Ever since the ravages of COVID, people have actively worked to find ways to withdraw from society. From DoorDash to delivery by drone, it seems that human interaction is on the wane. Not so long ago, home delivery of certain food products was very popular. Milk, of all things, was delivered to our doors with stunning efficiency by white-uniform-clad delivery drivers behind the wheel of distinctive milk trucks. If you have $11,000 and are looking to reenact one of the most historic renditions of food delivery, this rarely seen 1971 Divco 300D for sale on Craigslist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, may be your jam. Thanks to Tony P. for the tip!
Everywhere you go in today’s world, you see signs of folks withdrawing from society in some way or another. You cannot go shopping for groceries anymore without weaving around carts being loaded by a store employee for placement in an open SUV hatch out in the parking lot. If driving to the store is too much of a burden, you can order delivery by drone in many major cities. Let’s not even get into the whole DoorDash thing. Do any of you remember a time when going out to eat was something special? Now it seems that most places don’t even want you in the restaurant anymore. We are fast becoming a nation of voluntary shut-ins where food is concerned.
Before I spend anymore time on my soapbox about people getting food products delivered, I need to roll the clock back a minute. I am in my early fifties, so I have lived through some interesting and often now extinct stuff. One of my earliest memories is of a galvanized steel box on the front porch of my grandparents’ home in Florida. It had a hinged lid and was insulated with styrofoam. Every few days, they would receive a milk delivery from the T.G. Lee Dairy. The milkman drove a typical early-1970s step van instead of the distinctive Divco milk trucks seen in the north. However, the experience was the same. This service, along with a similar one from Charles Chips, with their plain potato chips in a round, brown tin, didn’t last very long into my childhood before they disappeared from memory.
Seeing this 1971 Divco model 300D step van pop up on the tips list brought my memory back to those carefree days as a kid who was fascinated by everything around me with an engine. It wasn’t until I was much older that I even saw a milk truck of this type at the Hershey Swap Meet, and even longer before I came across one below the Mason-Dixon Line. It seems that we never got the cool milk trucks that northerners enjoyed. Evidently, the tradition lasted for a long while in a few places. Divco manufactured this style milk truck from 1937 until 1986 with few changes.
Such trucks are rare to see today. One of the failings of the design is that these were non-refrigerated trucks. Products that required refrigeration, such as milk, were iced down instead. This melting ice kept moisture in the cracks and crevices of these trucks until it found a way out. Usually, that meant rust, and the pictures of this truck show evidence of this unfortunate side-effect. The good news is that the areas where rust has formed are almost all flat and should be easy to replace.
We are told that this dapper Divco was used to deliver milk by the Christiansen Dairy Company in Rhode Island until the seller purchased it in 2019. As for the rest of the truck, the seller claims that it does run and drive. It will also need some brake line replacement, as you would expect from a northern climate vehicle of this age. In fact, given that it is rated at a gross weight of 11,000 lbs., you might want to go over the whole brake system very carefully. These trucks aren’t geared to go very fast, but hills are a thing.
Perhaps some of the more enterprising companies today could look back and see the examples set back in the day for food delivery. We are told that dairies are suffering because milk consumption is in a freefall in this country. Maybe so. However, there seems to be no shortage of demand for energy drinks and caffiene laden sodas among just about every age group. Maybe these companies will consider door-to-door delivery again. There is certainly a market for it. Of course, by the time they got started along this path, the trucks will be driverless and a creepy human-featured robot will be happily skipping towards your door at all hours of the night.
After some deliberation, I think we will keep this milk truck delivery stuff to ourselves. What do you think? Please share your thoughts and memories in the comments.
We still have milk deliveries here in RI.
One neat feature on Divcos was the ability to stand up and drive, and these were manual transmission trucks. I think the seat could swing out of the way, and the clutch and brake pedal were combined in one. The throttle I think was on the shifter. I never drove one, just seen them and read about them. It fascinated me that someone could drive a standard transmission truck standing up. This Old Milk truck looks like it was “Put Out to Pasture” ( Punn Intended). This is still a great find and a I really enjoyed your write up Jeff. It’s great seeing all sorts of trucks here on Barnfinds. Hope it gets back on the road one day.
Good article Jeff about an important rig in a part of our past culture, and you answered a question that has bugged me for awhile-considering their numbers (49 years worth!) why don’t we see these pop up anywhere? Didn’t realize they weren’t refrigerated!
Learned something again today.
Thanks, Jeff.
Oh boy, the “milkman” jokes should surface after a long hiatus.( crickets chirping) The milkman, or milkmaid, was the center of all jokes, mainly because of their arrival times. Before the 7-11( one of the 1st late night grocery stores) most grocery stores were a 9-5 deal. People had metal boxes in the home doors, and a 2 way opening, the milkman would leave the products, usually before dawn, ironically just after the old man left for the factory. My old man made a milk chute in the wall, that me and my brother used to climb out of at night, but that’s for a different time.
Certain vehicles had specific duties, like the Checker for a taxi, Mack was a dump truck, a Divco was for dairy. The ones that had no floors left, became tool sheds out back. It’s tough to try and relate anything today to the “stand-up Divco”, and the era it serviced. Never in a Divcos opertators wildest dreams did they ever think home delivery would be so big, and if you are like me, I don’t like shopping, and would welcome home delivery if it wasn’t riddled with so many problems. All hail the Divco,,,,for a more simpler time.
Homestead Creamery used these some time ago,
& did home delivery until a year or to ago (with newer trucks).
I’d like to find one of their home delivery boxes.It had their logo
on it with one of those trucks.
It’s been over 60 years. I can still hear the clank of the bottles and the milkman slipping the clutch in the early morning. We had George the milkman who worked for Lake to Lake. Veryfine was the other dairy.
Back in the 1960’s in Huntington W.Va. we had Borden’s Dairy. The trucks were light blue with white trim and had a picture of “Elise the Borden Cow” along with the company name on the sides. Our delivery man was Mr. Snyder to the kids but, grown folks called him “Pop Snyder”. He would often let my grandmother ride on the passenger side the two blocks to the city bus stop so she could get to work. He’d say, “There’s no sense you walking, I’m going right by there”.
I’d say this find brought back a lot of memories.
My family’s last milk delivery was in 1965. Way before Covid. The Fuller Brush guy lasted about another year, til we moved and I guess they couldn’t track our cell phones…
As a kid growing up in the suburbs north of Toronto, we had numerous delivery trucks on our street. Milk truck, bread truck and soft drink truck. About once or twice a month, the knife sharpening truck would come by. He would ring a bell every 100 feet and people would bring out their knives, scissors or lawn mower blades, to be sharpened.
In the late ’60s while in HS, I worked at a service station that had a maintenance contract with a local dairy delivery service – they had about 30 Divcos and we had a regular, nightly service business, kept 2 of us busy for 2-3 hours each night with oil changes & tune ups, brake service, along with filling the fuel tanks of the whole fleet so they were ready to go out around 4am. They were simple and very rugged/reliable trucks. Another thing people sometimes forget is how interconnected small businesses were – we needed them and they needed us.
There was a milk box on our porch right beneath the bathroom window. The milk was delivered every morning and my dad would ask our milkman Bob Freitag how the roads where. Our own milk Delivery weatherman. Miss Bob and the milk
there were two kinds of bottles, one with a somewhat straight neck for homogenized milk and the other with a “bowl” type area in the neck for nonhomogenized. The bowl in neck was for cream to float to the top and be separated by the consumer. We always got the homogenized and my aunt got the nonhomogenized. There was one dairy that even used brown glass bottles to keep the milk better in the porch box. Oh my, all these memories, so good not to keep them all “bottled up”.
Udderly fascinating.
Thanks folks all for sharing your memories. Very heartwarming.
Most of the houses in my area were built in the late 40’s to early 50’s. They had a small door about 4 feet up for the delivery men to use. There was also a door on the inside of the house for the homeowner to collect the product. When kids forgot their key to the house, they would squeeze inside through the delivery door.