Flynn:When Dugan's delivered the bread

It had to be the summer of 1936 when I worked as an assistant on a Dugan’s Bakery truck because I would have been 14 years old that summer.

Of course, the term "assistant" is a rather highfalutin job description. I really was just a delivery boy who ran from the truck to the front door of homes dropping off a loaf of bread wherever the letter "D" was displayed in a front window.

To put that summer job in perspective you’ve got to understand that Bergen County was a different place back then. Bradley Avenue, the street on which I grew up in Bergenfield, became a dirt road a few blocks beyond our house and it then tapered into a path that gradually disappeared in the thick woods that once separated Bergenfield and Tenafly. Route 17 was a lightly traveled highway that ran through fields of black loam in Paramus where lettuce and celery grew. The George Washington Bridge had opened only in 1931 and most of the county was still a sparsely populated area of farms and small towns.

That Dugan’s truck was by no means the only truck that delivered to the doorsteps every morning. The milkman left off his glass bottles, the ice man brought cakes of ice to those homes that had yet to invest in a new-fangled refrigerator, and in the winter the coal truck parked at the curb and the driver shoveled the coal along a metal chute through a cellar window and into the basement bin. But most of all, or so it seemed to a young boy, Bergen County in the 1930s was a slow-paced, friendly place where people left their front door key under the mat and everyone knew everyone else’s name.

As for that summer job of mine on the Dugan’s truck, it was my first real job. Before that, like every other boy I knew, I had earned extra money by doing chores; cutting lawns in the summer, shoveling snow in the winter; distributing fliers from door-to-door for the grocer or delivering magazines along my route. I don’t recall how much that job on the Dugan’s truck paid. It couldn’t have been much. Maybe $5. After all this was during the Depression when the average salary for those fortunate enough to have a job was $30 a week.

The driver, after having already gone to the Dugan’s plant in Hackensack to load his truck with baked goods, would pick me up at my house when the sun was just beginning to provide a hint of daylight in the sky. It was, I recall, a time when every sound – a dog barking in the distance, a car’s engine starting up blocks away – seemed to be accentuated in a vacuum of quiet.

We’d take off on our regular route through Bergenfield, Dumont and New Milford, driving slowly along the familiar streets looking for those brown letter "Ds" in windows, and whenever we’d spot one I’d jump from the truck with a 10-cent loaf of Dugan’s bread and leave it on the front stoop alongside the milk box.

Sometimes the housewife would have also left a note, probably tacked to the front door, telling us to leave something else, maybe one of the crumb coffee cakes, and occasionally the driver, who knew his customers well, would tell me to leave a package of cupcakes even though they hadn’t been ordered. "Mrs. Hitz can’t resist them," he’d say.

We covered that route twice each morning, the first time dropping off the baked goods before most other people were even awake, and the second time to collect and see if we could sell something extra. On that second trip the driver would frequently give me a lesson in salesmanship.

"Take this pineapple cheesecake up to Mrs. Weiner," he’d say, "but don’t ask her if she wants it. Always be positive. Tell her that you remember she got one last week and you thought she’d probably like one again this week." The pitch never failed, but maybe that was really because mothers found it hard to say no to a freckle-faced 14-year-old boy.

For me that summer was an adventure. When September came I went back to Harding Junior High. Dugan’s driver, whose name I can’t even recall, went back to covering that route on his own. It must have been a lonely, monotonous job and I sometimes wonder if he spent the rest of his working days looking for that letter "D" in the window? And did he really need a summer helper, or did the summer just provide an excuse for him to hire someone he could talk to?

 BY ED FLYNN

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