III. A Visit to the Bakery
Soon they came to a big square building that seemed to be all windows, blazing with light. Over the door was a sign which read:
THE SPOTLESS BAKERY
The children had often seen the building before but had never been inside.
They entered and their father asked to see the manager. Soon he came bustling in—a round smiling little man, dressed in a spotless white suit.
“Good evening, Mr. Duwell,” he said, shaking hands.
“Good evening, Mr. Baker,” replied Mr. Duwell. “This is Ruth, and this is Wallace. They want to see how bread is baked, if you are not too busy for visitors.”
“I shall be delighted to show you,” said Mr. Baker, smiling and shaking hands with both children; “this way, please.”
Up a narrow winding stair they climbed to the sifting room on the fourth floor.
“Every bit of flour starts on its journey through these sifters,” said the manager, pointing to a row of box-like sifting machines.
On the floor stood a huge pile of bags of flour. “Each one of these bags holds one hundred and forty pounds,” he explained.
Passing down the stairway they saw the store-room piled high with more bags of flour. “There are more than a thousand of them,” said the manager.
Then they came to the mixing room. Everything was white—the huge mixers were white; the walls were white; the bakers were dressed in white with odd round white caps; the dough trays were white—everything was white and spotless.
“The flour from the sifters above comes through an opening in the floor into the mixers. Then the yeast and other things are added. The electric power is started. The great iron arms of the mixers turn, and twist, and mix until the whole mass becomes dough,” Mr. Baker explained.
Along the wall were the dough trays in which the dough is set to rise. These trays remind one of huge white bath tubs on wheels, a little wider and deeper and about twice as long as the ones in our houses.
“How much will each one of those hold?” asked Wallace, pointing to the trays full of creamy dough.
“Enough to make eleven hundred loaves,” answered the manager.
“Why, there must be over forty of them,” said Wallace, looking down the long line. “How many loaves do you bake in a day?”
“We have two more bakeries like this, and in the three we bake about one hundred thousand loaves a day—besides rolls and cakes.”
“Why, I didn’t know there was so much bread in the world,” said Wallace.
“Yes, my boy, there are bakeries almost everywhere. We supply only a small part of the bread needed in our large city.”
As they went down the next stairway to the baking room, the pleasant odor of fresh-baked bread came up to meet them.
“Here they are!” cried Ruth. “Look, Wallace, here are the bake ovens!”
All that could be seen on one side of the room was a long row of black oven doors, set in a low white-tiled wall.
On the other side of the room were large oblong tables, around which the white-uniformed bakers were busily working.
The dough was piled high on the tables. One baker cut it into lumps. Another made the lumps into pound loaves, weighing them on a scale. Another shaped the loaves and put them into rows of pans, which were slipped into large racks and wheeled to the oven door.
“Look,” said Wallace, “they are going to put them in!”
A baker put four loaves on a long-handled flat shovel; then quickly opened the oven door and slipped them inside.
“Look at the loaves!” cried Wallace, peeping into the open door. “Hundreds of them. How many will that oven hold?”
“Six hundred,” said the baker, closing the door.
“Look,” cried Ruth, “they are taking them out of that other oven. There comes our loaf for breakfast, Wallace.”
Farther down the room a baker was lifting out of an oven the nut-brown loaves, bringing with them the sweet smell of fresh bread.
“Isn’t it wonderful!” said Mr. Duwell, who was almost as excited as the children. “Notice how all the men work together, everyone doing his part to help the others.”
“What are the baking hours?” he asked the manager.
“From twelve o’clock, noon, till midnight, the ovens are kept going as you see them now,” said the manager.
“We will go down one more flight to the shipping room,” he added, leading the way.
There the finished loaves were coming down from the floor above on great racks to wait for shipping time. The space in front of the shipping platform was crowded with wagons and automobiles.
“Why, look!” said Wallace, “there are more wagons than automobiles. I should think you would use automobiles entirely.”
“No,” replied the manager, “the automobiles are better for long distances; but for short distances, where the driver has to start and stop, horses are much better. When the driver serves bread along a street he calls, ‘Come Dolly,’ or whatever the horse’s name is, and the horse follows. The horse is alive; the automobile isn’t.”
“When does the delivery start?” asked Mr. Duwell.
“Soon after midnight.”
After thanking the manager for his kindness, shaking hands all around, and bidding him good-night, the little party hurried home.
All that night Wallace dreamed that he was putting loaves of bread into a big oven and lifting them out, brown and crisp, on the end of a long-handled shovel, loading them into a delivery wagon, and driving all over the city, so that the people could have fresh bread for breakfast.