TED WILT’S RECOLLECTIONS
by Anita Messina
by Anita Messina
Ted Wilt lives in a white house on a pristine lot on Green Street here in Port Byron. He and his wife Lola have lived there for most of their 70-year marriage. The large lot once held an old mill that had been in the family for decades. An old bell sat on top. That very bell now stands on the lawn between the Owasco Outlet and Ted’s home.
Childhood Days
“I’ve lived in Port Byron all my life. My two brothers, two sisters and I lived two houses up from where I live now. My grandmother was a practical nurse, and she delivered all us kids. My grandfather Frank Emmons – ‘Big Frank’ people called him — was village constable and part-time locktender. He was a big, strong, burly man. When he was a little kid he got a pair of boxing gloves and got pretty good at throwing a punch.
“Pretty often he got called to the Erie House to settle a brawl. Canallers drank a lot – not just men, some women did too – and my grandfather was called to head over there quick to settle a scuffle. Mr. Kerns who owned the grocery store at the lock near the Erie House, would come to get him. My grandfather would jump in his horse and buggy and head there to take care of things. People would warn one another: ‘Don’t cause trouble in Port Byron ’cause Big Frank will haul you off to jail or worse yet put you on the trolley and take you to the prison in Auburn.’
“He must have been quite a man. I wish I had known him. He died two years before I was born. My grandmother kept his 45 revolver, belt full of bullets and his billy club hanging just where he left them. She’d say to us kids, ‘Don’t you ever, ever, ever go near there.’ He had some kind of accident and hurt his leg. Gangrene set in. They amputated and he wore a wooden leg. When he died my grandmother kept that too.”
“My mother’s name was Ethel Emmons. I was named after my paternal grandfather Delvin Wilt and my mother’s maiden name, Emmons so my real name is Delvin Emmons Wilt.”
How in the world did a young man with such a handsome name come to be called Ted? He admits, not a little sheepishly, that his nickname was part of a good-natured tease that his father perpetuated, and it was all because of a little boy’s strong attachment to his Teddy bear. Just before it was time to enter grade school he remembers his father’s repeated urgings, “Now Teddy, you don’t want to be going to school with your Teddy bear. You’re a big boy now, and big boys don’t carry Teddy bears to school.”
“I loved my Teddy bear, but I was too ashamed to bring him to school so on the first day of school I left him at home. That was a sad day. My mother took me to school. First I had to leave my Teddy bear. Then my mother left me. I cried and cried. I remember the teacher – Josie Green – patting me on the head and saying, ‘You’re going to be okay. You’ll be fine.’ I got over it in two days, made friends and had a good time in school.”
Kindergarten reminiscences trigger Ted’s memories of his and Lola’s two children, Kathy and Nelson. “I remember when we took Kathy to college. She just stood there watching me drive away, and I kept looking back and waving until I couldn’t see her anymore. She was always wanting to come home. Every two weeks she wanted to come home. I said to her, ‘I don’t think you need to come home so often.’ She said, ‘You don’t have to come for me. I’ll take the train.’ Nelson was different. He just went off. No problem. Looking back I remember it was kind of hard when they were both away from home.”
Ted remembers school being just “ordinary” during the years between kindergarten and 7th grade and then there was Louie – Louis Hancock. Just saying the name causes Ted to break out laughing. He never would say why Louie’s name provoked such mirth.
“School was crowded when I was in 7th grade. We didn’t have enough desks, we needed three more but there wasn’t room to put three more desks. So the principal, Mr. Gates, chose three of us to move into the high school for the homeroom period. He said he chose us three because we were more mature and could handle a high school homeroom. The high school kids didn’t like it one bit having three 7thgraders there. But eventually it all worked out. I learned a lot of things I hadn’t oughta, and after a while we all got along good. I can’t remember the name of the girl who went to the high school with us. The other boy was Louie Hancock.” Ted again broke into hearty chuckles. But again, he wouldn’t say why. He would only say, “Louie was sort of troublesome. Life was a big, happy joke to him. Oh, he wasn’t real bad, but he wasn’t real good either.”
Grandfather Delvin Wilt
“My grandfather built this house here on Green Street. He came from a family of millers in Germany. He and his brother decided to come to America, and they first settled in the Adirondacks but then they came down here and bought the old mill on Railroad Road. When that first mill burned down, they built a second one and then they found the old mill here on Green Street and bought it. They changed over from being a lumber mill to being a feed mill because I guess they saw a good business opportunity selling feed for the canal mules.
”Most houses had a few chickens, a cow, a pig or two, and people would come to the mill for feed or I would deliver it after school. One of the places I delivered to was the house right across the street from here. An old lady lived there and also an old guy named Aaron Quimby, a homemade optometrist. He had about 200 glasses on the wall. When I went over he’d want me to try on a pair of glasses. But I didn’t need glasses. He didn’t have any schooling to be an optometrist, not that I know of anyway. He was just a homemade optometrist.
“My Grandfather Wilt took me to the Baptist Church. My friends asked me, ‘What do you do at your church?’ I told them we just have Sunday school and church. They told me at the Methodist Church they had a party every month. They’d play games and have hot chocolate and ice cream so I began to go to the Methodist Church. Then my family became members there in 1934.”
Village Grocers
“My grandmother would send me to the store with a grocery list and the exact amount of money I would need to buy what she had on her list. She had her money exact to the penny because back then prices didn’t change as often as they do now. I didn’t dare buy anything that wasn’t on her list. While I was waiting for the grocer to put up the list I’d stand by a barrel of salt herring. Oh, I loved those things. I don’t know why, but I sure did love them. The grocer always said, ‘Teddy, go ahead. You can take one.’ That was a treat. Then when I got home my grandmother always gave me a penny or two.”
Ted thinks back to the years when Port Byron was a busy commerce center with many businesses and many grocers plying their wares. “I went to all those groceries depending what was on the list to buy because they all carried different stuff. In 1943, 1945 Mr. Elliott had a meat market. He was a butcher. He had some baked goods and some canned goods. Then there was Sam Thomas on the corner of Main and Rochester. Gary Parson on Main Street. Sam Davis on Main Street. On Rochester across from the gas station, where apartments are now, there was Clyde Miller. Herb Marshall had a store and Gary Emerson.
“My grandmother baked from scratch and she would only use Rumford Baking Powder, and I had to go to the store that carried that baking powder.
“Things were a lot different then. Wynne Longyear ran the garages where the Pit Stop is now. In the back of this property where I live now there was a blacksmith shop and a harness shop. My driveway was a dirt road that went up to the canal.”
Port Byron’s Dearly Loved Milkman
Ted developed a strong work ethic starting when he was 10 or 12, cutting lawns. He never had ideas of being a milkman. Fascinated with steam engines, he spent most of his time hanging around the West Shore rail station.
“A line of 80 or 90 freight cars came in every day with lumber, coal and grain, and they’d leave with hay and mincemeat from the mincemeat factory here in town. I spent a lot of time there at the railroad wishing I could be a train engineer.”
That wasn’t in the cards. Instead Ted became a milkman, starting his delivery service in 1945. Through the village and ½-mile beyond in any direction he delivered milk, cheese and eggs. He spread his route out to Montezuma when the demand for milk delivery built up there.
He put in a long day. After delivering he would go back afternoons, when he knew people would be home from work and try to collect any money that hadn’t been dropped in the bottles earlier in the day.
“The people who payed by the month were faithful payers, but sometimes people who paid by the week were not so good. I’d have to go back later in the day if the week’s payment wasn’t tucked in the milk bottle, especially often going back to people who lived in the section where all the trailers were. It was hard to catch up with them. They’d come into town quick and leave quick.”
He started his route at 6 a.m. seven days a week for five years, ending his work day around 6 p.m.
During the war when people couldn’t buy refrigeration some still used ice boxes and needed to have their milk delivered fresh each day. When refrigerators finally replaced all the ice boxes he was able to deliver every other day. Working smart, he split his route into two loops and worked shorter days. In a few far out country places he delivered only two times a week.
He said, “Some days the cream at the top was a little less than usual. People would say, ‘What are you doing, putting water in it?’ I didn’t have anything to do with the volume of cream. That was up to the cow. Then too if the pasteurization temperature got any higher than 145 degrees, that would cut down on the amount of cream that rose to the top.
“People could still go to a farm to buy raw milk. When I was a kid I went to a farm and got a gallon pail full of raw milk. Then my mother decided maybe that wasn’t a safe thing to be drinking so we switched to just drinking pasteurized.
“Webster Dairy, where I picked up my bottled milk, bought their milk from 20 or 30 dairy farms: Jones Farm, Mr. Fairbanks on Halsey Road, the Pangborn Farm. That farm was where the school property is now. The farms weren’t as big as they are now so they had to go to more places to fill the supply they needed.”
Ted owned his own bottles and had “Wilt Dairy” printed on them. He’d bring his empties over to Webster Dairy in Auburn. They washed them and filled his next order.
“People used to use the empty bottles for all kinds of things. Sometimes I picked up a really dirty bottle, one filled with motor oil for example, and I’d wash it before taking it to Webster for a good washing and sterilizing. To settle their accounts people would drop what they owed into an empty bottle set out for pick up. In winter the money would freeze in the bottle, and I’d have to wait for it to thaw before getting my money out. I’d be sure to give those bottles a good washing because there’s nothing dirtier than money.”
Webster Dairy became Hogan-Souhan, about the time milk put up in cartons. Ted didn’t own the cartons then, he just got fresh ones with his new order, but “Wilt’s Dairy” was still on each carton.
“I took over Mr. Batson’s route. Milk cost 30 cents back then. Heavy cream was expensive. One woman bought heavy cream three times a week. She entertained a lot and made fancy desserts.”
A visit with Ted is an enriching experience, learning from his memory shares, warming in his kindly sense of humor, balanced by his sense of fair appraisal. If Port Byron had a royal lineage, Ted would be its most venerable baron.
