When Phil Arrigo began making home deliveries for Turner Dairy Farms at age 18 in an old-fashioned Divco milk truck -- complete with stand-up gas pedal and all -- he says he was the youngest milkman in Pennsylvania.

Fifty-two years later, the Divco truck has been laid to rest as the farm's welcome sign, and Mr. Arrigo hasn't driven his delivery routes through the city, Natrona Heights and Greensburg in more than 10 years. But he's still working for Turner.

"It's been a wonderful ride," Mr. Arrigo said. "I'm old-school, and being around these people and their commitment to what they do -- they put their lives into this business."

While the 28-acre Penn Hills farm ceased to house cows in 1998 and stopped home deliveries in 2000, it now imports milk from 50 local family dairy farms. The facility bottles about 34,000 gallons of milk daily in addition to roughly 20,000 gallons of iced tea.

Two tall, gleaming silver towers with storage capacities of 30,000 gallons hold and refrigerate the milk shipped in every day. Typically, the milk is bottled and shipped to stores one to two days after first leaving the local farms.

Turner employs 155 people to run its operations, many of whom are there for the long haul, working alongside parents, siblings and children.

"People are here as long-term employees," said plant manager Randy Carr, whose mother retired in June after working at Turner for 27 years. "People refer people and want to bring their relatives here."

Turner has built itself around the notion of family. The mid-sized dairy company has been owned and operated by the Turner clan since its founding in 1930 and now is in its third generation.