Today the word huckster has a derogatory connotation, but it wasn't always that way. In a bygone era, back in the 19th century and into the early 20th, the huckster was an indispensable component of rural commerce, bringing merchandise to outlying farms and homesteads. The huckster wagon was a horse-drawn affair that was virtually a general store on wheels. Along with staples for the pantry, hucksters dispensed such things as patent medicines, hardware, seeds, cloth fabric, work clothes, kerosene, mason jars, tobacco and a goodly amount of news, gossip and folk wisdom. Some of what was carried was bartered for farm produce such as eggs, butter and cleaned, plucked chickens. Horse-drawn huckster wagons gave way to trucks early in the last century. But as roads improved and eventually most rural households could afford a car and do their own marketing, the huckster of old began to rapidly disappear.

When I was a young child in the late 1940s and early '50s, however, numerous vestiges of this earlier institution remained as elements of retail commerce. In Wallkill, Ed Masten's market delivered grocery orders three days a week in an old panel truck with twin doors in the rear. Few families had more than one automobile, and anyway not many housewives had driver's licenses, so free grocery delivery provided a valuable service for the home whose breadwinner took the car to work every day, as well as for elderly folks who had never learned to drive. Masten's delivery boy, Larry Dolan, eventually took charge of the store, and continued making deliveries into the 1960s.

Widman's Bakery, which was located down in Spring Valley but had a garage, office and transfer station in Walden, had a wide-ranging delivery service, visiting our house a couple of times a week. The particular driver who serviced our road when I was a boy reputedly covered twice the territory of the other drivers, and he did this by being speedy: still 100 yards up the road, he'd already be honking his horn frantically, and by the time he screeched to a halt alongside our lawn, yelling "Baker! Baker!" my mom would be at the front door shouting out her order (why was it almost invariably "Pumpernickel and a white bread"?). The man would hurry across the lawn, exchange the bread for payment and rush back to his truck and take off, already honking his horn for the next house. The whole transaction took scarcely a minute, which was just enough time for our dog to "sign his name" on one of the truck's tires. Every time.

To this day, shouting "Beep beep beep BAKER, BAKER" will likely elicit a guffaw among my brothers. Widman's had just enough multicultural savvy to carry challach, the traditional braided bread of the Jewish sabbath. Only they didn't call it challach, they called it "egg twist." Now in my family, challach was anglicized to "holly" among us children. We were multicultural in our own right, celebrating Christmas along with a few of the more important Jewish holidays. At Christmas time, we were probably the only household on the planet that, for a joke, would sometimes break into song with, "Deck the halls with boughs of egg twist, fa-la-la-la-la, etc.

I recall one or two summertime visits by the legendary Fuller Brush man, selling hairbrushes, brooms and such. He drove a Henry J, a tiny compact auto of the early '50s that was manufactured for only four years. (For those who have never seen this pig-faced little pipsqueak of a car, you can check out a picture of the Henry J on the internet. Not exactly what you'd call a "babe magnet"!).

From the age of 4½ to 17, I spent most of the year in Sunnyside, Queens — our home in Shawangunk had become a summer house during that period. Sunnyside was a mixed residential and light commercial neighborhood of attached one- and two-family brick houses, and vestiges of the old huckster and peddler traditions were still alive during our early years there. Besides the milkman, the man who delivered seltzer in old-style refillable seltzer bottles (think Clarabell) and the ubiquitous summer visits of the bicycle-riding Good Humor man or Bungalow Bar ice cream truck, there were infrequent appearances by tradesmen who survived from an earlier era. A couple of times a year, a certain clear, no-nonsense, metallic, bell-like Ding! resounded on our street, and that meant you could bring knives and scissors down to be sharpened by a man whose tools and equipment were all contained in a little cart that he pushed before him as he walked from block to block. Periodically, an old, horse-drawn wagon meandered along the street, with a few cowbells strung across the back (my little brother called this the "Ding-dong horsey"). I remember potted flowers and plants being sold from this wagon in spring and summertime, and I believe at alternate seasons of the year he traded in other goods. But the most intriguing visitations involved the occasional appearance of a rag man, whom I remember hearing more than seeing. He didn't sell anything. He bought rags, scrap metal and probably other recyclables, and he announced his arrival on the block by walking along the street (behind a truck which his partner drove), with a chant, almost a song, that sticks in my mind to this day: "I cash clo. . . thes, . . . rrrags, . . . rrradiators. . ." is all the words I actually remember, but even as a child this nasal chanting struck me as an anachronism, something that harked back to an earlier century or culture.

My final reminiscence concerns something delivered almost for free. It was a big upright piano — or perhaps it could more accurately be described as a piano-shaped object — purchased on impulse at the Wallkill Volunteer Fireman's auction ca. 1957. My father made the high bid (the only bid), of one dollar, and delivery by six volunteer firemen with a pickup truck added all of two dollars to the price. It took up space in the living room for about ten or fifteen years, before the decision became mine to get rid of it. I located a place in Kingston that refurbished and resold old pianos, and they agreed to take it away, sight unseen. One early spring morning when the ground was frozen, they backed a big truck right up to the front door, and two men loaded the monstrosity into it. God knows what disposing of something like that would cost today, but this delivery-in-reverse was free. In its own way, I guess it marked the end of an era.