This is what they meant by horse sense.
Bring the horses back and send the trucks to pasture.
The animals are more fuel efficent. A sack of oats costs less than a gallon of gas.
And horses are smarter than car, regardless of those dashboard gadgets that do anything but cut the price of gasoline.
A story in Monday's News & Record about how Guilford Dairy beat gas and tire rationing during World War II by using horses to pull milk wagons brought interesting responses from Andy Ralston-Asumendi and Fred Brown.
Ralston-Asumendi, whose grandfather delivered milk for Guilford Dairy, singled out the part about how milkmen could sit back in the wagon, daydream or even catnap. The horse knew the route and where to stop.
"You mentioned that the drivers could loosely drive the cart, but my grandfather went one better," Ralston-Asumendi e-mailed. "He would be in the back of the cart getting the next order ready and the horse would go to the next place and stop."
Brown said that when he was 13 and 14, he worked as a milk cart helper for Long Meadow Dairies in Durham, which also parked its trucks and used horses during the war.
"When we would travel down a street, we would leave the wagon moving," he said in an e-mail, adding that he and the milkmen would make deliveries on both sides of the street while the horse moseyed along. The horse needed no direction.
Let's see a car or truck do that.
Guilford Dairy, founded in 1931 during the Great Depression, survived the hard times of the '30s and hardships imposed by wartime rationing during in the 1940s.
It emerged from the war a strong company with a brand name known to all who lived in Guilford County.
Like Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Co. and Pilot Life Insurance Co., people assumed Guilford Dairy would be around forever.
Alas, it was gulped down in a merger, first when a group of cooperatives banded together to form United Dairy. In 1975, United was taken over by Flav-O-Rich of Louisville, Ky.
Flav-O-Rich continued operating the big processing plant that Guilford Dairy built on West Market Street in 1948.
The plant shut down in 2001 and has remained empty. It's a memory to the era when Guilford residents were fierely loyal to the milk and ice cream made by their hometown dairy, which used milk supplied by Guilford County dairy farmers.