One of my earliest memories was as a kid living in a fifth-floor walkup apartment on the west side of Manhattan, NYC.
My weekly chore from probably about six years old was to place the week’s collection of trash into the big galvanized containers in the basement, where the trashman would come by once a week to collect the contents. Luckily, I did not have to carry the trash down the stairs into the basement. We had a dumbwaiter.
The name likely now would be considered insulting, The dumbwaiter — the word derives from the silent (and in our family, the only) servant in our apartment — was a wooden shelf suspended on a rope and a set of pulleys. Mom placed the trash bags on the shelf and then pulled on the rope to lower the trash the way we might raise or lower a flag. I raced down to the basement and moved the trash from the dumbwaiter to the waiting trash cans.
Another memory from that period is the milkman leaving milk in a wire basket outside the door. Mom had a standing order, but if she wanted to change it — say, an extra pint of cream for whipping to top strawberry shortcake — she wrote a note and left it with the empty bottles. The milkman then left the requested order with his morning delivery.
We moved to Maine when I started Fourth Grade and we became our own milkman. We lived too far from the county seat to have our milk delivered but we drove past the farm daily when we went to the post office to check our mail. The Ellis farm was on the way home from town and we stopped to pick up a gallon every other day from the second refrigerator in the Ellis’ kitchen — one of us simply ran inside to grab our order — along with any extra Mom thought we needed, such as a quart of cream for the ice cream we would make on a summer afternoon.
Ken Bailey was the owner of a dairy farm just outside of the county seat, and the last farmer in Maine to deliver unprocessed milk door-to-door.
He called it “unprocessed” rather than “raw” because many of his customers were young people “from away” who had moved to rural Maine for clean air, slower life and organic food. Any advertiser can attest that what you call your product is important.
“We have a lot of customers who want ‘unprocessed’ milk who will stop buying if you call it ‘raw’,” Bailey, a seventh-generation dairyman, once told me.
It wasn’t as though his customers didn’t know why they were buying from him rather than one of the big-name brands from the grocery store. They simply did not like the connotation of the word.
Also, many people believe that buying farm produce from local sources was its own kind of protection. If anyone became ill, word would spread quickly about the source of the offending food, no waiting for the federal government to investigate and then allow producers to “voluntarily” recall their product.
One of Bailey’s pet peeves involved the idea that farmers stayed in their profession, rather than switch to work that paid better and was not reliant on the weather, because they love it. “We do love it. It’s in our blood,” he said; he just did not like that intimacy with the soil was often used as rationale for poor pay and difficulty paying one’s bills. He often quoted a president of Central Maine Power, who when asked about the high costs farmers face to stay in business, replied, “They love what they do.”
I often think of Ken’s pronouncements about his work and why he kept doing it. Many of our citizens remain underpaid – some not paid at all – because they are presumed to love their job.
They do, of course, but in a culture that measures value in cash, it doesn’t seem quite fair that some folks amass profits on the labor of low-paid, or un-paid, workers.
On the other hand, if, as the CMP head implied, the size of one’s paycheck is inversely related to how much one loves the work, he must have really hated his job.
Text and images ©2024 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, and social anthropologist living in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com
