Deliverance

One of the fun things of blogging is that there is no need to search out the unusual (though when the unusal bumps into you, it can be fun). If you think about it, the usual is as interesting for an outsider who does not know what normal life. One of the difficulties in making sense of the many societies in history is that we do not know what was usual for them, what it was that they took for granted and never wrote about. We would understand them much better if we did. (Much of archelogy is designed to tell us what normal life was like by examining the trash and garbage that the past left behind. What will our trash tell the future?)

One of the things we take for granted is the delivery system. We are so accustomed to having it work seamlessly that we ignore it. But consider the thousands of trucks that zip past Rensselaer each day on the interstate. They play an vital role in keeping everything running smoothly.

I thought it would be fun to take pictures of delivery trucks. Once I decided to do that, I realized that I had already begun to do so, such as here and here and here. One of the first pictures I took in this series was of a truck delivering gasoline to the Family Express station. What would happen if these deliveries stopped?
I am not sure what was being delivered to the Court House by this truck.
The milkman had a big delivery for CVS.
When I was very young, I remember the milkman making home deliveries. The milk came in glass bottles, and we got it non-homogenized because it was a little cheaper. By the time I was in the upper grades of grade school, the milkman was gone. I assume that at one time Rensselaer also had milkmen. When did they disappear here?

Here is another milk man delivering to the BP station. There are a lot of places that sell milk in Rensselaer.
Here is the waterman making a delivery to J&L Antiques.
I would guess that the bakery trucks deliver every day--bread has a short shelf life. Here Wonder Bread is being delivered to the County Market.
And here Little Debbies are destined for Save-A-Lot.
The CVS truck below unloaded its cargo using a ramp with the little embedded wheels so the packages roll from the truck into the storeroom.
The I-Supply truck delivering food to the Saint Joseph's College Halleck Center did not have the rollers. The driver unloaded the old fashioned way with a dolly.
I worked on a delivery truck for one day about forty years ago. If I can take the right picture, I will tell you about it in a future post.