MILKMEN MEMORIES

PALMER — Claude Maney is one of the few, the proud.

The milkmen.

Following a tumultuous year that’s seen a failed attempt by Alaska to save the Matanuska Maid creamery after more than 70 years of providing locally produced milk products to consumers, a group representing a part of that history met over some cold glasses of milk to reminisce.

From his home in Anchorage, Maney called up five of his old milkmen buddies, now all retired, but also sharing a common bond. He felt it time to rally his former coworkers.

The six retired men all had lasting careers with the Matanuska Maid at various times between 1952 and 1984. Some left after Mat Maid’s first bankruptcy in the mid-1980s, but they never forgot their place in the history of the longtime dairy concern. Maney and his fellow milkmen came together at the Valley Hotel in Palmer on Thursday to eat good food, share good memories and reminisce about the days when they all worked for what was once one of the richest private companies in Alaska.

Ernie Knueppel of Palmer, William Applebee of Wasilla, George Ervino of Anchorage, Marvin Brink of Chugiak, Frenchy Pelletier of Oregon and Maney all know a thing or two about the dairy industry. Collectively, they gave Mat Maid more than 150 years of service.

All afternoon, the six men buzzed about vacation plans, golfing techniques, wives, retired life and, of course, milk.

“It was the white gold that provided us all with a pension,” Pelletier said, flipping through old photographs.

All six said the recent closure of Matanuska Maid was a sad turn for them, but also said it seemed inevitable. And meeting on the eve of a public ribbon cutting for the recently opened Matanuska Creamery in Palmer, they also expressed hope the industry can still prosper as it once did decades ago.

For Maney, a milk and ice cream delivery driver from 1952 to 1978, Matanuska Maid gave him the milk and butter needed to support his wife and four children.

“It was a great place to work, but it came down to health problems for me at the end,” he said about his 26-year tenure. Years of lifting crates of milk had taken a toll on Maney’s back, forcing him into retirement.

A bachelor in 1952, Maney said he was hired after the construction jobs he previously held shut down for the winter. Maney was one of seven drivers who supplied fresh milk daily around the Anchorage Bowl.

“Back then, there was stiff competition with Alaska Dairy,” Maney said. “But we bought them out eventually.”

Maney started his day at 7 a.m., taking crates of milk to seven groceries stores located between A and L streets in Anchorage. The Piggly Wiggly, Lucky’s Grocery and Pay ‘N Take were a few of the stops along Maney’s Fourth Avenue delivery route in 1952.

“When I first went to work there, I made a lot of mistakes,” he said. “There’s no two ways about it, I knew they were gonna fire me.”

Maney’s manager took him aside one day and told him something he has never forgotten.

“He told me, ‘If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not doing anything,’” Maney said. “Then I knew I had found a good job.”

He also recalls Mat Maid was considered the cream of the crop for local dairy.

“Matanuska Maid carried eggs in those days for only 70 cents a dozen,” Maney said. “The company was doing really well and people had come to know our product as the best out there.”

There also weren’t many varieties of milk, he said. You got mostly whole milk and not the multiple types available today like lactose-free, skim or soy milk.

Although pleased to have a few laughs over the past, Brink said he is reeling over today’s grocery prices. Brink said in the early 1950s, milk prices would fluctuate between 35 and 40 cents a quart. Because of a lack of refrigeration technology in the Mat-Su Valley, many homes relied on the cool Valley breeze to keep milk from spoiling during the warm summer months.

“No problem with breezes in Palmer,” he said.

After he retired, Brink’s two sons, Larry and Lyle, also went to work for Matanuska Maid, and with the creamery’s closure came hard times for the Brinks.

“They didn’t lose too many pounds,” Brink said, “but it did have an impact.”

The good old days

Pelletier worked a majority of his 30 years in Mat Maid’s production plant when the creamery was pumping out an average of 7,000 pounds of fresh milk daily. Those who worked at the creamery in Palmer were eventually moved to Anchorage to begin Mat Maid’s heavy years of production.

The retired milkmen weren’t short of tall tales, laughing over memories of rowdy holiday parties, practical jokes in the creamery, the earthquake of 1964 halting production and delivery in and around Anchorage for nearly a week, and the long 14-hour work days.

“Working at Palmer’s creamery was tough work,” said Knueppel, “Moving here after the war [World War II] from Germany, I wanted to make my mark in America, so processing ice cream seemed like the next best thing.”

Knueppel said he and Pelletier learned how to operate what were then new electronic machines in the 1960s with ease. They had to. Mat Maid produced three 500-gallon batches of 14 flavors of ice cream each day.

Ervino said he mixed beer into a batch of frozen ice cream once — just because he could.

“Remember the vodka and brandy nogs?” Pelletier asked, causing a cheerful response. “We’d fix up these goody boxes of vodka nog during the holiday months for the corporate shareholders and sneak a couple for ourselves.”

“You rascals probably got a fair share more than we did,” Maney countered.

They all remembered the “ice cream girls,” women whose jobs were to fill and hand-fold each ice cream container in the production plant.

Applebee reflected on the mishaps at the production plant. As a mechanic, he said he became accustomed to fixing everyone’s mistakes, namely busted milk pipes.

“That’s why my complexion is so good,” Applebee joked. “I had a lot of milk baths in those days.”

Although also retired, Applebee said he still considers himself to be the “kid” of the group, having been hired at Mat Maid in the late 1970s.

There was also the time where instead of sugar, salt accidentally made its way into the 300-gallon batch of chocolate milk ready for ice cream production. Pelletier, in charge of tasting the product, noticed and halted production.

“That’s no easy feat, changing out the finished product and causing all kind of problems,” Pelletier said. “Imagine getting a mouthful of salt in your ice cream.”

Then there was the beginning of the end.

By the end of the 1970s, farms in the Mat-Su Valley had dropped from 70 to less than two dozen, forcing Mat Maid into bankruptcy and many into retirement.

“I really hated to see them go under this past year,” Maney said. “It had become a second home to me for all those years.”

At the end of the long afternoon, the lunch bill was paid and each of the milkmen went their separate ways, promising phone calls and visits would follow.

“It went real nice,” Brink said. “Some of us hadn’t seen each other in 25 years, so we’d never had a real party like this before. Some people are loners and this is great, remembering the good old days at the creamery.”

Contact J.J. Harrier at valleylife@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.