May 23, 1980 Gusto Nightlife feature: The beer truck man

I take a ride with one of the heroes in my world – the guy who drives the beer truck.

May 23, 1980

Here's to the men who bring us the brews.

"That's the misconception with this job," Brian Domon is saying as he slings 10 cases of 12-ounce cans onto the two-wheeled cart. "You see a truck and you think the guy driving it is just a deliveryman. That's not true."

The bright morning sun is awakening visions of summer on this one-way thoroughfare on Buffalo's West Side. Brian's big, gleaming, green and white Genesee Cream Ale truck is one of those hot-weather images. He latches the sliding doors, wheels the cart around the rear bumper of the truck and comes face to face with another creature of the summer – the street-paving machine – which has just laid two inches of steaming-fresh asphalt between him and the loading dock of the Bell's supermarket in the Grant-Ferry Plaza.

"Oh, for cripes sakes," Brian grumbles. He tracks through the sticky stuff, bumps up two steps to the graffiti-scrawled dock area, turns the cart around and pushes it into the cavernous supermarket stockroom. This is his third customer this morning. A rock FM station blares from a beat-up radio as stock clerks rip open cartons of canned goods and stamp their prices. Other deliverymen bustle in and out, bringing cheese, potato chips. There's even another beer deliveryman – a guy with a Carling's truck. He and Brian exchange some good-natured profanity.

Brian Domon's been driving beer trucks for 12 years – six of them for now-defunct Iroquois and the last six for Gohr Distributing Co. Inc., one of the biggest beer wholesalers in town. Genesee's their major item. Brian started out with 500 cases shortly before 8 o'clock this morning and two-thirds of them are Genny. The rest is Miller's, except for a few odd lots of Old Vienna, some O'Keefe's Ale and a case of Lowenbrau Dark. If there's a call for it, he can also pack some Cinci and the Australian Foster's Lager. A different driver brings kegs. In all, Gohr has 59 different combinations of beer and packaging: six-packs, eight-packs, 12-packs, 24-packs, seven-ounce ponies, 12-ounce regulars, pints, quarts, cans, throwaway bottles and returnables.

Gohr Distributing covers Buffalo and Erie County with a fleet of 60 trucks. The drivers are all union members, Teamsters Local 1016, and they get paid a salary plus commission. The company assigns the routes. Seven of Brian's stops on the West Side recently were shifted to summer drivers. For a while, Brian was doing downtown and Chippewa Street.

As you might expect, there's a waiting list for this kind of occupation. First, you need a Class 3 driver's license, then you start by filling in for vacationing drivers in the summer. Before Iroquois, Brian worked at Dunlop and was a milkman for Sealtest. And before that, he was in the Army. He's of French-Canadian ancestry and he grew up in Lancaster. He's 39. He goes ice fishing at Lake Simcoe and trout fishing in the Adirondacks.

As far as Brian is concerned, driving a beer truck is a great job. It can be tough on the legs and the back – Brian's had a couple bouts of back trouble – but it's terrific for developing the arms and shoulders. Once he leaves the warehouse, he's his own boss. He's meeting people. And he's not cooped up indoors, like he was as an Army clerk in Florida. That was awful. He didn't even have a decent chance to get a tan.

Like the mailman, the beerman is not deterred from his appointed rounds by rain, sleet, hail or snow, unless the snow gets particularly nasty. Beer trucks don't ordinarily get stuck, but Brian won't drive if he can't see. During the Blizzard of '77, the beer trucks didn't roll for eight days. "But a day like this makes up for all the rain and cold," Brian says. "It makes up for everything."

In the Bell's stockroom, he encounters Mike Hooley, a Gohr salesman in coat and tie. Brian brings the beer to Bell's twice a week, Mike makes sure it gets onto the shelves. Display space is one area where brewers compete, Mike says, as Brian goes to check his delivery against the invoice. Another area is price. Genesee raised its prices in April. Now a supermarket six-pack runs $2.05 for bottles, $2.09 for cans. Schmidt's has been cheaper all month, but they're raising their prices too, as of Monday.

Brian returns to discover that his two-wheeled cart is missing. Hard to say who'd take it. Brian's put his name on it in a dozen places. Nevertheless, there's another in its place. Maybe it was the Carling's driver. Sure enough. Brian catches him just as he's about to leave. They exchange carts and some more good-natured profanity.

Driving a beer truck is actually five jobs, Brian remarks. "You're a truck driver, a deliveryman, a public relations man, a bookkeeper and a salesman." Back in the truck, he lights up a Marlboro and updates his books, entering the deliveries to Bell's onto a master sheet. Then he tosses the cigarette, starts the truck and eases it past the paving equipment.

"Here's where you have your fun," he observes, inching through the mid-morning automotive snarl on Grant Street. "A lot of traffic and no place to park." He stops in a no-standing zone and leaves the lights flashing as he pops into Miller's Leader Drugstore to check on their supplies.

"Hello, dear," he smiles to the woman behind the cash register. "How are ya?"

This location finds Brian doing all five of his jobs. He determines the order, stocks the shelves, collects the vouchers.

"The orders are usually pretty constant," he says. "Of course, summer's the big season. From now until after Labor Day, the store'll do double what they do in the winter, sometimes triple."

Glass tinkles as Brian unloads cases of eight-pack bottles. There's always breakage, he says, and it's worse in the winter, when cold makes the bottles more brittle.

"What you do is turn the package upside down and take it back," he explains. "Then at night the guys in the warehouse will re-cooper it, wash down the bottles and repack them."

Brian's constantly leveling the loads within the truck's 10 bays so the cases don't tip in stops and turns.

"Now comes the big one," he says as the truck rolls into an unassuming 24-hour gas and groceries convenience store called Stop-N-Go at Grant and Auburn. “No beer sales after 3 a.m.,” a sign announces.

"You definitely coming by Friday?" the store manager asks as they check the supplies in the walk-in cooler. "You better. I've got a three-day weekend coming up."

"Tell you what," Brian proposes. "The seven-ounce ponies, I'll give you all I got. The 12-packs, same with that. And the eight-packs, I'll have those for you on Friday."

"Eight, 10, 12, make it 15 of them," the manager says.

Brian proceeds to unload an astonishing 142 cases of bubbly, filling virtually all the available floor space in the cooler. He trades small talk with the clerks and customers, admires the babies and waves to acquaintances who stop at the gas pumps.

"It's like being part of the family over here," he says.

Finally, the invoices are checked, the vouchers are signed and stamped. Brian updates his load sheet and it's time for lunch. He gets half an hour. He chooses a little neighborhood pizza shop and sits down with a ham sub and a can of cola.

The afternoon deliveries are smaller. The big accounts, the supermarkets, usually want theirs before 11 a.m. The taverns often don't open until after noon. And people can be fussy about when they'll take deliveries. Brian recalls one proprietor who waved him away from her empty bar at noon, telling him to come back later.

"She wasn't doing anything else," he shrugs. "She just didn't want to bother with deliveries at noon."

Afternoon stops begin with an old-fashioned family grocery, the Potomac Superette, which takes the special order of Old Vienna. Next Brian checks into tomorrow's order at another 24-hour shop, the Buz-Y-Bee, at Grant and Forest.

"Joe," he tells the manager, "you got no ponies back here. You want 12?"

"Better make it 15," Joe says. "We got a big weekend coming up."

Then it's back down Grant Street to Joe's New Era Market, run by a Palestinian whose Middle Eastern property was confiscated by the Israelis. Beer is his high-volume item. He underprices the convenience stores.

Next is a tavern stop, Sautter's Grill (established 1880) on Breckenridge, where horseplayers take a break from the nearby Off-Track Betting parlor. A couple of them play gin rummy with the barmaid.

"Anybody know the result of the first at Finger?" one asks. "I wanta collect my bet."

The last delivery is, appropriately, Sacco's Last Call at West Ferry and Plymouth, where the sound system churns out Bob Seger and a buffet table awaits the second night of an anniversary celebration. The reflected brilliance of Brian's truck outside the window silhouettes a dozen beer-drinking patrons.

Sacco's boasts the lowest beer prices in the neighborhood, though everything's going up a nickel next week after the Schmidt's increase goes into effect. Sacco's stocked up heavily before Genesee raised its rates and today Brian collects the empties – shuttling them from the low-ceilinged basement to a loading chute, then onto the cart and into the truck.

"OK," he says as he puts the last of the full cases into the cellar, "it's time for a beer. What do I drink? What kind of car does the president of General Motors drive? Genesee Beer, what else?"

Over his beer, Brian cleans up his paperwork. Out of 500 cases, he's unloaded 420, all of which are accounted for. If any were missing, it would come out of his pay. From here, it's back to the warehouse, check the invoices for the next day, check for orders, make out an order sheet, turn in the receipts, punch out and go home to bachelor quarters in Cheektowaga, maybe to work in his garden. Overnight, the warehouse workers will clean up the truck and reload it. Tomorrow Brian Domon will be back on the West Side, bright and early, with another 500 cases of beer.

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IN THE PHOTO: Brian Domon unloading his truck in 1980. Photo by News photographer Barney Kerr.

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FOOTNOTE: When I started looking for him in the Buffalo News archives, I thought for a moment that Brian Domon, who would be well into his 80s by now, might still be with us.

A July 2023 notice for the summer Trap or Skeet league at Wood and Brook Sportsman's Club way out Genesee Street in Crittenden has his name as one of the contacts. But wait, could that be the other Brian Domon who was just 54 when News reporter Jane Kwiatkowski interviewed him in 2012? It is. That's Brian G. Domon, a chainsaw entrepreneur with a shop called Woodcutters Headquarters, founded in 1979.

Our truck driver is Brian F. Domon, He appears in a photo, pushing a hand cart, in a 1992 ad for the opening of a new Hamburg warehouse for Builders Square, the home improvement center. He was still single when he passed away in March 1999