The Milk Order

Not only did we scare the milkman half to death in Attalla, but I had another milkman moment months later after we moved into our new house in Texas. Mama had set up the morning milk delivery with the Abilene Foremost Dairy man. The company was trying out a new ordering system, and we would be a part of that. There was a multi colored round paper badge in a holder that the milkman tacked to the post near our front door. It had thirty or so little tabs attached, and looked similar to the paint color wheels you might see at a hardware store. Each tab was printed and color coded with a different dairy product. The object was to allow people to order their dairy products the night before delivery by turning the tabs upward for the desired items. When the milkman came early the next morning, he might see the tag for a quart of milk facing upward, while all the rest were undisturbed, facing downward. He would leave a quart of milk.

As a seven year old, the badge and it's brightly colored tags were of interest to me. When everybody was inside, I took it down and played with it awhile, turning the tabs and such. When I heard Mama calling me to suppertime, I quickly put the badge back up on it's hanger.

The modest concrete porch on our little house was only about five feet wide, but at the next morning's light, it was an astonishing sight to behold! In my rush to replace the badge the night before, I had hung it upside down. Instead of getting the quart of Buttermilk that Mama had ordered, we recieved everything but the buttermilk! The porch was filled with one each of dairy products like Half and Half, sweet milk, Chocolate Milk, evaporated milk, Skim Milk, heavy cream, light cream, hard cheese, cottage cheese, butter...you name it, we had one of it! All except for the Buttermilk, of course, which Mama later had to go down to the Goldsmith store and buy.

I remember some talk about a spanking, but I don't remember getting one. There was also a discussion about making the dairy take the stuff back, but for whatever reason, I don't believe Mama ever asked.

It turned out fine, anyway. We ate high on the hog (or should I say cow) for a week or two. There was lots of cereal for breakfast, plenty of butter for the biscuits, and cheese galore whenever you wanted it! And Milk! There was skim milk with pork chops, sweet milk with Spaghetti, Chocolate Milk with Collard Greens and cornbread! Daddy always took his coffee black, but there was a time there when he drank it with Half and Half, if only to make sure Mama got her money's worth!

That was a close call for me. I was already on the hot seat for having taken a free sample of Duz detergent out of the mailbox and playing with it in the dirt. The Duz company was trying to introduce it's new disc shaped detergent, which eliminated the need for measuring out washing powder. You just threw the disc in the washer and it dissolved in the water. I discovered that the disc made a great wheel, and I played with it all day until it finally fell apart. All's well that ends well, though. There were two discs in the sample package, and I was caught when Mama asked me why the bag was torn open and one disc was missing. She wasn't really mad, and eventually let me throw the other disc in the wash and watch it melt away among the clothes.