Brothers, a Farm, and a War

It started the way a lot of Western New York family businesses started: with brothers, a piece of land, and a willingness to work harder than anyone else around them. In the early 1940s, Franklin Mesmer and his brothers laid the foundation for what would become Mesmer and Sons Dairy on Love Road in Grand Island. But before the business could find its footing, the world intervened.

Franklin was drafted into the Army Air Corps and sent to Europe as a waist gunner on a B-17 bomber. These were not safe assignments. Crews flew into skies filled with flak and enemy fighters, and the casualty rates were brutal. Franklin Mesmer was one of the fortunate few who completed 35 successful B-17 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for an act of real courage: staying with his crippled aircraft until it crashed in semi-friendly Russian-occupied territory. By the time his service was over, he held the rank of staff sergeant.

When Franklin came home to Grand Island, he came back to Love Road. He and his brothers rolled up their sleeves and got to work building the dairy operation they had started before the war. What followed was one of the more quietly remarkable stories in Western New York business history.

A Family Business on Love Road

The Mesmer corporation was owned by four brothers: John, Franklin, Raymond, and Edward Mesmer. Their operation was based at 1815 Love Road on Grand Island, the same stretch of road where the dairy plant would sit for decades. Mesmer and Sons Dairy was incorporated in New York State in November 1957. Two years later, in November 1959, the retail operation was formalized as Mesmer Dairy Stores, Inc., reflecting how much the business had grown beyond just processing milk.

The plant on Love Road was the physical heart of everything. It was where the milk was processed and bottled. It was where the Orange Zing was made. It was where the trucks loaded up and rolled out across the Buffalo suburbs every morning. For the people who lived on Grand Island, it was also just a fact of life, the kind of local institution you don't fully appreciate until it's gone.

Thirty Stores Across the 716

By their peak, Mesmer Dairy Stores operated around 30 retail locations spread across the Buffalo area. According to reporting from the Buffalo News, the stores were most densely concentrated in Tonawanda, Kenmore, and North Buffalo. These were small-format dairy stores that carried Mesmer milk, eggs, ice cream, and other dairy products alongside small grocery essentials. They were the kind of neighborhood shop that existed before supermarkets ate everything.

A 1970 Mesmer's ad captured the pitch perfectly: "When you hear those thirsty voices calling, be prepared, Mom!" It ran alongside promotions for Orange Zing, the artificially flavored sugar water that became one of the most remembered products in the Mesmer lineup. The Buffalo News described Zing as one of the top sellers at Mesmer's 30 locations, right alongside the milk, eggs, and ice cream. Kids who grew up in Tonawanda, Kenmore, and North Buffalo in the 1960s and 1970s have a Pavlovian response to the name. It was cheap, sweet, cold, and exactly what you wanted after getting off the school bus.

Franklin Mesmer: Veteran, President, Neighbor

Franklin Mesmer, known as Bob to people who knew him, served as president of Mesmer Dairy Stores from his return from the war until his retirement in 1989. That's roughly four decades of showing up to Love Road and running a business he and his brothers built from scratch. According to his obituary published by Niagara Frontier Publications in 2011, he was also a long-time member and former president of the Riverside Lions Club, a community institution on Grand Island.

He enjoyed camping with his family, woodworking, golf, and, as his obituary put it, talking with friends and relatives. He was less enthusiastic about discussing his wartime service, which the obituary described as his "terror-filled time in the air over Nazi-occupied Europe." He had to be prodded to talk about it. That's the kind of detail that tells you something real about a person. He didn't come home and turn the B-17 missions into a personal brand. He came home and went back to making dairy products on Love Road.

Franklin retired to Franklinville, then eventually to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he lived until his death on January 21, 2011. He was survived by his wife Jean, his four children from his first marriage to Dorothy Phillips Mesmer, and six stepchildren.

The Body Blow: Losing the Bells Account

By the time the early 1990s arrived, Mesmer Dairy was in a fight for its survival. The company had long supplied milk to the 40 Buffalo-area Bells Markets operated by the Peter J. Schmitt Co. That relationship represented roughly half of Mesmer's entire sales volume. Then, without warning, Schmitt dropped Mesmer as a supplier in favor of Meadowbrook Dairy out of Erie, Pennsylvania, and Cuba, New York.

James DePerno, the general manager for Mesmer at the time, told the Buffalo News that the loss of the Bells account shocked the Mesmer executives. He said the Grand Island dairy would have to fight to survive. It was that stark. Half the company's revenue gone in one decision made by a buyer they had no control over. DePerno acknowledged that several organizations had offered to buy Mesmer in recent years, and that the Bells loss probably hastened what came next.

The Sale and the End of an Era

Mesmer Dairy Stores Inc. agreed to sell its 19 Mesmer retail stores and four Niagara dairy stores to Quick Chek of Orrville, Ohio, which was owned by Smith Dairies, a family-run dairy business founded in 1908. The sale price was not disclosed publicly. All 100 full-time employees and the part-time staff were retained under the new ownership, DePerno said at the time.

Importantly, the Mesmer corporation retained ownership of the dairy-processing plant at 1815 Love Road and held a long-term contract to keep supplying milk products to the retail outlets under their new owners. "Mesmer will continue to bottle milk and water," DePerno told the Buffalo News. The corporate entity Mesmer Dairy Stores, Inc. was formally dissolved in March 1993.

A 1992 fire at the Mesmer Dairy plant on Love Road, fought by several Grand Island volunteer fire companies, gave the island a close-up look at how much that building meant to the community. The plant sat right next door to a Mesmer Dairy Store on the same stretch of Love Road where the brothers had started building their business fifty years earlier.

The Island They Came Home To

The Mesmer name is deeply woven into the fabric of Grand Island. Former residents who post on community memory boards mention Mesmer's in the same breath as Sandy Beach, the old bowling alley, and Little League fields on Staley Road. It's listed among the things people remember most about growing up on the island, right alongside landmarks that are still standing and ones that are long gone.

The Mesmer family itself was a fixture on the island for generations. Community guestbooks from 2000 show former residents writing about the Mesmers as one of the core Grand Island families, alongside names like Fleischmann, Ehde, and Stack. Mac and Nora Mesmer ran a summer fruit and vegetable stand on Staley Road. Another branch of the family operated Mesmer's Tavern in the late 1940s. The name appears in local memory across the whole span of Grand Island history.

A Small Island, a Generation of Heroes

To understand the Mesmer story fully, you have to understand the world Grand Island was part of in the early 1940s. Franklin Mesmer wasn't the only young man from this small island who went off to war. His neighbor Charlie DeGlopper, born and raised on Fix Road, attended school on Grand Island before graduating from Tonawanda High School in 1941. He entered the Army in November 1942 and was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division's 325th Glider Infantry Regiment. On June 9, 1944, three days after D-Day, DeGlopper's platoon was pinned down and cut off near La Fiere, France. He stood up in an open road, fully exposed to enemy fire, and used his Browning Automatic Rifle to draw the Germans' attention while his comrades escaped. He was shot repeatedly. He kept firing. He was killed. The ground around him was later found covered with destroyed German machine guns. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the only member of the 82nd Airborne to receive the award for action in Normandy.

DeGlopper had gone to Tonawanda High School with the Niland brothers, four young men from Tonawanda whose World War II story would eventually inspire Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan. Robert Niland was killed on D-Day with the 82nd Airborne. Preston Niland was killed the next day at Utah Beach. At the time, brother Edward was presumed dead in Burma after being shot down, though he had actually survived as a prisoner of war. The fourth brother, Fritz, was found in Normandy and sent home as the family's last surviving son. DeGlopper, fighting with the same 82nd Airborne Division as Robert Niland, died three days after both Niland brothers fell. Franklin Mesmer was flying B-17 missions over Europe during this same stretch of the war, one small community producing more than its share of the people who decided the outcome of the conflict.

The Mesmer Family and the DeGlopper Memorial

The connection between the Mesmer family and the memory of Charles DeGlopper didn't end with the war. Decades later, when the community came together to build a proper memorial to DeGlopper at the corner of Baseline Road and Grand Island Boulevard, a man named Joe Mesmer was part of the volunteer committee that made it happen. According to WNYPapers coverage of the project, Joe Mesmer served on the DeGlopper Memorial Expansion Committee alongside Ray DeGlopper, Charles's nephew, and helped lay sod at the memorial site. The Mesmer name, which had been a part of Grand Island's daily life through milk deliveries and dairy stores for five decades, was also present in the effort to make sure the island's greatest hero wasn't forgotten.

The bronze statue of Charles DeGlopper was unveiled at the memorial on June 5, 2021, 77 years after his death. It stands at the intersection of Baseline Road and Grand Island Boulevard, a few miles from the address on Love Road where the Mesmer brothers once built a dairy and a life.

The dairy plant is gone now. The retail stores are long closed. Franklin Mesmer passed away in Myrtle Beach in 2011. But the story of what this island produced in one generation, the B-17 gunner who came home and built 30 dairy stores, the neighbor who stood in the road at La Fiere so his platoon could live, and the family from Tonawanda whose losses echoed all the way to Hollywood, is a story worth knowing.