Mobile Vendors

You didn't have to go to a store to buy things in Brooklyn in 1946. Sometimes the merchandise came to you. Mimi Sheraton mentions the white Good Humor and Bungalow Bar ice cream trucks that drove slowly through her neighborhood in the summer. In When Brooklyn Was the World, Elliot Willensky listed a colorful complement of other vendors commonly seen in Brooklyn at the time.

First and foremost were the milkmen from Sheffield Farms, Borden's or Reid's Union Dairy who delivered milk to customers' doors in the early AM hours. The customer put out his or her empty bottles the night before, usually with a note stuck in one with the next day's order. Some milkmen and other vendors were still using horse drawn wagons, thanks to the petroleum restrictions of the war years, but these would quickly disappear in the postwar era. Sheraton remembers that the milk sometimes froze in the frigid winter air and had to be defrosted. Milkmen in motorized trucks were still delivering milk in suburban Long Island when I was a little kid in the 1950s. I remember not only frozen milk in the winter but also milk that had turned sour when left out too long on a particularly hot summer morning. The popular comedy star Danny Kaye played a milkman in "The Kid From Brooklyn," the much ballyhooed movie that opened right before Easter in 1946.

Krug's and Dugan's delivery men knocked at the door with their baked goods back then, offering breads, coffee cakes, crumbcakes, cupcakes, pastries, pies and donuts. This week in April they would have hot cross buns, a Good Friday tradition. Laundry delivery men, stores-on-wheels, Fuller Brush and Electrolux vacuum salesmen, diaper trucks, produce trucks and the seltzer salesmen were among the other vendors who plied the streets. In some neighborhoods spring brought the ragman ringing his cowbell and looking to buy old clothes. Then there were the scissor and knife grinder, the umbrella repairman and the street photographer who posed kids on a Shetland pony. In working class neighborhoods some people did not yet have a "frigidaire," as most people still called all refrigerators, and relied on the iceman to make deliveries for their ice boxes. Many people still had coal delivered for their furnaces and in the worst of the tenement buildings the only heat came from a pot-bellied coal-burning stove. Among the specialty street merchants were the sweet potato man, the corn on the cob vendor and the jelly apple merchant, most likely to be found on heavily traveled commercial streets.