Hi Ho Spritzer! “The Seltzer Man” rides again!
Since he lived to the age of 99, my father had many years to regale his family with stories of growing up in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side at the beginning of the 20th century. So that both parents could work, as a toddler, he was babysat by a vegetable cart driver and a cart horse named Pfeffer. My dad, a practiced raconteur, delighted us with his vivid memories of making the rounds with these unusual guardians. Our family misses the stories of the vegetable man and of the coalman and the iceman and the milkman who schlepped their loads up steep flights of tenement steps. But my father and the colorful deliverymen of the past are gone.
Or are they?
In April, The New York Times ran a story by Corey Kilgannon entitled “As Old as the Bottles.” It was a character study of Eli Miller, an 80-year-old seltzer delivery man, who has been bringing the fizzy stuff to thirsty Brooklynites for over 50 years. Miller relayed that at one time there were close to 500 seltzer guys in the city. That number has shrunk to fewer than five, all of whom fill their bottles at the last seltzer factory in town, Gomberg Seltzer Works, in Canarsie.