Lakewood Lore

Oh chute! Milk's hole-in-the-wall angle is modernized

Once upon a time, every self-respecting home in Lakewood was built with a milk chute.

To this day, a large number of these relics remain as an integral part of our city's older abodes. This, although home delivery of milk products began to disappear more than 40 years ago and currently is all but non-existent.

So what are the chutes -- now so chronologically out of place -- used for today?

Well, a lot of them are repositories for miscellaneous household items, and many serve as mailboxes.

"They make the greatest mailboxes in the world, and, as such, are a priceless part of antiquity," commented Lakewoodite James R. Mecredy, retired vice president of Cleveland Range Co., who lives on Cliff Drive.

"They're also good in the winter time for the storage of beer," he added.

Thomas E. Waddle, who lives on Lakeland Avenue and is a former principal of Lakewood's Garfield Elementary School, said, "I painted mine shut more than 25 years ago, but am thinking about opening it up as a mail slot."

Somewhat surprisingly, Earnest Ware, Lakewood's post office manager, does not look with jaundiced eye upon householders who prefer to use their chutes as mailboxes.

"It's OK as long as the post office is notified in writing that they want it done," Ware specified.

Furthermore, he said that because of a chute's easy accessibility (no steps), the substitution might even make it more convenient for the mailman on his rounds.

Also, after such a switchover is requested, there is no longer any need to keep a regular-type mailbox available at the home.

Howard A. Mather, professional musician and a pianist for Lakewood Kiwanis Club weekly luncheons, reported his chute disappeared when aluminum siding was put on his West 130th Street home 10 years ago.

"Even before then, I nailed it up because I was afraid somebody might use it somehow to get into the house," he remembered.

Meanwhile, Harold R. Gilbert, head of the Lakewood publishing company bearing his name, recalled a time when someone getting in through his chute actually helped him out of a fix.

"After returning home from running errands one day about 40 years ago, my wife and I found we had locked ourselves out," Gilbert recollected. "

Finally, in desperation, we borrowed our neighbor's 7-year-old daughter and fed her into the milk chute so that she could unlock our side door from the inside."

That girl, to whom the Gilberts were ever after indebted, was Julie Froberg, daughter of the late Frosty Froberg, a Lakewoodite who was at one time the business manager of the Cleveland Browns.

One of those Lakewoodites who has adapted his milk chute for miscellany is William F. Hamilton, consultant for Martha Holden Jennings Foundation and a former Lakewood teacher.

In it, at his Cordova Avenue home, he stores a squeegee, a bottle of window cleaner and paper rolls for keeping his car windows clean.

Perhaps there should be a contest some day, with an award given to the Lakewood resident who generates the most ingenious utilization of the lowly chute, a driveway-side appendage which is now outdated, passé and an anachronism, as they say in pedantic circles.

This article appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post March 3, 1994. Reprinted with permission.

More Lakewood Lore