Helms Bakery Trucks

By kiki

My memories of the Helms Bakery trucks go back to the late 1940s. It was while we were living at the Simons brickyard that I first saw that beautiful yellow Helms Bakery truck. The Simons Boys, and I was one of them, would wait for the Helms truck at the Vail Avenue entrance to the brickyard. As the driver slowed down to enter the brickyard via the dirt road, us boys would jumped on the rear bumper and open the rear doors and pull open the drawers where the loot was at. We would go for the cream puffs first and then some of the other goodies. The driver knew all the time what we were doing, he never got pissed at us. As the Simons route was his last one for the day he would give us what he didn’t sell. We always had bread at home!

Later on when I was attending Montebello Junior High School, a girlfriend and I would walk by the bakery via Maple Avenue, she lived on Mines. That didn’t last as she dumped me for a high school guy “because he had a car” she said.