Home-delivered milk is back in Wisconsin

Hard to imagine, but what high labor costs killed, affluent consumers have brought back :

Shorewood - A shadowy silhouette of a man, bent sideways by his lumpy underarm pack, loped up the sidewalks and driveways of sleeping suburbanites.

House by house, he performed the same dead-of-night ritual: a beeline to the side door to stoop low, flashlight in teeth, and exchange the lumpy bundle for one that rattled and clinked. Then, after scribbling on a sheet of paper, he hurried back to a waiting truck.

The truck, illuminated on the dark street by two shafts of headlight beams and a tiara of golden bulbs atop its cab, advertised "LW Dairy, America's dairyvan."

Its driver was LW owner Larry Westhoff of Beaver Dam, one of America's few remaining milkmen.

Even more amazing in 21st-century suburbia: 12 hours earlier, that milk was in a Wisconsin cow.

It may be awhile before houses are built with milk chutes again, tho. The one we had by the kitchen door sure was handy for getting into the house on the rare occasions the door was locked: I could open up the outside door, whack the inner door, and reach in to turn the doorknob.

Michelle Derus has the story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.