Presidents on Milk Bottle Tops

When I was a kid, all the presidents came to town. They arrived on milk bottles. The bottles came from Magoon’s Dairy in a wire basket carried by a classic 50s milkman with a flat-topped paramilitary hat and a white uniform. For a time, the bottle caps carried pictures of the presidents, and a boy’s major goal in life was to collect all thirty-something images. Magoon’s supplied a handy collector’s wall chart with rows of empty white circles where I dutifully pasted the lids in place with Elmer’s glue. Milk had cream in those days, and it was important to wash the back of the lids carefully or the whole chart built up a nasty sour smell.

I already knew the “money presidents,” the ones on coins and bills, but this was my first exposure to the likes of Zachery Taylor, Martin Van Buren, and Millard Fillmore. Who were these old guys with the white hair, muttonchops, and pallid expressions? We had already learned the name s of every state and most state capitals. You could cheat, if so inclined, by turning a little plastic dial on your pencil box that spelled them out. But next year, we were told, we would be required to memorize the presidents. Those who could recite the list backwards would get an extra gold star. The pressure was on.

President Eisenhower had been a god. There was a Boston kids’ show on TV called “Big Brother” Bob Emery. I watched religiously. Each day, halfway through the show, Brother Bob would tell us to go into the kitchen and make a big glass of Ovaltine. I did as I was told. We all brought the mixed drink back to the TV set and guzzled it down to a recording of “Hail to the Chief.” The camera held tight on the portrait of the president. We liked Ike. We liked Ovaltine. There was no humor, no irony, no commercialism in this daily ritual. It was simply what patriotic American boys and girls did.

I was 10 when we moved from Massachusetts to the wilds of New Hampshire. Since NH watched the same channels, Big Brother Bob and other Boston TV hosts helped soothe the transition. If memory serves, the first presidents arrived on the top of the glass bottles from Magoon’s Creamery the same year we were learning about the presidents. For a limited time only, each cardboard cap depicted a different president. The series came with a paper poster, suitable for framing, on which we presidential scholars could glue each cap. It was like an Advent calendar in reverse. We knew the drill. My postage stamp books and my brother’s coin collection folders followed that pattern. We were all already obsessive collectors of comics, matchbooks, monster models, dead bugs, pressed leaves, rocks, fossils, postcards, baseball cards, toys that came in cereal boxes, and 45 rpm records.

My mother, cruelly, would not allow the cap to be removed from the bottle until the milk was consumed. That was no problem. Five big glasses of OValtine each week kept the presidents coming. It was important not to pull too hard on the cardboard tab in the middle of the cap or it could come off. It was equally important to wash the cream off the back of the bottle cap, preferably in warm water, and let it dry before attempting to glue the cap on the poster.

I believe we got a complete collection of presidents, right up to a long-haired president named Kennedy. Then something happened. I was getting on the school bus when I heard the news. The bus driver was crying. I don’t like to think about it. Things were never the same. According to Wikipedia, Clair Robert “Bob” Emery was born in 1897. William McKinley was then the president. He was assassinated, too.

I swiped the following image (below) from an eBay auction. For a few bucks, you could buy the whole collection. But look carefully. The John F. Kennedy cap lists him as the president starting in 1961. There is no concluding date, just a blank white space. There never was a Lyndon Johnson bottle cap. And things have never been the same.

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.