A cold carton of Americana at your door

If you happen to be in the hills above Sherman Oaks some early morning and an old white milk truck goes clattering up the street, take a moment to observe it very carefully, because you’ll be watching an era roll by.

Ben Zuckerman will be behind the wheel. He’s been delivering milk in the San Fernando Valley for 40 years, but the day of the milkman, like the day of Wonder Bread in L.A., may be nearing an end. At age 64, Ben is thinking of retiring.

You can’t blame him. Once he had more than 200 customers from Van Nuys to Woodland Hills and now he has 30. The business is dying.

Ben admits that it’s cheaper to buy dairy products at a market, but I detected a note of melancholy in his voice when he talked about having to make the decision on whether to retire or stick it out for the sake of those who still need him.

“Service is what I sell,” he says, with no small amount of pride, “not price. Service and freshness.”

A balding, amiable man, he also cares a good deal about those he’s served for a lot of years, particularly the kids in school who benefit from his stops. His customers include a mix of homes and private schools.

“If I quit,” he says, “I want to make sure the kids are taken care of. I won’t leave ‘em hanging.”

He’s worried about who might take his place. He wants it to be someone who, like him, cares a lot and is safe for children to be around.

You don’t meet a lot of workers who love what they’re doing as much as Ben loves his job. He likes meeting people and the feeling that they like meeting him.

He once delivered to a lot of celebrities but they’ve moved, died or just plain disappeared, Ben says. He talks about Sally Field, “a real lady,” Bobbie Gentry, Tom Bosley, John Cassavetes and old Sam Arkoff, king of the B-movie horror flicks.

“People once lived in the same house, had kids and stayed for years,” he says between bites of a pastrami sandwich at a Studio City deli. “Now they’re moving all the time and there are no more kids in the neighborhood. It’s a different world.”

There were dogs too, and a few of them were mean. He’s been bitten three times but has never sued anyone. In one instance, he was leaning over on the outside of a gate to put the milk down and a dog poked his face through an opening and bit him on the head.

“There I am bleeding and the owner is denying that the dog bit me,” he says with a laugh. “But that’s OK.”

He pauses, still thinking of celebrities on his route, and then says, “Oh, yeah, Ernest Borgnine was there for a while, and Glen Campbell too.”

He began as a milkman after a tour of duty in the Army. There were other jobs in between, but he connected with none of them until he began delivering milk. There were still milkmen who’d driven horse-drawn wagons in some places when he began, Ben adds, but he didn’t have to drive one. He says it with a sense of relief.

“I had a truck that kept breaking down. There were no refrigerated vans back then. You had to throw ice on your products to keep them fresh. We had bottles in those days. They clanked as we drove along. There’s no clanking with milk cartons.”

Ben has gone through three trucks in the four decades he’s driven through the hills south of the Ventura Freeway. He doesn’t know exactly how many miles he’s put on since he began, but he does know he put 200,000 on his last truck. And if one breaks down, it’s his job to get it fixed.

He’s an independent distributor, selling Alta Dena dairy products, making about a 35% profit, and there’s no Big Daddy to pay for repairs. He buys the stuff, sells it, takes his cut and does what he can to keep the old truck running. He’s never likely to be a millionaire, but one gets the strong impression that Ben isn’t doing it just for money.

He also doesn’t feel like he’s a part of Americana that’s slipping away. Not like icemen or the junkmen who collected rags, bottles and sacks from a horse-drawn wagon.

He knows of 10 other milkmen, one of them a woman. They’ll be around, for a while, at least, if Ben decides to call it quits in a year.

Walking away won’t be easy. If he doesn’t think of himself as part of a Norman Rockwell painting, he does see delivering milk as more than just a job. It’s a commitment. He hasn’t missed a day of work in 40 years; not for illness, storms or earthquakes. He broke a big toe once and had to drive with a cast on his foot. He took one of his three kids along to run the milk to the houses.

“I love the people,” he says. “Even the crabby ones. You talk to them for a while, and pretty soon they’re your friends.”

No question that milkmen belong to another age, and maybe Ben does too, that easier time in America when we cared about each other and were content to make a living and not a million. You’ve got to envy a guy like Ben Zuckerman. He’s a happy man, and his conscience is clear. That counts. That counts a lot.

Almtz13@aol.com