No one believes Donald Shaw when he tells them what he does for a living.
"A milkman? No way."
"You've got to be kidding," he's heard.
But Shaw, 50, is one of about 20 people who make home deliveries to some 4,000 homes and small businesses in Sacramento, Calif.
Mike Forbes, Shaw's employer, contracts with Crystal Cream & Butter Co. to deliver milk to 800 customers.
Forbes, 63, started delivering milk in 1966, when there were seven dairies making home deliveries in the area. In 1973, Crystal decided to contract the delivery operations to independent distributors. At the time, there were 54 routes with about 400 customers each. Now Forbes has three routes, and 15 other independent distributors handle the rest.
Home milk delivery has virtually disappeared in the United States, accounting for just 0.4 percent of the 6.4 billion gallons of milk sold each year, according to the International Dairy Foods Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
That wasn't always the case. In the first half of the 20th century, there were just two ways to buy milk: You could go to a farm or have a dairy deliver it to your door.
By the 1950s, grocery owners were stocking milk and selling it at a deep discount to entice shoppers into their stores, said Les Bagley, executive director of the Divco Club of America, an association of former milkmen and collectors of the snub-nosed refrigerated (Divco) trucks commonly used for milk delivery.
Bagley noted that there is a reason dairy cases are often in the back of most stores.
"How many Twinkies do you pass getting to the dairy case?" he asked.
The "Twinkie-factor" is one reason that Forbes says home delivery may be more economical in the long run. Customers save money because they don't overshop.
"You go into the store for two items and you come out with three bags," he said.
At $4 a gallon, Forbes maintains that home delivered milk is competitive with grocery store prices, which range from $2.50 to $5 a gallon. Forbes' milk deliverers will also handle eggs, lunchmeats and other dairy products, all for the price of the goods and an average monthly service charge of $5.95 for once-a-week service.
Martha Geiger, who declined to give her age, except to admit that she is "old enough to remember when milk was regularly delivered in bottles," has been getting milk delivered to the porch of her midtown Sacramento home for 10 years.
"Cereal is not a breakfast food" for her 17-year-old son, Alex, she said. He eats it "any time of the day or night. And milk goes fast."
Lyndon Johnson was president when Forbes started delivering Crystal milk to Dorothy and Robert Leamon's home.
"We're not wild, spendthrift-type people," Robert Leamon, 84, said. "We try to save a nickel if we can, but it's just so handy" to have home delivery.
And when the Leamons started getting milk from Crystal, it wasn't porch delivery, it was right-to-the-refrigerator delivery.
Forbes said back then, when he signed up a customer, he got a key to the house — if the customer even bothered to lock the door. On delivery day he would let himself in, see how much milk was needed, rotate the older bottles to the front, and then leave.
This kind of access to the home contributed to the milkman's Lothario image. Forbes admitted a milkman did "become like a member of the family."
There was more interaction with customers because the milk was delivered later in the day. Forbes' routes now start at 2 in the morning, and most deliveries are finished before 6 a.m.
The early start is one of the things that milk deliverer Mike Farmer, 42, likes about the job.
"I like the city in the morning," he said, running his refrigerated truck down deserted city streets.