The land of beans and berries

Part 6

In the 1950s the Willamette Valley was noted for agricultural production on family farms.  There were bean fields, strawberry fields, walnut orchards, plum orchards, and some dairy herds.    Today it is still agricultural, but the dominant plant is grapes.  There are vineyards full of wine grapes everywhere. 

As with many farm towns then, the school year ended in time for harvesting the first crop of the season.  Around Dayton it was strawberries. 

To harvest the crops there were crews of itinerant farm workers and their families who lived in unheated one-room shacks tucked away in a corner of a farm.  There were crews of men brought down by bus from Skid Row in Portland.  And in Dayton, there was a crew of local townspeople, mostly women and middle-school age children, my mother, myself and my sisters among them.  Our next door neighbors–the mayor’s wife and her older child–were also in our group.  We knew all the other local people, too. 

Each crew was kept separate–no contact at all.   But we all had the same job: picking strawberries to be made into strawberry jam at a canning plant somewhere near Portland.  I remember kneeling down in the cold, muddy rows picking basket after basket of strawberries on chilly, damp mornings.  Within minutes the knees of my dungarees were soaked and caked with mud. We were paid by the number of baskets we picked.  My sisters were too young to really work.  They ate strawberries and played at the side of the field.  The strawberry season was short–thank goodness.   In three or four weeks the strawberry harvest was in.  To this day I do not like strawberries in any form, except in strawberry shortcake.

There was a break after strawberry season and my sisters and I went to Summer Vacation Bible School at the local Congregational church. 

Then bean season began.  They were Blue Lake beans which in those days were only available canned.  Now, Blue Lake beans are available fresh in farmer’s markets all over Southern California and probably elsewhere, too. 

The bean fields were not cold and muddy:  they were dry and the soil had hardened into clumps.  Picking, however, meant being down on one’s knees to pick the beans near the ground, then standing up and picking all the beans up to the top of the bean plant, which grew up string and wire to about 6 feet high.    So it was down and up and down and up and down and up all day long.   After one field was harvested we moved on to another.  Within a few days we were back at the first field where new beans had grown. 

We picked the beans into large burlap bags and they were weighed when full.  We were paid by weight.  The atmosphere, unlike that in the strawberry fields, was slightly festive, at least among my friends and me.  We kids used to have contests to see how quickly we could fill a bag and who could pick the most beans in a day.    If I remember correctly, one day I picked almost 400 pounds of beans.  I  was never the winner, however. 

Our work days ended in early afternoon and we would walk home and get cleaned up.   Then we would go to the local drug store which had a soda fountain and have a cherry coke or phosphate drink which we paid for from our own earnings.  After that we sit around the park and talk and talk, the way teenagers always do.

So for three summers I worked picking crops and earned well over $200, most of which I put into U.S. Savings Bonds.  I know this for a fact because when I received my Social Security Statement at age 62, there were the earnings from those years listed on the Statement of Earnings.   It was a shock to realize that I had been working and contributing to Social Security for 50 years!  Seeing that, I decided to go ahead and file for Social Security payments–figuring I had better start collecting soon so I could be sure to at least get back the money I had put in during that half-century of employment.

The summer before 10th grade our family moved to Eastern Washington.  My parents had me cash in the bonds I had bought from money saved working in the fields, and those funds were used to move us to Spokane.  I hated Spokane.

(This post is part of an experimental memoir.  I teach memoir writing and will edit your memoir to make it better.  Learn more at www.onedaymemoir.com)