Paul Oates said he started collecting milk bottles as a hobby at the age of 10. The former City of Lockport clerk, who had also worked in radio, also went to school for journalism at St. Bonaventure University. Between stints at WLVL, he ended up writing a feature for the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal in 1987 about dairies in Lockport.
Then something happened.
“His name was Bryant Fulcher from Quincy, Illinois, and both him and his father were milkmen,” Oates recalled. “He saw (the feature) and he called me up on the phone and he said, ‘If you don’t write about this, no one will.’ ”
Seven years later Oates wrote a book called “A History of Lockport, NY Dairies 1895-1970.” It was the result of several interviews with the living family members of long-time local dairies. On the cover was a photograph of his great-great-grandparents of the Oates Dairy which ran for 62 years.
But Oates said that it couldn’t stop there.
“The minute it got printed in 2000, at the desktop at home I started piecing together for this,” he said, pointing to his second publication, “Lockport, N.Y. Dairies & Milk Delivery.”
The spiral-bound, more than 230-page book was released on Saturday and sold at the Artists, Craftsmen & Vendor Fair at the Niagara County Fairgrounds. Oates hashed out some of the stories that he was able to uncover.
“This is a totally separate book than this,” he said of the two books. “It’s the same subject but there’s very little repetition between the two. Everything I didn’t get in here, I kind of got here.”
For example: the first book was largely written in first-person interviews with the biggest dairies in the area. The second, however, focused on smaller dairies. Ones that lasted, “only a year.”
“Dairies that were run out of a garage. There were ones that were run by only two people. You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody in Lockport that even heard of any of these,” he said.
Oates also has pages documenting where glass bottles for the milk were made in Lockport — a place called the Lockport Glass Company in 1900, that then changed its name to Thatcher Manufacturing in 1919 and was in business until the early 1940s.
Not only did they supply local dairies with their bottles, they also shipped them out, Oates said, sometimes further than one would think.
“We were in Key West, last November, my wife and I. We go into an antique shop where they have milk bottles from Cuba. The bottles were from the late 1940s or early ‘50s but they were from Cuba. … The first thing I do, I turn them over, and it’s a Thatcher bottle from Dunkirk, New York,” he said. “I know that because I know the markings on the bottle and I’m thinking, ‘How cool is this?’”
More interesting facts about dairy farms and bottling are within the book, including one about the Wyles Cow Milking Contest that took place on stage at the Lockport Palace Theatre in 1940 and 1941. The grand prize was $25 in 1940 and $30 in 1941.
“The best part for me is in the promotion of it in the second year, they appropriated Elsie the Cow,” Oates said. “She was the trademark character for Bordens (a national chain) and Wyles appropriated Elsie the Cow to promote their own thing.”
“Lockport, N.Y. Daires & Milk Delivery” can be purchased at https://niagara-art-trail.square.site/product/lockport-n-y-dairies-milk-delivery-by-paul-k-oates/686?cs= true&cst=custom.
This post was originally published on here
