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In this day when so many people do so much of their shopping online and have purchases delivered to their homes, it seems ironic that certain delivery people who were once familiar in Guelph’s residential neighbourhoods are now a part of history.
Long gone are such people as the milkman, the breadman, the dry-cleaning man and the grocery boy. Yes, we still get front door delivery of pizza and other fast foods, but we no longer see empty glass milk bottles left on porches along with money to pay the milkman’s weekly bill.
Kids today might think you were making it up if you told them that on freezing cold winter mornings, your mother would open the door to bring in the bottles of milk the milkman had left there hours earlier, and found that each bottle had a column of frozen milk rising from it, topped by the little, round cardboard lid.
Surprisingly – especially to people in this era of the thieves called porch-pirates – that milk money was rarely stolen.
The iceman is another delivery person who has disappeared from our neighbourhoods. In the days before electric refrigeration, people kept dairy products and other perishable foods, as well as drinks they wanted to keep cool, in an icebox. The icebox should not be mistaken for a refrigerator, even
though some people called their refrigerators iceboxes long after iceboxes had vanished from most homes.
An icebox did not make ice the way the freezer or ice-maker in your refrigerator does today. It was an insulated cabinet that had a compartment for a big block of ice. A basin at the bottom caught the water as the ice melted. The iceman drove up and down streets, delivering blocks of ice to customers on
his route. When his vehicle stopped, kids would crowd around hoping for free chunks of ice they could lick like Popsicles.
Originally, ice was harvested in the winter – carved out of lakes, rivers and ponds as “natural” ice, and stored in well-insulated ice-houses, often packed in sawdust. Later, “artificial” ice was made in large manufacturing plants, before most homes had refrigerators.
In a Three Stooges short film called An Ache in Every Stake (it’s on Youtube); Curly, Larry and Moe are the icemen you wouldn’t want to rely on to keep your icebox supplied. This bit of slapstick comedy actually provides a good look back in time to the era of the iceman. The boys make their deliveries from a horse-drawn wagon. Writing on the wagon tells the viewer that the company also delivers coal. A sign on the gate of a property lets the boys know that a customer needs ice.
Curly even uses a block of ice to bowl over the milk bottles outside a customer’s door, and later tells a woman she should get an “electric icebox.”
Like any other commodity, ice for domestic use could be subject to the pressures of supply and demand. In August of 1944, there was an ice shortage in Guelph. A headline in the Mercury warned readers, “Ice Supply Dwindling, May be Rationed Here.”
The newspaper said that in other Ontario cities such as Sarnia, ice deliveries had been reduced by as much as 50 per cent, and advised the community to cooperate with ice dealers to avoid those drastic measures being taken in Guelph. According to an article that was published in the Mercury on
Aug. 10:
“Dealers believe that the greatly-increased demand for ice is caused by the increase in the number of apartments since the start of the war; the difficulty experienced by owners of electric refrigerators to obtain repairs, and by the number of new dwellings erected which have been fitted with modern ice refrigerators.”
Mary Halliburton, manager of the company that supplied Guelph with natural ice, said it was impossible to fill all of the community’s demands for ice. The previous summer, she said, her company had augmented its supply by purchasing 2,000 lbs. of ice from out of town. Now, she was having a difficult time buying ice anywhere.
The only city close to Guelph that had an ice-manufacturer was Kitchener. A representative for that company said they couldn’t keep up with the calls for ice from all over the district, and had been obliged to order ice from as far away as Rochester, New York. As of the end of July, they’d had 750,000 lbs. of ice trucked in from that city.
At the time of the Mercury article’s publication, they were bringing in 10 tons of Rochester ice a day.
Shipping the American ice by train was hindered by railway traffic congestion at the international border. Transporting it by highway was limited by truck capacity and by the availability of gasoline during wartime rationing. Those concerns, said the Mercury, “will govern conditions in Guelph.”
No doubt, on hot summer days the appearance of the iceman on Guelph streets was welcome. But with the coming of the “electric icebox” his days were numbered.
