York Town Square

John Schwartz drove a milk truck for Rutter’s, the venerable York County, Pa., dairy before his retirement in 1994. Rutter’s ended its home delivery in the mid-1990s. Another company, Apple Valley Creamery, started home deliveries about three years ago. (See additional photo and videos below.) Also of interest: Baltimore screamed for York County ice cream and Pinch Gut or Arbor or Adamsville is in Red Lion or Dallastown or, uh, actually York Township and Perrydale’s bovine: ‘She’s a wonderful, laid-back cow’.

This is a tale of two milkmen.
One, John Schwartz, delivered milk for decades for Rutter’s.
He came back recently to talk about time delivering for this old-time York County business.
Here’s one of his stories, according to the York, Pa., Daily Record/Sunday News (1/9/11):

Justin Althouse loads up before taking to the road. Apple Valley delivers to customers in Adams, Cumberland and York counties.

Schwartz once found an 8-foot black snake in his truck after making a delivery to a bar. One of the bar’s regulars put it there. Schwartz, after discovering the snake, went back to the bar to retrieve the prankster. The men couldn’t find the snake when they returned to the truck, so Schwartz brought the prankster along with him, who eventually forced the snake out from under the dashboard and removed it from the truck.

The other, Justin Althouse, has been on the job for Apple Valley Creamery for just a few months.
He’s doing that until grad school for the relatively new startup dairy:

Althouse regularly delivers to a house where several big dogs live. Usually, they’re inside, where they bark at Althouse through a glass door. One day, however, they were roaming free in the driveway when he pulled in, with no owner in sight.
“What am I going to do?” he recalled thinking.
Fortunately for Althouse, the owner appeared and restrained the dogs.
Althouse usually puts the milk he delivers into a cooler waiting on his customers’ porches. Some of them use their own coolers; others use one provided by Apple Valley. Some customers ask him to leave the milk in a refrigerator in their garage. In the winter, it’s sometimes cold enough outside that he can just leave the milk on the porch.

It’s an interesting contrast of an older business changing, leaving an opportunity for another to explore. That’s been going on for centuries around here.
As for milkmen, well, they’ll always have stories to tell.
For more about Rutter’s and John Schwartz, visit: Milkmen from past and for more about Althouse and Apple Valley, visit: Milkmen of present.

Also of interest:

– The milkman from Stewartstown muses about delivering standing up: ‘I don’t know how I drove’.
– Remember: Visits from the milkman.
– See a Paul Kuehnel video of Jay Crist operating a milk delivery truck.
Also:
– All York Town Square posts from the start. (Key word search by using “find” on browser.) Or search via Google.

John Schwartz back in the saddle. Photographer Paul Kuehnel assesses the video at his blog Greenmesh.