play in with my friend Kim, whose father was a very distinguished, even world-renowned architect (which, by the way, Kim now is too). Who knew?  The houses he designed looked strange to us, with flat roofs and only one floor. Now they are known as "Storey houses" and much-prized. 

I also found the little variety store where I bought penny candy, now up for sale. They even showed the inside of it. Once I played with a little girl who lived up there with her mother and went to (I remember) Pentecostal Holiness Church. She asked me if I'd like to go to her church, and when I told my mother she was shocked that she even asked. I think now that she was afraid my friend might be black.

What's the point of all this? Nothing, except that it's gone forever, those days of organic things like wood and horseflesh. Brick has lasted a little bit longer.

And memory lasts, too. That is, until you die.

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You might as well squeeze the cow

I'm not a million years old, but in many ways I might as well be.

I live in an era of tablets, social networks and i-this-and-i-that, and I have (very) imperfectly adapted. But I grew up in something else.

This was the kind of thing I heard, and saw, when I was a child. This is how we got our milk every day. Yes, this way.

Cloppa, cloppa, cloppa down the street every morning, very early. Snorting and whinnying. It was a little girl's paradise. Every morning I'd rush out the front door with a carrot.

Oh that smell, that I love to this day, the smell of horses!

I used to try to tell my children about this, and they rolled their eyes and said I was lying. Surely horse-drawn wagons ended some time in the 1890s.

But they didn't. They delivered milk, not to mention fruits and vegetables, well into the 1960s.

 This is a wagon from Bracebridge Dairy. All these wagons have a three-digit phone number on them, incomprehensible. I remember the name Bracebridge - somewhere in Northern Ontario, I think (a name I haven't heard in so long, like the old street names in Chatham, that it gives me an odd sort of thrill). We had Silverwood Dairies, mostly in southern Ontario but also, I believe, in parts of Alberta out west.

I just thought of something! My first real job was in the purchasing department of Silverwood Dairies in London, Ontario. My job had nothing to do with the milk, but I do remember filling out endless requisition forms for various ingredients. I was also on the taste panel for new products, one of which was artificial ham.

Supposedly, this is the very last Silverwood's wagon in existence. A picture both beautiful and sad. Accounts vary as to exactly when they were phased out: some say 1960, others 1964. If it was '64, I'd have very clear memories of it. But it seems incredible we got our milk this way right into the Space Age.

Bottles were still clinking together then, but no longer had the cream-top bulge that you skimmed with a little dipper. Later when I lived in Alberta, our post-war bungalow had a little cabinet at the back, the place where the milkman left the bottles and picked up the note for next day's order. Without the cabinet, the milk would freeze in the 40-below weather and the bottles burst open.

This is one of my favorites. By the look of the cars, it seems to have been taken in the early 1950s. The horse, looking intimidated, is completely surrounded by traffic.  I wonder how everyone managed. Did the horses have the right of way? What about the road apples?

Did any of them ever spook and take off at a gallop? Horses will be horses, after all.

More to the point, I wonder why everyone seems to have forgotten all about this. Like the elusive, mysterious Skeezix bird, it belongs to a past that now seems more like a mirage.

People collect dairy memorabilia now the way they collect old weather vanes or butter churns. I suppose back then, men with cold hands milked those cows every morning. It would be bottled by some primitive method, sealed with a cardboard cap. This was before the days of "homo milk", milk that had magically been homogenized so that you could no longer skim the rich yellowy cream off the top.

Just a model now, but I remember when it creaked and clopped and smelled like horses.

I wonder if there's still such a thing as "homo milk".

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