By Mack Williams
Just up the street from where I live in Danville, the milk truck brings the products of the dairy to a little early 20th century grocery, the “Midtown Market.” I also see similar dairy trucks making deliveries to Food Lion. What I don’t see, and what no one else has seen now for quite a while, is a smaller, more “intimate” truck making home deliveries of milk, cream, etc. Long ago, the dairy joined the doctor in the cessation of “home visits.”
When I was growing up, books were delivered by the Rowan Public Library’s Bookmobile in our driveway for the neighborhood; and Coble Dairy made our personal milk delivery. Just now, I’m puzzled as to why the Bookmobile chose our driveway. Just across the way was an excellent example of what a driveway should be at the Clines’! Its full semicircular expanse was filled with the most proper kind of gravel, (but if it hadn’t been, it would have been a reflection on Mr. W.A. Cline, who owned and operated his gravel business from home). Someone told me the other day that her son-in-law is a plumber, and that he just can’t seem to find the time to fix either her plumbing or his own; but such was not the case with Mr. Cline and his preparation of a proper drive! Our driveway was sort of semicircular, doing a little turn around a little “island” of a few trees. Instead of proper gravel, it was (and still is) made up of nice-sized chunks of quartz rock, not piled on from above, but always erupting from below like the fresh, ongoing teeth of a shark. My friends Charlie and Pam, who live there now, have put down gravel, but it always seems to disappear into the ground, while the quartz chunks continue to rise around it from below (like some sort of strange variation on the “Devil’s Tramping Ground”).
Before digressing to gravel, erupting rocks and teeth, and the Devil, I mentioned that we received our milk from Coble Dairy, which has been out of business now for many years. My band director at Granite Quarry School and for my first couple of years at East Rowan was Mr. Bill Coble. Nowadays, I only seem to hear the name “Coble” mentioned at election time, in reference, of course, to the multi-term congressman from Greensboro.
One morning in the early 1960s, I looked out of our living room door and saw the milkman coming up the steps with a couple of glass, amber-colored, gallon containers of milk. I looked away for a second and then heard a great crashing noise. When I again looked out, I saw that the light blue of our front porch’s slate floor had turned into a little alabaster sea filled with amber crystals of all sizes, resembling an assortment of islets, some of whose sharp, honey-brown peaks rose higher than others above that “sea’s” level.
The milkman asked for a mop and a bucket filled with water so that he might clean up his mess. I brought him both and offered my help. He politely declined my offer, then busied himself with the cleanup. He mopped up the milk and gingerly gathered shards of glass till both were completely gone, only the wet glaze of re-rinsed stone remaining. My mother was at her first-shift job, and my father was asleep from his third-shift work during the time in which all of this transpired. Since it would be several hours before my father’s waking and his picking up of my mother from work, there would be plenty of time for evaporation to do its job and remove that wet sheen from the slate, leaving it “dry-blue” again.
A young boy’s developing world is filled with many adults to whom he assigns the titles of “role model,” “hero,” etc. Among those are teacher, mailman, milkman, policeman, fireman, railroad man, etc. The accident on the front porch that morning was my first inkling of something being amiss with these idealized “heroes,” that memorable and disheartening day when the milkman spilled milk.