When Delbert Hall thinks back to childhood, he hears the scrape of crates, the clank of bottles and the slosh of milk.
The 96-year-old Orrville man has rich memories of being a delivery boy for his father Budd Hall’s dairy business in the Kenmore neighborhood of Akron.
“He started with his automobile,” Hall recalled. “He took the back seat out, and there he put the cases. … When he went in business, he would get me out of bed at maybe 4 o’clock in the morning and he’d drive the car to the customers. Then I’d set the milk out on the porch.”
Young Del was a pupil at Highland Park Elementary in the late 1920s when his dad decided to leave his delivery job at Peoples Dairy on Grant Street to be his own boss. Budd Hall, a World War I veteran, was a good provider for his wife, Orla, and their five children: Delbert, Don, Dola, Dale and Jim. Their home on McIntosh Avenue was comfortable and the kids knew they were loved.
“But my father — I’m going to say it just the way it is — was lazy,” Hall recalled with a chuckle. “That’s why he quit Peoples. He wanted less to do.”
It was an unorthodox business model but it worked. Budd Hall canvassed his neighborhood for customers and began deliveries to about 30 homes. He bought his milk from the Blue Ribbon Dairy on Kenmore Boulevard and drafted his son Del to help. Dad drove and Del delivered.
Scrape, clank, slosh.
Scrape, clank, slosh.
After they completed the route, Budd dropped off his son at school.
“I did this every day,” Hall said.
It was repetitive work, but once in awhile, something unusual happened. Hall recalls delivering to a barbershop on 27th Street off Waterloo Road early one morning in the 1930s. He and his father noticed that the lights were on before business hours.
“We took the milk, and I set it on the porch,” Hall said. “Dad went in — and here they introduced me to Pretty Boy Floyd. Does that register? He was there to get his haircut.”
The dapper gangster, who had an image to maintain, greeted the visitors cordially before finishing up his appointment and slipping into the predawn darkness.
“He was wanted by the law,” Hall said. “Sure was.”
Budd Hall bought a small truck and had Belle Isle Dairy process his milk for him. The Halls washed and capped their bottles by hand. Del made deliveries and collected money from customers as he entered Kenmore High.
Hall will never forget the family who moved into a Waterloo Road house just across the swamp from his Kenmore home. The Tratnyeks had emigrated from Budapest and were customers on his milk and newspaper routes. Their daughter was the most beautiful girl Del had ever seen.
“Now this all ended up, I became their son-in-law,” Hall said. “That was my wife, Rose.”
Budd and Orla Hall moved their family to Marshallville when Del was in his teens, and he graduated from Dalton High School in 1939. The milk business was so good in the late 1930s that Budd bought Filo’s Dairy on 16th Street Southwest in Barberton.
Del Hall worked at the dairy as a route coordinator until he joined the Navy in World War II. When he returned home from the Pacific, a job was waiting for him. His father built a state-of-the-art plant for Hall’s Dairy in the 1940s on Main Street in Marshallville.
“It was probably the most modern dairy around here at that time,” Hall said.
Trucks dropped off milk cans onto a conveyor belt that rolled toward a vat. A lab weighed and tested the milk, which was then pumped into a pasteurizer before going to a homogenizer and then a bottling machine.
“When it went into the bottler, it was all automatic,” Hall said. “It turned around, capped it and dropped it into a case. This case was put on a dolly and that was shoved into a cooler.”
Hall’s Dairy bottled about 2,000 quarts of milk a day and operated six trucks that delivered milk in Orrville, Wooster, Dalton, Doylestown, Barberton, Akron, Portage Lakes and Canal Fulton.
“You Can Whip Our Cream, But You Can’t Beat Our Milk,” the dairy boasted.
Hall was route manager, his brother Don was plant manager and sister Dola was office manager.
Business was prosperous, and Budd Hall couldn’t resist when Reiter Dairy made an offer to buy the plant in 1948.
A year later, Del Hall and Rose Tratnyek married in Akron. They welcomed eight children — Michael, Stephen, David, Andrea, Anita, John, Susan and Rosemarie.
“I was blessed with the best person in the world,” Hall said. “She was not only a good wife, she was the best mother for the children and she was my best friend.”
Hall wasn’t quite done with dairying. Two years after his father bowed out, Hall jumped back in.
“I got a truck, I went out and got business, and don’t you know it, the government called me to go to Korea.”
Brother Dale watched over the dairy. Hall returned from the war and made a go of it, but decided to sell out to the Acme Dairy of Massillon in 1955.
“My brother didn’t want anything to do with it,” Hall said. “So I go in by myself again, but it wasn’t what I wanted.”
Hall and his family moved to Chula Vista, Calif., where he worked as an auto salesman, but they returned to Ohio in 1961. Hall landed a job at Georgia Pacific, where he drove an 18-wheeler and logged more than 2 million miles before retiring in the late 1970s.
He and his wife enjoyed “65 years of togetherness,” welcoming grandchildren and great-grandchildren before she passed away in October 2014 at age 90.
“There isn’t a day that I’m not thinking of her,” he said.
Looking over memorabilia from Hall’s Dairy, including photos, bottles and a milk can, he couldn’t help but think of his father and the scraping, clanking and sloshing from childhood.
It was hard work and maybe he didn’t appreciate it at the time, but he admits that he liked it.
Plus, he got to meet the girl of his dreams.
“As long as I can ever remember, I had the same thing to say to my wife every night: ‘Good night, Rose. God bless you. I love you. See you in the morning.’ And I would kiss her good night. She would look at me, and say, ‘Del, I love you, too. Now go to sleep.’ ”
Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price is the author of Lost Akron from The History Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.