Luberger's Distributing Company

This is a continuing series of stories about growing up in the magical village of Tarrytown, New York during the mid 20th century, and my life at 27 Cottage Place.

Previous posts have covered a variety of Tarrytown topics as well as a genealogical trip to Italy to search for our Italian ancestors who settled in Tarrytown.  This blog features my gig at the bars.

In 1963 I began working for Luberger's Distributing Company in North Tarrytown, near the top of Beekman Avenue.  Luberger's was the distributor of Ballantine beer and ale and soft drinks to the stores and restaurants in the area.  His warehouse is pictured on the right side of the illustration.  That large door is where his trucks entered and exited.

Luberger's warehouse on right

I got this job through my cousin, the late Tony Veteran who happened to be my football coach at the time (Alexander Hamilton in Elmsford).  He was sure this was going to be beneficial to my strength training for his team.  That didn't work out so good; another story, but this was my first "good" job.  It payed far more than bagging groceries at the Grand Union in Elmsford.

I learned many things on this job, from Truck driving to tapping kegs.  Let me tell you, tapping a keg can be quite exciting if your hand slips and the tap, under pressure, goes whizzing by your head like a javelin.

The day would start with an early reporting time to get our daily marching orders.  I worked as a helper with a driver.  His name was Jimmy.  Jimmy liked to have a drink or two, and this was, perhaps a job that satisfied his need. 

Old Mr. Luberger would give us a loading sheet in the morning.  It would contain the names of all the stores and bars and restaurants we would service that day, and what their orders were.  We then would go through the warehouse and stack our orders in a logical manner which allowed us easy access as we progressed through our list of stores (first in, last out).

When we would get to a bar, we would usually drop two or three kegs down into their basements.  Do you remember the old steel doors in the sidewalks in front of the bars?  They were direct drops to the basement; no stairs.  At the bottom there were heavy duty mats which absorbed the drop.  One of us would be at the sidewalk level and one of us would be in the basement.  Once the keg was dropped into the hole, the guy in the basement had to minimize the crash and prevent the keg from careening out of control into the basement.  This was not easy work and it was no picnic because most of the basements were pretty dirty and dinghy.  

In stores we would wheel in cases of beer or soda, whatever was ordered.  In restaurants we often wheeled beverages and kegs through the cooking area.  Hopefully the sanitation inspectors do a better job today than back then.

At the taverns, Jimmy would settle the paperwork at the bar.  The bartender would always offer me and Jimmy a shot and a beer.  Jimmy rarely refused.  I didn't like alcohol then, and, except for wine, that holds true today.  I would, however, never fail to get a glass of a special drink that we sold.  It was called birch beer.  It came in a keg like regular beer, but it was a root beer, made somewhere in New Jersey, I believe.  It was better than any soft drink I have ever had and I wish I could find it today.

One day, Jimmy's drinking got him in trouble and he lost his license.  That's when I began driving the truck.  Oh how "manly" that made me feel.  I thought I was "hot stuff" backing that big truck into the warehouse at the end of the day.  However it was my undoing.  I went to old Mr. Lubergerger and suggested that, since I'm now a driver, I should get driver's wages.  We did not see eye to eye on this so I quit.  I'm sure that angered coach Veteran but I wasn't thinking about that at the time.  I did however recover very nicely by getting a better position at Fisher Body.

I'll bet that the old building is still there.  I don't know what is in it now, and maybe someone can comment on that.  My work experience there had, at least, a small part in shaping my character, as did most of my Tarrytown adventures.  Hard to forget my roots.