My Little Town, Part 3

North East Street, the street where I lived. It's the street where my aunts and uncles and cousins lived too, in those 1950s days when families were a kind of clan.

I grew up next door to the Coudersport Dairy. The soundtrack of my childhood was spliced together with rumbling farm trucks backing into the driveway in the early morning to deliver milk from nearby farms, empty milk cans clanging together, rattling glass bottles of milk in cases as the step trucks rolled slowly up the driveway on their morning trips around town. And Mr. Bradley's cheerful whistling - that's what everyone remembers about Mr. Bradley - Pete as he was known, though his name was Harold.

The Bradleys owned the Dairy and lived in the mansion-like next door house with its deep and shady front porch. Mr. and Mrs. Bradley had two teenage daughters, Judy and Carol, who seemed so beautiful and mysterious to me with their boyfriends and girlfriends coming and going. Their little brother was David, the same age as me, and then came Mike, the baby, some years later.

Isn't that a grand house! Still standing, it's unrecognizable since a fire and
extensive remodeling to accommodate several apartments.

The Dairy building was simple and still stands today tucked up against the flood control channel at the corner of Sixth and North East Street, silent since the Dairy closed in the mid 1960s. The driveway that seemed so long to this child is widened, taking away the yard where the wonderful, big sandbox used to be and the teenage daughters sunbathed on chaise lounges.

  

From Potter Enterprise, 1950

My friend Jeffrey lived on a dairy farm on Ford Hill, growing up having to milk the herd of Holstein cows twice a day. He imagined the milk making its way to a big, gleaming factory and was so disappointed to find the Dairy was no more than a garage when he made friends with David Bradley in elementary school.

The best part of living next to the Dairy was the room where Mr. Bradley kept a little box freezer, the kind with hinged lids that allowed access to the depths where there would be Dixie Cups and popsicles and other frozen treats. It was the honor system, just leave your nickel or dime on the ridge of the blackboard and go on your way.  It seemed so grown-up!

Sometimes I'd peek around the corner to the room where the milk was processed, warm, even in the winter. The cooler, its compressor insistently humming, was beyond. Sometimes there was a milky, watery stream circling down the drain in the main room where the trucks were loaded. And always the sweet, milky scent in the background. Whenever milk is warming on the stove for hot cocoa, the scent takes me back to the Dairy.

1964 advertisement

David Bradley and I played together nearly every day. That sandbox, safely behind a split rail fence to separate the yard and busy driveway was where we'd make elaborate towns and later lined up the toy soldiers to fight wars - though it felt a great injustice that there weren't any nurse figures like I wanted to be. Sometimes we'd play in the big backyard that stretched all the way to Seventh Street. Mr. Bradley hung a wooden horse, complete with a mane and tail made of baler twine, from two ropes tied on a limb of a maple tree. The Bradleys had a big garden back there and a barbecue fireplace. Sometimes the men from the Dairy would sit around the picnic table to eat their lunches.

On rainy summer afternoons, we moved our play to the front porch. It was furnished much like a living room with a full size glider and furniture that appeared every spring and went away in winter. I'd bring over my dolls and we'd play house. I was the Mommy and David was the Daddy and sometimes the dolls would cry and cry and sometimes they would be naughty and sent to the corner to repent. 

I did my best to try to stay overnight there when invited, enticed by the thought of staying in Carol's room with the canopy bed and little balcony porch. But after the popcorn and whatever program was showing on one of the three channels on tv, I always dissolved into tears of homesickness and my father would cross the driveway to carry me home in my pajamas and tuck me into my own bed, still shuddering from weeping.

There came the summer when the new garage went in, right on the line that separated my parents' property from the Bradley's. I watched the progress from the little platform hammered into the branches of a tall spruce tree in our side yard. That's where I stretched out to read - perhaps a Judy Bolton mystery or one of the teenage novels by Rosamond du Jardin or Betty Cavanna though I was far from becoming a teenager myself.

The garage not only housed the Bradley vehicles, the upstairs became storage space for a new, modern twist at the Dairy, soon to replace the thick milk bottles with their aluminum foil tops.

1964

And now we had a new play place - though the grownups would not approve had they known. We'd built tunnels and labrinyth-like paths between the cartons of cartons, that reached the ceiling.

But there was no stopping the change that made paper milk cartons ubiquitous in supermarkets as folks turned away home milk delivery. It wasn't too many years before the Bradley family moved away, Mr. Bradley taking a job in the northeastern part of the state. The Dairy, operating for a time under different management, was then closed.