MIKLO DAIRY

Once when Betty and I were eating pizza at the Community Tap on 5th Avenue South in Fort Dodge, she told me that the building used to contain a grocery store where Steve had delivered milk. 

Steve’s relationship with his father improved after he married and left home. He continued to help Emera with the dairy and Betty pitched in, too. Here Betty talks about helping to bottle milk:

Now, when I married your father, that was before there was a law of pasteurization, it was raw milk. He and his stepmother had a small dairy. They had a barn back of the house. There were half a dozen houses by the gypsum mills were the gypsum workers lived. There was a barn back there and there was a pasture back there, but anyway, there was a bunch of cows.

He and his stepmother milked those cows, then they hauled the milk into the milk house. There was a big round wash tub they filled that with cold water, they had running water out there, they filled that with cold water, put the can of, you saw them milk cans before? They put the can of milk in there and then they had a regular thing they stirred it with to cool it off in a hurry. Then they bottled it in those bottles and there were good a many weekends I was up there putting those caps on top of the bottles. There was something that you capped it with. A little wooden thing you pushed it down on. I used to help him cap.