In the days before digitalization, people looked straight ahead when they walked, sometimes making eye contact. Communication was limited; no faraway acquaintances could beep in with a text message or share an image of them at a fun place. Pedestrians did, however, occasionally glance down at their wristwatches.
In the summers, it was, like today, hot at night (mean earth air temperature has risen a terrestrially significant but personally negligible ~ .5 degrees since Eisenhower), so people without air-conditioners sat on stoops or porches and conversed with passersby and neighbors.
If a disagreement arose, say, over how many strikeouts Lefty Gomez amassed in his career, precise information was difficult to come by. Unless someone could produce an almanac or up-to-date encyclopedia, the disagreement couldn’t be settled until later. Sometimes people telephoned librarians to look up the answers to their questions, though libraries weren’t open at night. On some nights you might hear people raising their voices in disagreement over Gomez’s strikeouts or the name of the last Triple Crown winner. People slept with their windows open. Dogs ran free.
During working hours, most librarians would cheerfully agree to research your questions. In those days, most working women wore fleshcolored hose, which they attached to undergarments called garter belts, elastic contraptions worn around the waist that had eight metal clasps (four per leg) dangling around the circumferences of the garments. Women (and a few men known as transvestites) attached the top of their hose (also called stockings) to the clasps of the garter belts.
Most librarians were female in the days before digitalization. To find the answer to the riddle of the number of Gomez strikeouts, they left their stations behind a desk and walked to obtain the information from a reference volume classified under the Dewey Decimal System. In doing so, the librarian would encounter others, nod and smile, rather than avoiding human contact by consulting a plasma screen.
If the librarian were plump, the chafing of her hose would produce a swish-swish sound. When she called to inform the questioner that Lefty Gomez had struck out 1,468 in his major league career, she had to dial the questioner’s number, each digit clicking clockwise downward to engage. Depending on the size of the community, telephone numbers might consist of as few as five digits. However, it took longer to dial five digits then than it does to punch in seven digits today.
Before the 1960’s all telephones were black.
In the days before digitalization, people were thinner (average woman’s waist circumference 1950: 71.2 cm; average woman’s waist circumference today: 91.44 cm). If worried about her figure, rather than starving herself or joining a gym, a plump librarian might wear a girdle, a constricting undergarment that created the illusion of a flat abdomen. These armor-like undergarments restricted movement, so when the plumpish librarian approached a talker with her forefinger pressed to her lips prior to issuing a snake-like shushing sibilant, she appeared somewhat militaristic in her carriage.
In those days, libraries were as quiet as mausoleums. They housed only books, magazines, and phonographic records. No doubt despite their cheerful phone voices, some librarians resented being diverted from the task of keeping the library organized by having to retrieve trivial baseball statistics.
In those days, people had milk delivered to their porches on weekdays. Whereas most librarians were female, virtually all milk delivers were male. You never heard the term milkwoman. (In fact, my spell checker has underlined milkwoman in red).
Milkmen worked early hours and drove trucks with open doors that looked very much like UPS trucks. They had daily routes, like paperboys. Perhaps because of their diurnal journeys around the grids of city streets, milkmen obtained the reputation of producing children out of wedlock. In the days before digitalization, condoms (also known as rubbers) were about the only mechanical means of birth control. Their packaging claimed that they were “sold for the prevention of disease only,” no doubt as a legal escape hatch in case the device failed.
While at work using company time to call a librarian to solve the Gomez strikeout mystery, a man’s lawfully wedded wife could be going through the time-consuming activity of undressing in preparation for a tryst with the milkman. For each digit her husband dialed, she could unclasp on average two garter connections, completely disengaging the hose before the first grating sound simulating the distant phone’s ringing.
In movies, women called this process, “slipping into something more comfortable.” Because of the conspicuousness of a milk truck parked on the curb outside a house, these sexual unions would have to be completed rather rapidly. Certainly, they took place in less time than it took the librarian to receive the call, research the question, and to return the cuckold’s call.
In the days before digitalization, it was somewhat embarrassing for a librarian, i.e. someone with a BA degree, to be married to a blue collar worker like a milkman (though milkmen usually wore white uniforms reminiscent of lab technicians). These educational differences could lead to marital discord, because, like today, many men were competitive, even with their wives. Having sexual encounters with other men’s wives was perhaps a way for milkmen to compensate for their lack of education.
Because of the rush for time, the milkman would leave before his conquest would have time to dress. Like UPS and FedEx deliverers, milkmen left their trucks running. Afterwards, perhaps the wife of the baseball fan would pull back the curtain with her hand to watch the truck pull away or merely listen to its groan as it left her for another delivery, and then she would continue the mechanical task of reconstructing her various layers of undergarments.
In the event that a union between as mailman and a married woman resulted in conception, she most likely would keep her fingers crossed and hope the child looked like her instead its progenitor. Abortions were illegal. Because there was no way to check for DNA, a suspicious husband had really no way of knowing, unless both husband and wife were blue eyed and the child brown-eyed. If the child were red-headed and the husband and wife dark, people might ask the child where he got that red hair.
The milkman?
Even today, in the age of digitalization, when milk delivery is a distant memory, people still light-heartedly associate milkmen with the production of strange-looking children, instead of updating the scenario to attribute the out-of-wedlock son’s or daughter’s unfamiliar physiology to UPS or Fedex drivers. Though plumbers have played a milkman-like role in pornographic films, they are rarely cited as the sire of suspiciously featured or complected offspring.
Despite smart phones, laptops, GPS systems, streaming video and audio, the proverbial pre-digital milkman still lives on as the alleged producer of illegitimate children.
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