They say that the cream always rises to the top. What rose to the top of Answer Man’s inbox this week were memories of Washington’s vanished dairy scene, the subject of last Sunday’s column.
It was a single Chestnut Farms Chevy Chase Dairy bottle that prompted the column. Such glassware isn’t as rare as you might think. Bob Perry of Alexandria said his wife, Flo, has a bottle exactly like the one described, but in a half-pint size. “We also have an insulated milk bottle porch box with ‘Loaned by Alexandria Dairy’ printed on it,” Bob wrote. “Inside the lid it is stamped, ‘The Man that made this box never saw it. Washington Society for the Blind.’ ”
Jim Churchill of Alexandria said some Chevy Chase Dairy bottles had a unique feature: The uppermost portion narrowed to a throat then enlarged into an ovoid. The globe at the top is where cream settled. “The Chestnut Farms bottle made use of a custom aluminum spoon whose circular bowl precisely fit the neck of the bottle,” Jim wrote. “The spoon handle was bent sharply upward and then curved outward to a point. The user would insert the spoon, grasp the glass ovoid part of the bottle and use the forefinger on the spoon handle to hold the spoon cup in the throat while pouring off the cream.”
Leonard Raskin of Silver Spring has been a construction manager in the Washington area since 1965, and has collected many bottles from work sites. He has Chestnut Farms bottles in various shapes and sizes, as well as examples from Thompson’s Dairy, Fairfax Farms Dairy and Holbrook’s Poplar Spring Farm Dairy.
Carl Myers’s late grandfather, Bill Leonberger, started as a delivery man for Chestnut Farms around World War I. He was a proud member of the Teamsters union and qualified as a real teamster: When he started, he drove a team of horses.
“He used to talk about going up Connecticut Avenue to make deliveries when it was pretty much a dirt road above Dupont Circle,” wrote Carl, of Arlington.
After the home-delivery business dried up, Bill delivered Sealtest Dairy products to grocery stores. For four decades he received a pin annually attesting to another accident-free year. “He was buried wearing his last pin,” Carl wrote.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Bob Murphy lived near Mount Vernon. He remembers the days before refrigerated trucks, when the contents were iced down by hand. Wrote Bob: “Neighborhood kids would often request a piece of ice from the driver/deliveryman during warm weather, and those trucks left a puddle wherever they stopped.”
Growing up in Silver Spring, Susan Weinsheimer’s family was a Thompson’s Dairy family. “I was the oldest and was responsible for carrying each bottle into the house very carefully so as to not mix the cream into the milk,” Susan wrote.
Carolyn M. Wise, great granddaughter of Joseph A. Wise, co-founder of Wise Brothers’ Dairy, the antecedent of Chevy Chase Dairy, said that Joseph retired on a farm in Rockville called Preservation Oak. Her father remembers Sunday meals at Preservation Oak, which is now the Halpine View apartments. “My father remembers visiting with his grandfather and another old retired farmer on the porch steps,” Carolyn wrote. “The other old farmer was Walter Johnson, the Senators’ pitcher.”
The icons of our youth, no matter how seemingly modest, can create memories as powerful and reassuring as a mother’s embrace. Rocky Semmes’s father, Rock, grew up in Chevy Chase in the 1930s. In early June of 1944, Rock found himself in a North Atlantic convoy steaming toward a landing in Le Havre, France. He was a forward observer for an Army artillery unit. “His transatlantic passage was interrupted more than once by U-boat encounters,” Rocky wrote. “The ensuing depth charge releases added thrills to the convoy experience he said he would have preferred to do without.”
And then one day during the long passage, the milk served at the mess table came in bottles labeled “Chevy Chase Dairy.”
“He said that the sight of that familiar label, so far removed from its native source among the unfamiliar and nerve-rattling experience of a war-time convoy crossing, just absolutely made his day,” Rocky wrote. “It was a comforting touch of home where he expected least to find it. And the good news was that he lived to return and tell the tale.”
Send your questions about Washington to answerman@washpost.com.
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