Opinion: I was a CT milkman. The Guida guy was the guy to see.

Al Guida was a barrel of a man, short, with Brezhnev eyebrows and rolled-up sleeves that revealed unnaturally thick forearms.

In his youth, I can imagine Guida’s strength being measured in the same way you gauged that of a burdened beast at his Middletown childhood family farm, in horsepower.  And in the milk biz, Guida and his brother Frank had gone from pickup truck peddling to the undisputed milk magnates of Central Connecticut.

In those days, the mid-70s, “the Guida guy was the guy to see,” or so their ad suggested.  And I was a Guida guy, albeit briefly, and hired by Al himself.

So I was sorry to read in the Courant that Connecticut’s dairy farms had declined from about 1,000 in the ‘50s and ‘60s to fewer than 100 today.

Dairy farms in CT disappearing as financial, environmental challenges pose a threat to profitability

Though purchased by the Dairy Farmers of America farmer-owned cooperative in 2012, and now mostly packaged under the Garelick Farms brand, Guida’s plant was (and still is) on Park Street in New Britain.  And in the decades since I worked there, it’s taken over the entire block and forms (what you don’t see much anymore, and which aren’t allowed much anymore) a kind of truck-heavy commercial island in a sea of homes.

Wholesale delivery driving for Guida’s Dairy was my first real job, one that wasn’t an informal non-paying family thing, or me as some kid down the street cutting grass.  It was my first 9 to 5, though actually it was more 3 to 2 – as in 3 in the morning ‘til early afternoon.   It was early morning stuff because, at least on the delivery end, the dairy business is an early morning business.

My father hated that I’d gotten that job.   Not so much because he saw it as a dead-end blue-collar job, but because he had a longtime friend who worked at the same dairy as a truck driver too, and he’d spent his entire working life doing so.  And my father feared I’d follow the same fate.   I had myself gotten the job from my own longtime friend, one who had worked for Guida’s running a small tanker truck to pick up milk from local farms for processing in New Britain.

But I was young and driving a truck was exciting, at least for guys without loftier ideas.  The low rumble of the diesel, the dual shift tranny, and all the heavy road steel suggested some kind of very real participation into the big leagues of workingmanhood.  I wouldn’t be driving what young guys saw as the apex of trucks – that was tractors, the Macks and Kenworths and Peterbilts. But I didn’t drive a bread van either.

Still, my milk truck was far from the cream of Guida’s fleet; it was a 6-wheel affair, a bit older, and had cooling plates instead of an on-board refrigeration system.  And the plates would ice up overnight and melt during the day and the diamond plate floor would get wet and slippery.  And before long, the floor would be covered with a slimy mixture of water, rust, and spilled milk that fouled my uniform as I lifted sloppy crates from the truck to the sidewalk below.

And it was really hard work. Unlike these days, my truck had no liftgate, and I had no loading dock stops.  So you’d be lifting crates of milk all day.  A gallon of milk is eight pounds, and a case was 32.

You’d lift two cases to the sidewalk and then three for a stack of five that wheeled into the store. And that meant I’d you’d lifting 64 and 96 pound hoists all day long.  During holidays, the Italian bakeries on Franklin Avenue used vast amounts of raw milk and cream, so the truck would have dozens of those old style 10-gallon cans that weighed just under 100 pounds full.

To soft suburban me, it seemed a lot then.  But regardless, Al Guida’s massive forearms now made perfect sense.

The drivers were always running because their day ended when the route was done.  So if the day took six hours or 12, that was your day and what you got paid for.  There was some kind of commission structure too, but most of my customers were so small that it hardly mattered. The drivers with the supermarkets made out really well. They had loading dock deliveries and fewer stops, because so much of their truck space got used up.  And supermarkets yielded large commissions that added to their pay,

But my route had a couple of diners and a couple of Bess Eaton donut shops.  There was the Elks Club, a church rectory, two grinder joints, two hot dog joints; and a bunch of stops so small it felt absurd delivering to them with such a large truck. I also had the “Latin Quarter” in Hartford, and Los Cubanitos Market was my big stop.

In those days, the drivers did carry cash. They’d be responsible for totaling up the bills on delivery by adding up long columns of numbers (without the benefit of a calculator), presenting the bill to the store manager, and collecting the cash.  And oddly, it was rarely checks, just cash.   And on delivery, an owner or manager would review the bill and “check you in” or count the products to confirm you’d delivered what he was to pay.  The larger supermarkets and schools had accounts, but I didn’t have any of those on my route.

And at the end of the day, you’d return to Guida’s. You’d unload the empty crates you’d picked up, along with any out of date returns you’d pulled, and hose out the truck if it needed it (which mine often did).  Then upstairs in the office you’d settle your accounts, with all your paid receipts totaled and your cash counted and, not surprisingly, the figures were supposed to match.  And also not surprisingly, mine often didn’t.

Indeed, it was many weeks before I first actually balanced out, and the office gals congratulated me with half-hearted hurrahs and weary smiles drawn from the relief that I’d ceased to be an accounting problem.

Still, I didn’t last long, less than a full year, I think.  And I no longer recall why I left, some trip maybe, or maybe I got tired of going to bed at 7 to get up at 2.

Yet while going to bed so early got old, as did getting up at 2, I was never unhappy about being up and gone once I’d left the house.

Because being awake and out and moving at that time of day, missing all evening fun for an early bedtime, and the physical trauma of the daily REM killing alarm weren’t as unrewarding as they sound.

For me, to be up and moving each day at daybreak was (and at the risk of sounding clichéd) an almost spiritual experience.  And through the windshield from a rumbling truck seat or standing on the sidewalk of a near empty street, the grandeur of dawn that is daily missed from bed or the kitchen table, was laid out as an almost personal gift to be experienced by me alone.

And I could peacefully bathe in its shifting colors and its quiet stillness. a stillness that somehow remained even if the clouds were in motion.  And it made the mornings a nurturing time that fueled you with a strength you’d carry the entire day; a kind of caffeine of nature that awoke some part of you that would otherwise have remained unstirred. It’s an experience completely missed by 9 to 5ers, and its benefit to unfolding the day shouldn’t be discounted.

But regardless of all that, before long I had moved on, and my father needn’t have worried.

Jody Mamone is a writer who grew up in Connecticut. He is at [email protected] and substack.com/@jodymamone.