Strawberries! Monday night I had dinner with two of my parents' oldest friends, retirees living on a hobby farm in the Willamette Valley, and talk turned to strawberries. And in particular to the terrible quality of the commercial berries in the market, especially here in Minnesota. From there, inevitably, I recounted stories (our adult offspring were there) about being "forced" to pick berries as a summer job as a child. Back then-- late 1970s --it was the thing you did in summers in the mid-Willamette Valley: made your kids pick berries commercially. Legally, as I recall, we had to be 12 to pick but most of us started at 9-10 and were simply told to lie if anyone asked how old we were. Kids would be assigned to "platoons" with adult organizers and were transported by public school busses to the fields; I had to be at the bus stop at 630am Monday-Saturday and was usually dropped off around 3:30pm. A "full day's work" might earn a kid like me $2-3, or a really good child picker twice that. The migrant farm labor we shared the fields with would earn 10x what we did but of course they worked much harder and longer hours, even those most were also supervising their own kids as well. Those fields of Oregon strawberries are long gone now I understand, and it's probably been decades since hundreds of schoolchildren were disgorged from busses on a daily basis to help with the harvest. But every time I see a ripe berry I think of how it felt to walk in them all day, have my hands stained red, and learning to hate the taste of strawberries all over again every June as the crop came in. Someone should write a book about the history of youth agricultural labor!
This is a great memory. Thanks for sharing. I never picked strawberries, but my dad did. And I recall many, many times driving around our hometown and him pointing out neighborhoods that used to be strawberry fields he worked in.
Strawberries! Monday night I had dinner with two of my parents' oldest friends, retirees living on a hobby farm in the Willamette Valley, and talk turned to strawberries. And in particular to the terrible quality of the commercial berries in the market, especially here in Minnesota. From there, inevitably, I recounted stories (our adult offspring were there) about being "forced" to pick berries as a summer job as a child. Back then-- late 1970s --it was the thing you did in summers in the mid-Willamette Valley: made your kids pick berries commercially. Legally, as I recall, we had to be 12 to pick but most of us started at 9-10 and were simply told to lie if anyone asked how old we were. Kids would be assigned to "platoons" with adult organizers and were transported by public school busses to the fields; I had to be at the bus stop at 630am Monday-Saturday and was usually dropped off around 3:30pm. A "full day's work" might earn a kid like me $2-3, or a really good child picker twice that. The migrant farm labor we shared the fields with would earn 10x what we did but of course they worked much harder and longer hours, even those most were also supervising their own kids as well. Those fields of Oregon strawberries are long gone now I understand, and it's probably been decades since hundreds of schoolchildren were disgorged from busses on a daily basis to help with the harvest. But every time I see a ripe berry I think of how it felt to walk in them all day, have my hands stained red, and learning to hate the taste of strawberries all over again every June as the crop came in. Someone should write a book about the history of youth agricultural labor!
This is a great memory. Thanks for sharing. I never picked strawberries, but my dad did. And I recall many, many times driving around our hometown and him pointing out neighborhoods that used to be strawberry fields he worked in.