Editor's note: Today's article by Glenn Tunney, the second of a three-part series originally published in May 2003, takes us back to the bygone era of dairy home deliveries as residents recall Stapleton's Dairy of West Brownsville.

Stapleton's Dairy operated in West Brownsville from 1903 until the 1940s, providing Browns-ville area farmers with a convenient outlet for their milk. The dairy converted local milk into such delicious dairy products as cottage cheese, sour cream, butter, flavored milks, coffee cream, buttermilk and whipping cream. The dairy building, no longer standing, was located between Railroad (Main) and Middle Streets on the corner of Ashland Alley, just down the street from the Lincoln Baking Co.

J.R. and Mary Stapleton, who died in 1927 and 1932 respectively, founded Stapleton's Dairy. Their five children, Ida Mae Stapleton Lutes, Clyde, Howard, Harry (Jack) and Delmar (Jim) Stapleton, all helped with the dairy operation as they were growing up. In 1927, Jim Stapleton became the last of the five to take a spouse, marrying Adda Verlair "Dutch" Sprinkle. The couple had three children, Thom, Marilu and Howard, all of whom live in Arizona today. Thom described for me how the duties of managing the dairy were gradually transferred from his grandmother, Mary Stapleton, to his own generation.

"The brothers helped run the dairy for a number of years," Thom told me, "but eventually several of the brothers went their own way. My uncle Jack went into the truck and car business, Clyde worked in the mines, and Howard was an agent for the P & LE Railroad."

That left Thom's father and mother, Jim and "Dutch" Stapleton, to manage the dairy with the indispensable assistance of a man named "Litchie" Jacobs.

"Litchie Jacobs was the backbone of the business," said Thom.

"His name was Litchie?" I asked.

"That's right. Litchie's brother was Joey Jacobs, who worked at Lincoln Baking Co., and Litchie's nephew, Mike Jacobs, was later a lifeguard at the West Brownsville beach."

Although Jim Stapleton was nominally in charge of the dairy operation, Litchie primarily handled the processing of the milk.

"Litchie was licensed by the state," Thom said, "to test the milk and run the pasteurizing equipment. The milk processing was monitored as to time and temperature and recorded on charts, which had to be kept for state inspection at any time. My dad was also licensed to do this, but Litchie really handled most of the operation."

The dairy equipment was fascinating to the Stapleton children. Marilu Stapleton Coppinger remembers her childhood impressions of the machinery.

"I remember the huge stainless steel vats that pasteurized the milk," she said. "At least they seemed huge to me. I also recall the chiller for the cream. One year my mother made a drink of iced tea with citrus and ran it over the chiller to make it icy. It was delicious!"

Unfortunately, state inspectors frowned upon "Dutch's" new treat.

"The State Control Board put a stop to that on their routine inspection," said Marilu. "We also had good cottage cheese and sour cream, which as a child, I thought were untouchable. And I remember making butter in the house - working it with a wooden paddle to get the excess water out, shaping it and wrapping it."

In order to produce cream, cheese, cottage cheese and other specialty products, whole milk was processed with a separator.

"To produce cream for sale as coffee cream and whipping cream," Thom Stapleton said, "the milk was run through the separator twice. According to state law, the skim milk that was left after that process was supposed to be poured down the sewer. We gave it away though, and we were fined by the state time and time again for that practice. A lot of it went to Mike and Joe Klaic for their hogs, which they raised on the river bank near the old West Brownsville distillery."

Thom's boyhood memories of the dairy are rooted in the Depression, when wasting anything was a sin. Today skim milk is a popular product in its own right, and during the tough years of the 1930s, many families would have been glad to have it.

Bill Beals, now of Centreville, Va., recalls, "As a child in the mid-1930s, I would go to Stapleton's Dairy, where they would fill your container with skim milk to take home. It was a real treat. The Stapletons were a generous family in the community when things were very difficult for most others."

In addition to the regulation requiring disposal of skim milk, there were other state laws that did not make much sense to Marilu Stapleton Coppinger.

"Pennsylvania had some strange laws regarding milk," she told me, "including one that helped lead to the dairy's demise. Even though Browns-ville was in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, we were not allowed to buy milk out of state when it was in short supply locally.

"I remember having it shipped in from near Harrisburg one year. Of course, the cost of shipping it that distance, rather than being able to buy it from farmers in much closer West Virginia or Ohio and possibly picking it up ourselves, was exorbitant, and it was not a cost we could readily pass on to the consumer. We didn't really know from week to week what the local supply would be."

Many folks who remember Stapleton's Dairy have a memory of rising early in the morning and looking outside to find a couple of quarts of fresh milk waiting for them on the porch, just in time for breakfast. The delivery man or boy who put them there had rolled out of bed around 2 a.m. in order to complete his door-to-door route by breakfast time.

One 10-year-old whose first job was helping to deliver the milk and collect the empties was Thom Stapleton, whose mother helped manage the dairy. Being Mrs. Stapleton's son did not guarantee that her youthful offspring could lead the Life of Riley.

"Mom thought everyone should experience the work ethic," said Thom, "and learn that life was not a free ride."

Thom spent many early summer mornings perched on the running board of a milk truck, preparing to jump down and hurry to a customer's door with the bottles of milk the driver had handed to him. Six hours of dashing from truck to porch and back again was enough to tire out most kids, but when the truck returned to the dairy around 8 a.m., there was plenty of work remaining to be done.

"During my childhood years working at the dairy in the late 1930s and early 1940s," Thom said, "Milk was selling for 9 cents a quart, then 10 cents, and finally 11 cents. I believe the going wages were $15.00 a week for the top hands. A driver began his day around 2 a.m. by loading the truck for house-to-house delivery, then putting the milk on each doorstep on his route. This usually took until about 8 a.m., at which time he would return to the dairy, unload the empty bottles he had picked up, and reload the truck to do commercial deliveries to various stores around town. That took the driver until about 1 p.m., after which he would unload more empties, wash out the truck, and by 2 p.m. could probably go home."

Being a milk delivery man did not make one rich, but the job did provide a living at a time when many yearned for work.

"I helped a driver friend of my brother deliver Stapleton's milk," remembers Dan Buchan, who now lives in Blue Springs, Mo. "That meant getting up very early in the morning. He paid me about 50 cents per week, which in those days was good money for a 12-year-old boy. One time I earned a dollar for teaching a new driver the delivery route."

When the milk delivery truck drove up to a customer's house, the system of letting the driver know how much milk the customer wanted that morning was simple.

"It was similar to the ice ordering system," says Paul Broadwell of Phoenix, Ariz., who grew up in West Brownsville. "If you wanted delivery of a quart, you put out an empty clean quart bottle; if you wanted two quarts, you put out two bottles. That was our home delivery method, and it worked pretty well.

"I especially recall Stapleton's chocolate milk," Paul continued, echoing praise heard from others about the high quality of that chocolate milk. "And I can still recall looking out early in the morning and seeing the milk already on our front porch. It showed its richness by the amount of cream on the top of the milk, which accumulated as it sat. That cream was generally saved for coffee-drinking visitors, but if you could get your hands on it, it was very good with strawberries!"

One of Stapleton's commercial customers was Torchia's grocery store in West Brownsville. Loretta Torchia Galica, now of Canton, Ohio, recalls that it was a great convenience to have both Stapleton's Dairy and Lincoln Baking Co. just blocks from the store in West Brownsville.

"Many a Sunday when our store ran out of milk," says Loretta, "we would have to have my father, Joe Torchia, drive down to the dairy to pick up extra milk. The bakery was down that way too, and we often had to get extra bread when we ran out."

It is not only sights and sounds that we remember years later. Sometimes our other senses bear imprints of our early years.

"I can still remember," Loretta concluded, "the smells of both of those places."

When a Stapleton's delivery truck driver returned from his door-to-door route around 8 a.m., he would load up again for his commercial deliveries, but young Thom Stapleton would not be going along on that route. Instead, there were other jobs at the dairy awaiting his personal attention.

There were rubber boots and rubber aprons to be donned, pasteurizers to be climbed into and cleaned, and plenty of other daily chores to be done to assure that Stapleton's Dairy would continue to meet the high standards upon which it prided itself.

Next week, we will follow Thom into the dairy's production rooms as we continue our 1930s-era visit to Stapleton's Dairy in West Brownsville.

Comments about these articles may be sent to Editor Mark O'Keefe, 8 - 18 East Church Street, Uniontown, PA or e-mailed to mo'keefe@heraldstandard.com