Sybil Bruncheon's "ON THIS DATE... 1877"...

Dairy Milk Delivery.jpg

Boys and Girls, did you know that a long time ago, your Mother didn't buy milk at a store? NO! A nice man would come to your house with a small metal rack holding glass bottles of milk with rubber stoppers in them!... Sometimes they might be stolen if you lived in a poor part of town and other mothers talked like pirates, or had an eye-patch, or BOTH! Sometimes the glass bottles might break when they were dropped or thrown, or even freeze in cold weather and explode if they were left out on your fire escape or back porch. But bottles were considered a big improvement over what came before... you see the very first delivery of milk to a home happened when Mr. Enoch Hamhacken actually drove his entire herd of Guernseys into Brooklyn, and left one on each doorstep of his clients for them to milk themselves. Then he would pick the cows up again that afternoon.

You can imagine how difficult that might have been on everyone. Some people were too busy to sit down and milk a cow. Some people were too squeamish or afraid. Some cows might be grumpy on a certain day, and either moo loudly, or even step on the poor customer. And what about nice Mr. Hamhacken? He got tired of carrying his cows up flights of stairs and trying to make them stay outside the Spinnelli's apartment and not walk over to the Lefkowitz's. And then there was the time when he had twenty customers in one tenement building, and the twenty cows he left formed a crazed stampede shortly before lunch and trampled thirteen people to death... all on the fourth floor! That story was on the front page of the Brooklyn World-Watcher Times... complete with horrifying photographs of the victims, squished beyond recognition and surrounded by now-placid cows munching happily on houseplants... And that was on this very date. Back in 1877!

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