Carnation Dairies was advertising for milkman trainees, so I applied. After all, didn't milkmen work in the early morning hours—and wouldn't I have afternoons off to pursue my freelance sign painting business?

Well, the first thing I discovered was that you didn't get to be a milkman without first being a door-to-door salesman, where you would try to sign up customers for a milk route.

Door-to-door selling—just what I liked least to do. But, they assured me, it was just temporary and I'd be getting a salary while in training.

Our main selling feature was Carnation's new "multi-vitamin" milk that came in brown bottles to "filter out harmful sun rays." We were taught how much of each vitamin a quart of milk contained, and what the average adult's minimum daily requirement was for each one. Since we were representing a major company and offering a service that would make the buyer's life a lot easier, making these sales calls would be fun and easy, we were told. Yeah, right.

Our instructor at this cold-call selling was a shifty-eyed guy named Cliff with a gravely voice, who'd obviously been doing selling of some kind all his life. And he would say anything to make a sale.

He struck me as somebody I wouldn't trust to give me the time of day, but the Carnation milkman's cap he wore lent him a certain air of credibility. When one of the crew said he'd just had a doctor answer the door (and not sign up for milk delivery) Cliff said, "Oh, I forgot to tell you—if a doctor ever answers the door you look him right in the eye and say, 'Good morning, doctor—I'm with Carnation's health department.'" Yeah, right.

In any case, after about three weeks of sales training they sent me out on a delivery route. I would spend the next three weeks working as helper to a seasoned route driver. I was excited.

But I was also disappointed to learn that the most successful route drivers became so largely because of their ability to continually sign up new customers. Hmm, in order to make money at this job you had to be a salesman. Not too encouraging for a shy guy like myself.

The fellow I would be training under for the next three weeks was a likeable guy named Bob Prettyman. However, he was a little defensive about his name, and advised me right up front that it was pronounced, "Purtyman."

Anyway, he liked everything about being a milkman, and was genuinely convinced that one day he would become Carnation's CEO. "My first day on the job," he was fond of saying, "I took to delivering milk like a duck takes to water." Well, I soon discovered that I took to delivering milk like a brick takes to water.

In those days buildings higher than three or four stories were rare in Los Angeles (earthquake country, you know). Well, in the vicinity of La Brea and Wilshire Blvds., there was (and probably still is) a large development that interspersed 11-story apartment buildings with 2-story four-plexes. Park La Brea and its Towers quickly became a nightmare to me.

But shouldn't this have been a dream route for a milkman? It was beautifully landscaped with lots of green areas around the structures. You didn't have to compete for space with buses, trucks or streetcars—and at 4:00 in the morning there was relatively little automobile traffic to contend with.

The tenants were relatively affluent and rarely stiffed you on a bill—and some were even known to give generous tips on occasion. Furthermore, Park La Brea was only a ten-minute drive from the Carnation depot. How could this be anything but the ideal milk route?

Easy.

For starters I felt lousy even before I got there. I had to be at work at 3:00 AM to get my truck loaded. I was never a morning person, and having to go to bed in the middle of the afternoon didn't suit me at all. I was lucky to have gotten four or five hours sleep before getting each morning.

Then there was my truck. Refrigerated milk trucks had only recently been invented, and Carnation had just a few. Only the drivers with the most seniority got one. The rest of us had old open-air Dodges and Divcos, whose dairy products were kept cool by covering them with gunny sacks filled with ice cubes.

The first thing I had to do every morning was to put these icebags in place. Well, being a Southern California boy, I was not good at working with cold fingers. And at 3:00 AM (especially in winter) handling these icebags would numb my fingers for the rest of the day. This made it hard to drive, to write notes, and to function in general.

As for those towers, there were about two dozen of them and they all looked alike. The only thing that identified one from another was the address over the entrance. And the four-plexes spread around between them only had three or four different floor plans—so they all looked pretty much alike, too.

Now this sameness may not sound like such a big deal—but early in the morning, when it was still dark, and I was cold and sleepy, it was easy to confuse one building with another. The streets curved around with no right angles to their intersections—and, with no sun, you really couldn't tell east from west. I'd basically be lost as soon as I drove into the complex.

There would be several deliveries in each tower, so the idea was to try to carry all the milk, cream, butter, eggs and cottage cheese that the customers normally ordered in one trip. And getting to the eleventh floor of Building No. 1214, only to discover you were carrying the goods for Building No. 1204, did not get your delivery day off to a very good start.

But even when you took the right goods into the right tower, you'd frequently find a note from Mrs. Shapiro on the tenth floor, whose standing order was two quarts of milk and a pint of cottage cheese, saying today she wanted three quarts plus a dozen eggs.

Well, you weren't going all the way back to the truck for the eggs and extra milk until you'd checked out all the other stops to see if anyone else had changed his or her usual order. This meant writing hasty notes with cold, stiff fingers, or hoping you could remember all the changes when you got back to the truck.

Neither system was very reliable, and it was not uncommon to get back to the terminal and be told that Mrs. Shapiro had called to complain that you left skim milk instead of regular.

Also, people would move or go on vacation without telling you, causing you to leave a delivery at the door of an empty apartment. And deliveries that didn't get paid for came right out of my paycheck.

My friend Carl would say he could hardly wait for me to give up this job, because he had to listen to all my complaints after each day's work. He finally got to where he'd say, "I don't want to hear anything about wrong addresses, or unreasonable customers, or ice that melted too soon—and I especially don't want to hear the words 'Park La Brea Towers.'"

Early Morning Eye-Opener

I survived this job for about four months. I couldn't wait to start going to bed at midnight again. But the four months weren't totally unfulfilling. There was this stop at a four-plex, where a startling surprise awaited me one morning.

As I was placing the milk on the doorstep, a light came on in a large window of another apartment. A shade was raised and revealed the shapely body of a totally nude young woman. I couldn't see her face, because the shade stopped just at the neck. (I probably wouldn't have been looking at her face anyway.) After a few moments, the woman turned and walked into another room.

Well, I didn't know what to do. Would she come back? And if she did, would she turn the off light or pull down the shade? I waited—but nothing happened. Well, I couldn't spend the rest of the day standing there; so I finally went back to work.

In any event, this had certainly brightened my morning, and made suffering through Park La Brea a little more bearable that day. Not surprisingly, I could hardly wait for my next delivery at this address. But the window remained dark and Miss Godiva never appeared again.

Being a Milkman Was Not Entirely Without Its Rewards

However, there was another apartment where a young woman in a see-through top invited me to come in. She said she hadn't decided on her order, and if I'd come in and wait she'd get it sorted out. Over her shoulder I could see three other delectable young things clad in a variety of bras, panties, and slips. One was in the process of hooking up a strapless bra when she dropped one end. She discreetly turned her back to me as she finished fastening it.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?" I asked the woman in the doorway, trying not to notice the curvaceous breasts whose nipples were pushing through the clinging top.

"Come on in, and I'll see what we need," she repeated.

"Uh, well, we're really not supposed to go into people's houses," I said with a catch in my throat.

"Oh, come on," she said as she grabbed my arm. "It's cold outside." She disappeared into the kitchen, and the others all smiled at me as they continued getting dressed. One asked me to zip up the back of her dress.

"Darn," I was thinking. "Wouldn't it be nice to be invited in when they were all getting undressed?"

Oh, well. Just be grateful for small favors, I told myself. A few moments later the brassiereless one returned and told me what she wanted. I wished I'd had the nerve to tell her what I wanted. Anyway, I thanked her for the order, and spent another delivery day that was a little more bearable than the others.