Sunshine Superman

Percy And Jack Gay in front of the Dairy



There are some things and places that never seem to change with time and then suddenly they disappear. When you are just a kid everything seemed so permanent, your parents, your dog and your neighbourhood, then one day you look and they are gone. Sunshine Island Dairy was such a place for me. It was always there and I thought it always would be.
In May of this year Purity Dairy ended it's milk home delivery service.

My brothers and I spent a lot of our youth at the dairy both working and playing. On Saturday mornings we would go down to the dairy after we finished delivering our newspapers to see about going out on milk delivery.
The first man that let me tag along was Mr. Hamm, Frank was his first name but we never used it, he was Mr. Hamm. He was one of countless
men who left their homes and families and went off to war. Fought for King and country, lost many friends in battle, then returned and picked up their lives again and got on with building a family.
I never heard him speak of the war even though it had only been a few years since it ended.
He was a strong man, if anyone recalls how milk was handled back then. The stainless cannisters weighed about 35 lbs empty and must have been well in excess of 100 hundred lbs when filled with milk. Mr Hamm would carry one in each hand and toss then up on his wagon as if they were weightless.
In this era dairy farmers had their customers for milk but didn’t have the equipment to process it, so they would take it into a dairy and sell it and buy pack a finished product to sell to their customers.
The milk was packaged in glass bottles with a cardboard stopper on top with the name of the company printed on it. Milk was available only in one grade, 5% and it wasn’t homogenized so the cream always rose to the top. Before you used it you had to shake the bottle to suspend the cream in the milk.
In the winter the milk would freeze and the cream would push the stopper out of the bottle and a frozen cream cone would rise up.
Mr Hamm lived out in Mt Herbert and would make the trip into the dairy early each morning, after he finished milking his cows, and load up his wagon with bottles and start his deliveries.
Each Saturday and all summer I would be at the dairy waiting for him to arrive. I was too small to help unload the milk but was able to carry the wooden cases of bottles and stack them on the wagon.
Oh , by the way Mr Hamm did not use a truck but a horse and wagon in the summer and a sleigh in the winter. I ‘m at a loss as to the horses name but it was along the lines of “Annabelle” I hope someone can tell me what the name was. Summer was a great time to deliver milk, the weather was so warm , you were up early and always finished by 12:30. Mr Hamm had a few customers who actually took a vacation in the summer and left their house and didn’t require milk.
This is where a kid is most handy. Our horse new the milk route as well as Mr. Hamm did and would stop at our customers houses and wait for me to deliver and come back and then move on to the next customer. When we would come to a house where the people were away the horse would stop anyway, not knowing about vacations. The horse would stop and wait for the delivery , so I’d jump of the wagon, rattle the bottles and jump back up on the seat and she would be content and move on to the next customer. Winter was the opposite, it was so cold, and as I mentioned in another story, we wore rubber boots with wool sock. The insulating value was a minus factor and after about 5 steps the socks fell down your leg and bunched up in your toe. After a few hours your feet lost all feeling and you forgot about them until you went home and took off your rubber boots and placed your feet on the oven door and they began to sting as the cold began to leave.
One day in the fall Mr Hamm arrived with a different horse “Annabelle was sick. This was a much younger horse and not too experienced, a lot like me.
Mr hamm warned me not to stand up but to sit as this horse would make sudden moves and I could get hurt. Well it didn’t take long.
It was a very cold morning and there were ruts frozen in the mud around the dairy.
We loaded the cart and pulled away from the loading hatch and began to drive up Belmont Street , when suddenly the horse stumbled over a mud rut, lost his balance and fell down. The cart was loaded with milk crates and was very heavy, if the horse tried to get back up he would either tip the cart or break the shaves. In a flash Mr. Hamm jumped off the seat of the cart and landed by the horses head, he put his knee on the horses neck to prevent him from being able to stand. I ran up to the White Rose and sounded the alarm and Walter, Wenn, and Bill Burhoe and Allison Moore came running down. They unhitched the cart and kept it from rolling back down the hill. Mr Hamm got the horse back up and hitched it back into the cart and away we went.
As We drove along Mr Hamm would teasingly say
“ Did you trip the horse? I thought I saw your leg stick out”.

“ No way Mr. Hamm, look I can’t even come near his leg”

Later that day we were going up Walthen Drive and I’d forgotten his warning and was standing up when the horse suddenly moved. I lost my balance and fell on the horse’s rump , tried to hang on to the harness but slid down his back between his legs and onto the street underneath the horse.
The horse got a scare and began to jump around with me under him my hands and legs sticking up trying not to get kicked or stepped on. There were hoofs flying every where but I managed to roll out from under him unscathed.
I sat down the rest of the day. When we finished the milk route and returned back to the dairy, I would put a blanket over the horse and put on his feed bag, then I would help him unload the empty bottles and place them in the bottle washer.
What a neat machine , it was a conveyor and we turned the bottles upside down and they were washed and steamed to sanitize them. I recall a bottle of milk was seventeen cents.
Mr Hamm would give me 25ct.for helping him and away I’d go home for dinner and then off to the Capitol Theatre to watch a good Cowboy movie.
I never remember Mr Hamm with a truck only his horses and his quiet and thoughtful manner.
I grew a little older and lost interest in the horse and wagon and went on to help Louie Savident and ride in a new truck.


Reg Gay loaned me these pictures.
The two men at the back are Des Whitlock and Arnold Roper?
The other man with white hair is Bob Farqueson
and in front are Elmer Paquet, Dick Bevan, And Louie Savident.
The picture was taken fron the balcony up at Walters.
The two houses that are where Chandler Bros is were bought by Stu Mackay and moved.
They are both on Donwood Drive in Parkdale.



As I mentioned, my brothers and I were at the dairy every Saturday , with but one exception.
CARTOON CAVALCADE
Once a year Sussex Pop would sponsor a morning of cartoons at The Prince Edward Theatre on Grafton Street. To gain admission you had to produce 7 caps from Sussex pop. They also bottled Nesbitt’s Orange and Evangeline products.
We would spend days going store to store emptying out the cannister that collected the bottle caps, sort through them to get enough for the cartoons.
The Prince Edward was a grand old theatre with the box office in the middle of the entry with picture of coming movies on either side.
Kids rarely went to this theatre as they mostly showed mushy adult stuff about love, we went to the Capitol were they showed serials, short comedies like The three Stooges and a good western every Saturday afternoon.
Close to the Prince Edward was a Chinese laundry run by a family who lived there. The grandfather lived to be 112.
The family had children and in the evening as adults lined up waiting to purchase tickets the youngest son would march in front of the people playing a drum.
The adults would OOOOOH, & AAAAAH and give him money.
So the morning of Cartoon Cavalcade we would join hundreds of kids and have a feast of laughter, watching warner Bros. Cartoons, Abbot & Costello, The Bowery Boys, and of course The Three Stooges, what a morning we had.
I also saw King Kong , the 1930's version there, when Kong came on the screen I was gone, laying on the floor , terrified.
Niall would say
“It’s ok , he’s gone come on up”.
Sure enough I’d poke my head up Kong would roar and I’d be gone again.
So there we were watching the show when suddenly the show stops , the light come on and The Man, Mr. Mullis is standing there with our father.
He calls out Niall’s name and we are thinking what did he do , this is serious.
Niall goes up to see dad and then comes back to tell us he has to go.
Butsy Dennis, the milkman that Niall worked with , had a heart attack.
As I said before with Mr Hamm, the horse knew the route and all the stops, but a Chevy pick up truck didn’t.
They needed Niall to go with Butsy’s replacement and show him the route.
Saturday was a difficult day for milkmen as it was the day people paid for the week or bought tickets for the next week.
We were so proud of Niall that day as he left Cartoon Cavalcade to deliver milk.
Neither Rain, Nor sleet, Nor Cartoon Cavalcade could prevent the milk from being delivered.
The Prince Edward burned down one night, it was very elegant with a balcony with two winding stair cases up to it.
We went down to survey the fire the next morning and it was still smoldering. next to it was a small store caleed Ray's, it was badly smoke damaged and flooded with water.
LLoyd Duffy waded in , again thank goodness for rubber boots, he picked up smoe candy that was floating in the water and brought it out.
He gave me a soggy and a smokey Eatmore bar, mmmmmmmmmmm delicious.