Becoming a Bookkeeper

 When I was working at Cherry Tree Aviation, my desk was in the center of everything that happened. Everyone who came in and out went by my desk. Most people (both employees and customers) hung out in the central lobby area because that was where the coffee machine and the cigarette machine were. One of the people that I got to know while working there was Peter (not his real name), who owned a plane that he hangared with Cherry Tree Aviation and went flying frequently during the work week (a perk of owning his own business). He was a very jovial fellow, like to joke and tell stories, liked by everyone.

When Peter learned that Cherry Tree was closing down and I was losing a job, he asked me if I wanted to come work for him at his small manufacturing company. He had a very small office with two people, a bookkeeper and an accountant. The bookkeeper handled all the accounts receivable and the order desk, while the accountant handled the accounts payable, and all the accounting issues like payroll and taxes. The bookkeeper was a young woman my age who was married and expecting her first child and planning to quit work about a month before her due date, which was coming up soon and he hadn't found a suitable replacement. Like John Pritchard, Peter had decided that I was probably capable of learning the job even if I didn't have formal office or bookkeeping training. 

Two weeks later I started work at Peter Works (not its real name). Most of the building space was taken up by the machine shop were their product, car and motorcycle headers, were fabricated by skilled machinists (like my father). At the very front of the building were two offices, the smaller of which was where the bookkeeper and accountant worked, and a slightly larger inner office that was Peter and his partner's. Peter was the idea guy, the one who talked to customer, made deals and designed the headers. His partner was an older, gruff fellow who was the one who turned the ideas into reality, he had engineering and machinist training and spent most of his time in the machine shop supervising and guiding the half dozen young men who fabricated the headers. 

For those who don't know headers are a fancy exhaust system (generally for cars pre-1980, but also for motorcycles) that help exhaust flow away from the engine and improve engine performance (increased horsepower and torque), so important for people who raced stockcars or motorcycles. Customers ranged from individuals, to small car and bike shops, to large distributers like JC Whitney in Chicago that had a huge catalog business of all kinds of car and motorcycle parts. [The image is of a set of headers designed for a small block engine Chevy car 1955 to 1957). Header design is specific to a car make and type, as the pipes must fit into tight spaces in an engine. 

It turned out that the bookkeeping was the easiest part of the job to learn. I was taught how to do double entry bookkeeping in paper ledgers and how to make daily reports to the bank on income and outflow of money. The hardest part of the job was working the order desk. I had a detailed catalog to refer to, but still needed to learn a lot of specifics about particular car makes and designs. It was necessary to know the exact size of an engine in cubic centimeters (ccs), and whether the engine had any additional modifications. If I didn't know an answer I had to track down one of the bosses and ask, but unlike the young woman I was replacing, I started taking notes, so that I would only ever have to ask a particular question one time.

I liked both parts of the job. I found working with numbers and details to be calming. Even the part where at the end of the day everything had to total up with no more than 1 penny difference was enjoyable. On the rare days that I had made a mistake the hunt for the missing  money to correct the error was challenging and fun. Talking with customers on the phone was also fun, most of the time. There was always some guy somewhere who didn't want to talk to a "girl" about technical stuff and would insist that I get him a man to talk to. Usually when that happened I would have Bob the accountant (often the only other person in the office at the time) take the phone. Bob was a good man, and a great accountant, but he knew nothing at all about cars or headers. Usually after the guy talk fruitlessly to Bob for a while, he'd be willing to do business with me, because I generally knew what I was talking about. 

Bob was an interesting character. He was a high functioning alcoholic, something everyone knew. But twice in the five months I worked there, he did not show up for work for two or three days in a row. The bosses would say "oh, Bob's gone on another bender," and nothing was ever said to him when he would show up again, sober and ready to work.

I particularly liked dealing with the small car and bike shops that would buy directly from the company. Over the months I developed friendly, bantering relationships with several of the men who ran those shops. One in particular I remember was a custom bike shop in Ohio. They ordered headers almost weekly and the owner was a funny and pleasant guy with an amazing voice. 

In addition to the headers we also sold t-shirts and bumper stickers with the company logo. Requests for those often came in the mail from teens and adults with five dollar bills for the t-shirts. It was my job to select the right size shirt, package it and mail it out to the client. 

There were only two problems I had working at Peter Works. The first I simply decided to ignore (and not tell my father about). The shop was not unionized, and about two months after I began to work there the International Machinists decided to try to unionize it. They began picketing the building during working hours. Now I was raised in a union family, and my dad was a member of the International Machinists, and I was brought up never to cross a picket line. It made me very uncomfortable (and as I said I couldn't tell my father about it) but I decided that I wanted to keep the job, so kept coming to work despite the pickets.  Part of my argument to myself was that Peter gave all the machinists raises, so that their wages were actually above union scale to keep them from organizing, and none of the workers were interested in foregoing those higher wages to sign a union card. Of course, Peter did not give out benefits like health care or retirement, but most younger workers didn't have the foresight to realize how important those were. The whole situation made Bob and me grumble, because our pay (mine was only $2 an hour) did not change, because at that time there were no unions for office workers to join. 

The UPS drivers who picked up our shipments also would not cross a picket line, but the pickets would leave as soon as the workers did at 4:30 PM, and the truck drivers were willing to make us their last call of the day, and show up after the pickets and the workers (including me and Bob) were gone. This arrangement with the truck drivers unfortunately made it easier for the second problem to arise. 

Small manufacturing companies without large capital investment often face a problem. To sell a product you have to make it, and to make it you need to buy materials (in the case of headers this is mostly steel), and pay wages of workers. This is acerbated by the fact that it often takes a long time, weeks if not months for small companies to get payment from their customers. To solve this problem banks would offer accounts receivable loan funding. Accounts receivable funding still exists, often from on-line lenders as well as established banks. How it works is that when a small manufacturing company ships product to a buyer, the bank will loan them about 80% to 90% of the value of that as yet unpaid shipped invoice. This means that for every item you ship out your door, you get money the next day from the bank to pay for new materials and current wages while you wait for your customer to pay you. When the customer does pay you, you pay back the bank for the loan plus small interest, and pocket the remainder (so less than 20% to 10% of payments coming in stay with the company, and the bank gets what they loaned out plus interest. This was why at the end of every business day, I had to send Peter Works' bank a report, the report had to include: bookkeeping summary for the day, a photocopy of all the invoices for products shipped out that day, and every few weeks a check for the money owed the bank. 

That year, 1974 was in the middle of a recession (the recession lasted 1973 through 1975) and it was made much worse by the Arab Oil Embargo that began in November 1973. Gasoline was not just much more expensive than it had been, it was also scarce. I had given up driving a car to work altogether in 1974 because in California one could only get gas every other day (depending upon whether your license plate ended with an even or an odd number), and waiting in a gas line could take hours that I did  not have. I bought a really nice 10 gear bike, a Peugeot, and rode the bike to work along the San Francisco bay. It was a glorious way to commute. But the difficulty in getting fuel and the overall recession hit companies like Peter Works heavily because they provided parts for vehicles that used oil products. 

Because of the International Machinists picket line in front of the factory, all our product was shipped out after I and all the other workers other than the owners had left. As a result rather than reporting shipping invoices the day they went out, I would find a stack on my desk in the morning when I came in, enter them into the books, copy them and add them to that days bank report. It was in my fourth month there that I slowly realized what was happening, and it took a phone call from one of our largest customers, a large retailer that carried Peter Works headers in their catalog. The call was a complaint about not having received a shipment of headers that had been ordered. I found that confusing, because I had recorded and reported invoices for those products, with shipping labels to them in the previous weeks. 

It took me a while to put the pieces together, but what was happening, was that after hours when only the owners were there, they were creating fake invoices and shipping labels for products that did not exist (they didn't exist because they didn't have enough money for the materials to make them). Through me they were sending false information to the bank and getting funding for product that did not exist yet in hopes of getting enough funding to actually create the product and ship it before the deception was discovered. I began to realize that I had been asked to lie to customers about their orders being produced and when they would be shipped, when there was little certainty of that happening. 

The knowledge of the deception and cheating took a great toll on me. I did not like having been used as part of this scam. While I did not report what was happening to anyone outside the company, I did immediately proffer two weeks notice. Those last two weeks there were the most uncomfortable working situation I think I've ever had. 

I don't know what the consequences, if any, to the company and its owners were. I do know that the company still exists today, located in a different city, under the same name, still making headers, which is why I have changed the name of the owner and the company. It was my first real brush with the corruption that exists in business, and a major factor in why I have come to distrust those who make large amounts of money through business. I have come to know many honest small business owners over the years. None of them because rich from their businesses. I tend to be suspicious of those who do. 

My brief life as a farm worker Part 2

During the summers of 1970 and 1971 between years of college I worked at Yoder Brothers commercial horticultural plant in Redwood City, California as a farm worker. 

Women's Work in the Greenhouses

As I wrote in my previous post the primary work that we women did at Yoder Brothers was take cuttings of 2 and 1/2 inch shoots from chrysanthemum plants that were then shipped to other Yoder Brothers plants to be rooted. This constituted about 80 percent of our work load. 

But before the plants could grow to a point to have their shoots harvested, it was necessary to plant them. Planting was also a job that women did. The beds were prepared by the men. Preparation included sterilization of the beds. Each bed was tightly covered in plastic and scalding steam was piped under the plastic. Fertilizer, fresh top soil and other chemicals were applied to the sterilized beds by the men.  Then the women went to work. 

Taking cuttings was a job that could be done standing up, but planting could only be done kneeling. The beds were about a foot and a half high, so that even kneeling we sometimes had to lean over to work in the soil.  The packed dirt isles between beds were about 3 feet wide, which was enough to comfortably kneel perpendicular to the edge of the raised bed. We were given thick rubber cushions to strap over our knees, however, the isles were always dusty and often muddy so the bottoms of my pants, my socks and the tops of my shoes were usually filthy after a day of planting. 

Of course, I did seem to get dirtier than everyone else. Probably because I didn't mind getting dirty, because I was luckier than most of my work mates for whom this job was the difference between survival and starvation or homelessness. I had a home with my parents and was earning money to pay for college. Also I could afford to have clothes (even if only old ragged jeans and work shirts) that I only wore for work in the greenhouses. When I got home I could dump my clothes into the washer and put on something fresh. Many of my fellow workers could not afford separate sets of work clothes and home clothes; a lot of them would cover up at least their tops with old, worn, over-sized men's shirts to prevent staining. Some of it was a matter of choice - the young women did not want their novios or husbands to see them in dirty work clothes. I on the other hand had no one to impress with my femininity at that point in my life. Also many of them lived in apartments where they had to pay for laundry while I did my laundry for free in my parents' washer. Note that I did do my own laundry and did not leave it for my mother to do. I was often teased about getting so dirty. They said I was like their niños, who loved playing in the dirt. 

While the beds as a whole was three feet wide, thick wooden sides left the planting surface was about 30 inches. The surface of the bed was marked off in 5 inch squares by wire, so there were six squares across the width of each bed. We were given huge plastic trays of seedlings, each in it's little square of soil similar to the tomato or pepper seedlings at your local greenhouse or Lowe's in the spring. We had to make sure that the wooden stake labeling our tray of chrysanthemum seedlings had the same type name and number  to the wooden stakes labeling the bed we were planting in.  Rarely two women worked together on the same bed, one to a side facing each other, but most often we worked alone doing first one side and then the other. 

The soil was soft so we used no tools, only our fingers and hands. There was always dirt under my finger nails during those summers. We began with the square closest to the middle (the third square in from the side), so that we would not crush plants closer to the edge as we leaned out to reach the middle. Three seedlings were planted in each square in a triangle, the apex of the triangle pointing away from us.  I would gently pull a little seedling with its attached soil out of the tray with my left hand, while I simultaneously created a thumb sized hole in the bed with my right. I would plop the seedling in, and use my thumb and fingers to pinch the soil of the bed around it. Then reach for the next seedling and poke the next hole. I would usually do all of the third row squares I could comfortably reach from one kneeling location first, then the second row, and finally the first row, before "walking" on my knees to the next location. The pressure to be productive meant that there really wasn't time to stand up and straighten out between each location, just scooting on our knees. 

Physically planting was far more difficult than taking cuttings. Even with the thick rubber pads being on my knees for hours hurt. I'd get cramps in my calf or my thigh sometimes. In the early mornings there was greater risk of burning oneself on the heating pipe running around the bottom of the bed. But mostly it hurt my back to lean out over the bed to reach the middle rows.  And yet, I actually liked planting more than cutting. 

When you were cutting even though the job was really repetitive and boring you always had to pay close attention because you had to be counting the number of cuttings. The quality control was really strict, your 200 cuttings per box had to be exactly 200, not 199 or 201. If you let your mind wander while taking cuttings and lost count, you would have to stop and carefully count every cutting in your hand to make sure you knew where you were. Of course, stopping to recount cost time and that cut into your production which you couldn't afford to do if you wanted to keep your job. 

But planting required almost no thought at all, it was a purely mechanical process. So my mind could wander wherever I wished. Sometimes I sang softly to myself. Sometimes I composed letters or stories in my head. One could just simply daydream while planting, so time spent planting generally passed far more quickly than the hours spent taking cuttings. On those uncommon occasions that two women were working across from each other on the same bed one could actually have conversations, something not at all possible while you are counting cuttings. Too bad that planting was such a small part of the job during the summer months. The permanent workers did much more planting, being responsible for getting all the beds started in the late winter and early spring. 

Taking cuttings was the biggest part of the job, next in frequency and importance was planting, and finally when the productivity of plants had ended, we had to rip dead plants out and clean up the beds so the men could come in and prepare them for the next round of planting and harvesting of cuttings.  This was the only job that was truly social. It was always done by at least two women at a time, and sometimes a whole crew of women might be assigned to work on cleaning up an entire greenhouse. Since all we were doing was yanking plants out of the ground and piling them in huge piles there was plenty of opportunity for conversation, joking and singing. It was working on ripping crews that taught me all my best Spanish curse words, most of which are unfit for publication. 

Most of the time ripping out and cleaning up was a very short lived task centered on a few beds in an otherwise active greenhouse with many other rows of green, growing plants being actively harvested for cuttings. I have very vivid memories, however, of one afternoon in my second summer (1971) a crew of six of us were set the task of ripping beds in a greenhouse where everything was dried, brown and dead or dying.  This was a large task that was going to take the six of us the entire afternoon to complete. 

In an active greenhouse full of green, growing plants it was very humid and the high temperatures were usually in the high eighties or low nineties. That's not particularly pleasant, but its bearable and one becomes adjusted to the heat.  This particular greenhouse we were sent to work in was dry as a bone, and the temperature in that greenhouse when we started was 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It would reach 124 degrees before we were finished. We knew this because there were thermometers hanging from the overhead pipes. It was awful!  As the heat rose and it because harder and harder to work, I had a sudden inspiration. I stood up on one of the beds and turned on the faucet of the overhead water pipe and stood under it. I soaked myself completely my hair and clothes were dripping wet. Most of the others followed my example. We could then work in reasonable comfort for a period of time enjoying the coolness of the evaporating water. Within about 20 minutes I would be dry again, and need to soak myself once more. This tactic allowed us to complete the task without anyone succumbing to heat stroke or heat exhaustion. The only downside was that all the dust and dry leaves stuck to us and we were totally filthy from head to toe by the time the work day ended. 

We were required to be on the job site by 6:45 AM, but could not clock in until a minute or two before 7 AM. We were luckier than most open field workers in that there was a toilet with running water on the property, but we were only suppose to use it before we clocked in, during the 10 minute morning break, and during the 30 minute unpaid lunch period we were given. Most of us found ways to slide into the bathroom when nature demanded, especially when moving from one greenhouse to another without getting into trouble. The end of the day came at 3:30 PM. 

The Yoder Brothers and Scientific Horticulture

The job was hard, hot, dirty and mostly tedious, but Yoder Brothers (now Aris Horticulture, Inc) as a whole was a fascinating business. Begun in 1920 by two Mennonite brothers Menno and Ira Yoder of Barberton, Ohio, Yoder Brothers had grown by the 1970's to dominate the chrysanthemum market in the US.  Some eighty percent of all chrysanthemums blooming in the U.S. in the 1970's had begun their life in one of Yoder Brothers' greenhouses. Even in 1997 the greenhouse in Letcher County, Kentucky where I got my autumn mums bought their chrysanthemum seedlings from Yoder Brothers. 

One of the reasons I think that the plant manager hired me was that he wanted someone he could talk to. He was proud of the organization and its "scientific" techniques and found me a willing listener.  So I learned many details about the Yoder Brothers corporation and its operations that the other workers knew nothing about. 

Yoder Brothers was engaged in plant research, and had developed a highly systematized, rationalized, program to maximize chrysanthemum output and quality. They collected extensive data from each of their plants on temperature, moisture, and production, then developed complex formulas and programs to predict the most efficient and efficacious was to produce chrysanthemums. Each week the plant in Redwood City California received computer printouts mailed from the company headquarters in Ohio. The printout dictated precisely which beds in which greenhouses would be targeted for harvesting that week, which beds would be uprooted and cleaned out, which would be sterilized and treated for new planting, and which would be planted with new varieties.

We greenhouse workers often made fun of these printouts as they frequently dictated harvesting from beds that were producing almost no new shoots, while telling us to tear up beds that still had days if not weeks of production left in them. However, it appeared over the two summers that I worked there that on the average the computer program optimized their production.

Each day, at the end of shift, the precise number of boxes (each with 200 cuttings) of each variety of mum and each bed in each house, would be tallied on a sheet.  Because the first summer I was the only employee other than the manager for whom English was a first language, I was tapped to report each day's production to the home office.  I had to make a long distance call to Ohio and recite pages and pages of variety names, location identifiers, and numbers of boxes. These numbers would then be fed into the computer program that determined what the activities for each bed would be the next week. For some reason the need for concentration and accuracy on this task would trigger a yawning reflex in me. Halfway through the task I would start to yawn, which would make me struggle to continue reading the numbers.  Just writing about this has triggered a bout of yawning for me. 

Towards the end of my first summer, the home office sent a huge teletype machine to California to be used for reporting the production information. The plant manager (who spoke little Spanish) trained me how to use the teletype, and then it was my responsibility to teach the process of typing the report to my fellow worker and friend Gloria, an immigrant from Mexico who had been a executive secretary in a large corporation in Mexico and could type much faster and more accurately than I could, but who had no English at all. At that point I spoke Spanish fluently but my vocabulary was limited in odd ways: I knew the word for push, but not the word for button! But Gloria was smart and a quick learner and she filled in the gaps.  I was glad to give up the job of reading all those numbers every day and the weird yawning fits that it brought on. 

Stay tuned for part 3, where I will talk more about the women I worked with, made friends with, and cared about. Also I'll talk more about the Hispanic immigrant community at that time in that place. And at one funny story about speaking Spanish. 

My brief life as a farm worker Part 1

About a year and a half ago, I saw an interesting article about a 1965 program that attempted, unsuccessfully, to replace temporary migrant workers from Mexico with American high school students:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/when-the-u-s-government-tried-to-replace-migrant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers

This article reminds me of my experience as a farm worker during the summers of 1970 and 1971 between years of college. Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio) which  I attended between September 1969 and May 1973 expected students with financial aid to earn income during the summers to contribute to their own education.

Unlike the young men described the NPR article, the job I worked on was not out in the open fields, but in greenhouses; the workers lived in their own homes and commuted to work every day, so we did not experience the dreadful living conditions of most fieldworkers. Nonetheless, the work was physically hard, very hot and humid, very low pay and seasonal without any benefits or security.

How I Came to Become a Farm Worker

At the end of my freshman year I was really tired of being cooped up indoors, so when I returned home to California for the summer in May 1970 I decided to inquire about outdoor jobs. San Mateo County on the peninsula just south of San Francisco was a mixture of very urban/suburban and rural farms.  The urban/suburban belt was on the east side of the peninsula along the San Francisco Bay. Up the spine of the peninsula was the low coastal mountain range that in the 1970's was mostly forest and open land, including a large protected areas such as state and county parks and the large Crystal Springs reservoir sitting right on top of the San Andreas fault. The western side of the peninsula facing the Pacific Ocean was in the 1970's mostly agricultural land with a few very small towns. There was vegetable farming (brussel sprouts and pumpkins I remember in particular), but most of the farm land in San Mateo County was devoted to the growing of flowers. The floral industry was a major economic factor in the county. 

I contacted the Cooperative Extension program staff in my county about outdoor jobs, such as working in agriculture. They did not keep any type of systemic clearing house, but the man that I talked to happened to know that a large commercial horticultural company, Yoder Brothers, was hiring summer workers for their greenhouses.  He gave me the number and I put in an application. I was surprised to discover that Yoder Brothers plant was not in the western, agricultural part of the county, but situated right in the middle of Redwood City, the county seat of San Mateo County, surrounded by shops and businesses, and residential areas. 

The manager of the Yoder Brothers plant in Redwood City didn't quite know what to think of me. All of his other workers were Hispanic immigrants, most legal, but some illegal (as I learned later that summer).  Many spoke no English, and only one woman I met there was fluent in English having immigrated as a child. The manager never had anyone who was not from the Hispanic community inquire about employment before. But he was willing to take me on. I think he looked on me as someone to talk to, as his Spanish was limited and his wife who worked in the business was deaf. 

I started work the second week in June 1970 and worked full-time until time to leave for Ohio again at the end of August 1970. Despite the physical demands and discomforts of the job, I liked the people I worked with enough to come back the next summer between sophomore and junior year. 

A Description of the Greenhouses and the Workplace

The Redwood City Yoder Brothers' plant was located off one of the city's major arteries Woodside Road, between two major north/south routes  El Camino Real and the Alameda de las Pulgas. The plant had about 10 large greenhouses made of wood and glass lined up along a central narrow paved road off Woodside Road. Six greenhouses were on the west side of the road into the plant and four were on the east side.  The east side also had a large, blue, metal building near the entrance to the plant that contained the offices, the shipping dock and provided storage for some of the machinery used. 

Most of the greenhouses were about 60 feet wide and 80 to 85 feet deep, front to back, a couple were slightly smaller.  A wide isle perhaps 5 feet ran across the front of each greenhouse and a slightly narrower isle at the very back of the greenhouse.   The greenhouses had from six to eight raised beds running from the front of the greenhouse to its back, a distance of about 70 feet. Each bed was about 3 feet wide and raised about a foot and a half above the ground.  There was a 3 foot isle between each bed. The isles were packed dirt, which could at times become very muddy. 

Insulated pipes ran along the bottom outside of every raised bed that carried hot steam to warm the beds during winter time and chilly, foggy summer nights. Even though the heating pipes were insulated, I had to be careful not bump bare ankles or calves against them in the morning because burns were possible. Water pipes ran overhead about 5 feet above each bed to provide water for the plants. Thermometers dangled from the water pipes in several places around each greenhouse. I was often obsessed with seeing if I could guess what the temperature was and checking my guesses against the thermometer. I got so that I could accurately perceive very small differences in temperature change. An afternoon that was 84 degrees felt different (and more bearable) than one that was 86 degrees. 

Cooling for the greenhouses on sunny days was provided by six huge 5 foot diameter fans across the back of the greenhouse. In front of of each fan was a fiber mat through which cold water trickled continuously; the moving air from the fans was cooled by passing through the mist of water on the mats.  This is a cooling method that works well in dry climates like the California coast. I learned to my dismay many years later that a swamp cooler (smaller version of the greenhouse cooling system) did not work at all well in humid Pennsylvania. 

The outside temperature in Redwood City in the summer could range from the low 40's or 50's 6:30 AM when we arrived for work to high 70's and occasionally low 80's by the late afternoon when we clocked out. Inside the greenhouses, however, steam heat overnight meant that the morning temperatures were always at least in the  mid-60's and then as the sun rose through the day interior temperatures were normally between 80 degrees to 98 degrees with 100% humidity in greenhouses filled with living, productive plants. It would be marginally cooler at the very back of the greenhouse within a few feet of the fans. 

My first summer (1970) at Yoder Brothers I was also taking an evening class in cultural geography at community college in San Mateo. The professor in that class was a big fan of "environmental determinism" and spent some time talking up a book he'd recently read titled Hell is a Hot Place. One particularly hot and difficult day working in the greenhouses I decided that hell was indeed a hot place, but "heaven is the back of the greenhouse". 

The Organization of Work in the Greenhouses

 Work at Yoder Brothers was segregated and assigned by gender. A small crew of six or fewer men operated the machinery that tilled, prepared and sterilized the growing beds. The men were also responsible for the frequent, heavy applications of pesticides and herbicides to the beds and the growing plants (more on this later).  Men also monitored and recorded the temperature multiple times a day in each section of each greenhouse.  They turned on and off the sprinkler systems that watered the plants on a precise schedule, and they monitored and maintained the fans and water mats that were used to cool the greenhouses. About half of the men worked year round, the other half only in the summer months. 

The primary production jobs at Yoder Brothers belonged to women. The number of women varied during the summer months (May to August) from as few as 10 women to as many as thirty women. Less than six of the women were kept on during the winter months. Those women were all documented immigrants and slightly older than the seasonal workers. They had all been working at Yoder Brothers since the previous year, and all of them were still there when I came back again in the summer of 1971. The summer workers were far more transitory and a number were undocumented, only a couple of the summer workers I knew in 1970 came back to work at Yoder Brothers in 1971. One important example was Rosa, who had initially been a seasonal worker but in the autumn (after I'd left for Ohio and college) was hired on permanently. Not only was she there when I returned in 1971 but she had been promoted to greenhouse supervisor.  

The women's jobs involved more physical labor than those of men, but no machinery. The women spent more time in the greenhouses with fewer breaks outside in cooler air compared to the men who came and went from the greenhouses frequently. The men were provided with protective gear, the women were not. All of the women's work was done with bare hands. We could have brought our own gloves, but then we'd lose much of the dexterity we needed for the task and have had to wash the gloves ourselves. It was quicker, easier and cheaper just to wash our hands.  

The fact that we women had constant contact between our skin and the plants meant that we had far more exposure to the pesticides and herbicides that were sprayed on the plants than the men. They may have done the spraying, but they work protective gear, including gloves and respirators, and left the greenhouse as soon as they were finished spraying. The women frequently walked into a greenhouse to begin production work within 15 to 20 minutes of the plants being sprayed. One of the several pesticides used by Yoder Brothers was DDT which was not banned in the United States until 1972, a year after I last worked there.


An aside: In 1972 I purchased a lovely poster for my dorm room, the art was by Teresa Woodward and the poem by Henry Gibson went thus:

I have DDT in me
Inside of me is DDT
If you could see inside of me
Then you would see DDT
(Which is okay, I guess, if you like
to swallow live bugs...)

The women's primary task to cut small shoots from non-blooming chrysanthemum plants for eight hours a day.  If we were lucky the plants we were working with were full grown and we could stand upright to take cuttings. But mostly plants were at various earlier stages of growth and so that one had to lean over slightly to access the plants.  Sometimes we would help each other out with shorter and taller women switching beds so that each of them could work without leaning over. But this was not generally approved of by the management as it was viewed as cutting into our productive time. 

The cuttings all had to be precisely 2 1/2 inches in length measured from the top leaf bud excluding leaf length (see the red arrows on the photo) to the bottom of the cut stem. We each had a small metal plate (no sharp edges) that was the precise length needed and about 1 inch in width. We slipped the first three fingers of our dominant hand (for me the right hand) into an elastic band on the back of the cutter. We placed our fingers with the cutter behind the tip of a small flowerless shoot, lining the top edge up with the tip of the shoot, then closed our thumbs on top of it and flipped our wrist to snap it cleanly off. 

The cuttings went into plastic lined cardboard boxes. Each box was suppose to have exactly 200 cuttings in it. If at the end of a row you could not find exactly 200 healthy appropriately developed cuttings, you were allowed one incomplete box, but it must hold some multiple of fifty: 50,  100, 150. 

The quality control was very exacting. Boxes were inspected by the manager's wife. If you had too many cuttings that were not precisely 2 1/2 inches, or too many boxes that did not have precisely 200 cuttings you were in trouble and if you did not improve quickly you would be let go. Moreover there were quotas for the number of boxes you produced. When I first began I needed to be sure I produced at least six boxes per hour to remain employed, then the expectation rose to eight boxes per hour which was considered the minimum to retain employment. The experienced, year round workers could produce from 10 to 12 boxes per hour. 

The combination of the requirement for precision and production was very stressful at first. There was no time to carefully line up each cut. I had to learn to be able to reach out, grab an appropriate shoot precisely lined up and snap it off all in a single smooth move. Each new cutting would be transferred to my left hand to hold until I had exactly 50, then I would take a moment to walk forward to box stand and put the cuttings in. After a while I got so that I could hold 100 at a time securely but without crushing them because walking back and forth to the box took time away from production. 

At the head of each row or section of a particular type of chrysanthemum was a post with a white plastic bucket filled with 1" x 6" flat wooden stakes. Each stake had the name of the type of chrysanthemum in that row or section printed on it. The stick had a place to write your employee ID (a 4 digit number) and the number of cuttings in the box (preferably 200). When you filled a box, you penciled in the information and slid the stake into slots on the box as a label. Then you dropped your finished box on the ground in the isle. One of the women, usually someone who had trouble making production quotas consistently was given the task of running up and down the isles collecting the boxes and putting them in a rolling cart. When the cart was full, the gatherer would roll the cart from the greenhouse to the office building where they would be inspected and then placed in a large walk in cooler. The gatherer would pick up and empty cart and wheel it back to the greenhouse and begin gathering up filled boxes again. 

At the end of each day hundreds of boxes of cuttings were loaded into refrigerated trucks and taken to other processing facilities and greenhouses where they would be placed in chemical baths to grow roots. These about half of these rootings would then be sold to commercial nurseries to produce hundreds of varieties of mums for gardens, homes, and offices - the rest would be cycled back to greenhouse facilities like ours where they would produce new cuttings. 

At the Yoder Brothers greenhouses in Redwood City the plants were never allowed to flower.  The flowering of chrysanthemums is triggered by the declining length of days (which is why the majority of chrysanthemums are sold and displayed in the late summer and autumn. To prevent any of the plants from flowering growing lights automatically came on before sunset every day and stayed on until past sunrise. The plants were fooled into thinking it was perpetually mid-summer so they never bloomed. 

This was the most frustrating aspect of the job, all that hard work and we never actually saw a chrysanthemum blooming! I wondered then what the bloom of the variety called Fuji Mefo looked like, because the name intrigued me. Today, because of the miracle of Google and the internet, I finally know what the flower looks like. 

This is a good stopping point. Stay tuned for Part 2 of My Brief Life as a Farm Worker! 

A Concerted Cultivation Childhood

Sociologist Annette Lareau developed the concepts of "concerted cultivation" and "the accomplishment of natural growth" as two different patterns of child rearing practiced by different social classes with "concerted cultivation" being the preferred child rearing style of the middle and especially upper middle class parents, and "accomplishment of natural growth" the preferred child rearing style of working and lower class parents.

Although I grew up in a blue-collar, working class neighborhood, where my father, a machinist, was one of the lowest earning workers, both of my parents had come from middle class families. My father was the only one of his siblings who did not go to college (due to his having graduated high school in 1930 just after his family was financially devastated by the stock market crash), and my mother had gone to college and gotten a teaching certificate and spent seven years teaching school before marrying.

The result was that my childhood experiences were highly controlled, scheduled and focused around education (concerted cultivation), while those of my neighborhood peers were unstructured, largely free of supervision and centered around fun (accomplishment of natural growth).  This was most obvious in the summer time.

When school ended each June, my neighborhood friends were usually pushed out of the house each morning by their mothers, who didn't want their children in the way while they were cleaning house and watching soap operas. This was California, in the SF Bay Area, where rain was non-existent in the summer time, so bad weather never forced kids inside during the summer time. The children were left to entertain themselves and only grudgingly allowed back in their houses to use the bathroom, get something to drink or eat, then encouraged back outside.  Every child had a bike, most children had roller skates (the metal kind that clamped on to shoes) and the neighborhood had excellent level, continuous sidewalks on which to ride and skate; games of tag, hide and seek, four square, kickball, catch, and many others spontaneously erupted.  Girls also played jacks, hopscotch, played with dolls outside. Boys had comic books, and some access to tools and wood to build things like skate boards and other small items.

While our friends spent their summers in almost total freedom of unstructured play, our summers were quite different. Our mornings were always organized into some type of educational activity.  My mother's obsessions changed from year to year. One summer she focused on math, and we spent several hours doing math problems. Another summer our lessons focused on learning Spanish. Another year we spent a lot of time reading the Bible and memorizing Psalms. Whatever the focus, two to three hours of every summer morning were organized around some type of learning activity.

Every summer involved substantial time for reading. My mother took us to the public library near us (about 3/4 of a mile away) at least once a week, if not more often. Each of us selected books that we would read ourselves, and my mother selected books that she would read aloud to all of us in the evening - all of the books by P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins and more), Beverly Cleary's books (Beezus, Henry and Ramona, etc.), as well as classics like Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, etc.

Even when we were allotted playtime, we rarely had the same degree of unsupervised freedom as our friends. My mother would recruit the other children to come to our yard and teach everyone games from her childhood. She taught us  Red-light/Green-light, Simon Says, Duck-Duck-Goose, Puss in the Corner,  and many more whose names I've forgotten.

Unlike the other mothers in the neighborhood, my mother had little interest in housekeeping (beyond the necessities of cooking and laundry). Moreover, our household furnishings were old and shabby second had pieces, and we lacked carpeting.  So unlike the other mothers she did not mind having dirty, noisy, children tromping in and out of the house. She encouraged other neighborhood children to play in our yard, and to join us indoors for afternoon for organized arts and crafts activities.

My father was also unlike most of the other fathers when he was at home. He cared little for having the perfect lawn and put little energy into yard work. As a result he did not mind having children digging holes in our yard, or building forts or other things in the yard.  He preferred to spend his time at home in his workshop building things, and liked showing children how to use tools and make things.

My family's relationship to television was different from the other neighborhood children as well. In the other households the television reigned supreme in the evening hours, with both adults and children watching programs during prime time. Our television was almost never on in the evening. My father took classes at the community college through our entire childhood and he was often studying in the evenings. He had little interest in situation comedies or the other staples of 1950's and 1960's TV. My mother on the other hand loved TV and comedies, but in deference to my father did not watch TV in the evenings. Instead she watched TV during the mornings when the popular situation comedies of the day were "stripped" five days a week. Almost all of my familiarity with television in my childhood came from watching with my mother on summer mornings.  When I was really little  we watched things like O Susannah (Gayle Storm), George Burns and Gracie Allen, and George Benny; as I grew older her favorite shows became the Dick Van Dyke show, Bewitched, Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, etc.

As a child I was often envious of my friends and their freedom in the summer.  It was only as an adult that I came to appreciate the was in which my mother shaped our time around learning.

Beautiful, Useful Things

            My father made beautiful, useful things with his hands and his tools. As far back as I can remember he had a well-equipped workshop in the garage which included a 1949 Shopsmith, an amazing multiple purpose woodworking tool that could saw, drill, sand, and best of all be a lathe on which he turned many intricate smooth objects like the posts and spindles on my brothers’ bunk beds, table legs, chair legs, candlesticks, and other decorative but useful items for our home.  I liked spending time with him while he worked, especially when he turned some blocky 4 x 4 post into a smoothly rounded, fluted, curving piece of beauty. I loved the smell of sawdust mingled with oil and the faint burning smell as his chisel cut into the swiftly turning block of wood.  I enjoyed the task of using fine sandpaper to further smooth the objects he turned on his lathe, luxuriating in the feel of the wood.

            After thirty years of knowing my father, I should have realized when I asked him drill 9 holes in a block of wood as a makeshift Chanukkiah* for my first Chanukah that he would not pay attention to my instructions, but instead create something incredibly beautiful that violated all traditional Jewish rules for a Chanukkiah.  A Baptist turned Methodist by marriage, my father knew nothing about my adopted religion. I think he wanted me to know that he supported me as I made this major change in my life, unlike my mother who took my conversion as a rejection of her and my childhood.

            I sent my dad (in California) a sketch of a plain, flat, block of wood with nine holes in a row. A few weeks later, I received (in Kentucky) a large box in return. Carefully wrapped in layers of tissue paper and newspaper was a work of art.

My first discovery was that he had chosen to use some of his precious chestnut wood instead of a scrap as I had suggested. The wood had been scavenged in the late 1970’s from his childhood home in Virginia. In the late 19th century before the blight destroyed most of the American chestnut trees, my grandfather had built the family home with chestnut paneling, stairs, railings, doors, molding, and other adornments.

Within the box was a block of wood, but unlike my sketch it had been carefully laminated in half inch layers of decreasing size, creating a double staircase effect with four steps on each side and a ninth platform at the top.  There were nine holes drilled, one in each step.  However, those holes were not for candles, for in the box, individually wrapped were nine perfect wooden cups, each with a stem to sit in the stair-stepped holes. Each cup had been turned separately on the lathe to perfect smoothness. They were all the same size, same diameter, same depth. The bottom of each cup had been curved like fat brandy snifters.  Each of those little wooden cups had to be turned on the lathe separately; checked and rechecked to make sure they were the same diameter, the same height, the same, length stem, so that when set in the stair-step block they would form a perfectly graduated holder for candles rising on both sides to a point in the middle.  I lifted each cup, turned them in my hands feeling the smoothness of the fine wood grain and placed them in the block one by one.

My father had carefully cut green felt and glued it to the bottom of the main block of wood, so that the bottom of it would not scratch or scar any surface it was place on. Then in the center of the bottom, he had left an opening in the felt, and in it he had burnt the words:  To SUE/from DAD/DEC 1981.

Thirty-seven Chanukahs have come and gone. Sometimes I consider getting a “proper” Chanukkiah. Jewish law and tradition say that all the candles in a Menorah or a Chanukkiah should be at the same height, because no day, and no person is more important than another. Also, Jewish law and tradition call for a new candles every night or a total of 44 candles, so most Chanukkiah are designed for small candles less than ¼ inch in diameter and only about 4 inches high. My father designed his candle holder for regular sized candle tapers - 2/3 of an inch in diameter and eight to ten inches in height. The cost of 44 regular sized candles is getting to be a little prohibitive these days even at Walmart.

But in the end, every year I use this cherished gift from my father. It may not meet the standards of Jewish law, but it is still beautiful and a product of love.

______________

*Most people refer to these as Menorahs. However, a Menorah is a seven branched candle stick used in synagogues and homes on the Sabbath. A Chanukkiah is a nine branched or holed candle holders used only for the eight days of Chanukah.

Bureaucracy and Crying

I was having difficulty sleeping last night, something that seems to occur fairly often to me, and started thinking about something that happened a little over eight years ago.  Here's the story:

            We were getting a new house. I was 60 years old and buying my first new house, taking on my first conventional mortgage. The whole situation was fraught with anxiety from the start. My husband was terrified of taking on a mortgage, but our current house – a thirty-year-old, improperly installed double wide - which we owned outright through a completed land contract, was falling apart. There were gaping holes in the floor covered with a patchwork of boards and other places where the particle board sub-floor was so damp that it sagged in great wallows. The roof leaked in six different places. The stove top and oven had all died, and the dishwasher had never worked. Only one of the two toilets functioned. Renovations were out of the question. So we bought another, new, shiny, double wide manufactured home, to locate on another part of our property from the original falling down double wide trailer. This is important to the story: we were moving into a new house, but it was only 10 feet away from the original at the same 911 street address.

            The new house was delivered two days before Thanksgiving 2010. It took three weeks more weeks before it was properly installed, tied down, underpinned, skirted, with steps and stoops front and back. The next week the plumbing was begun and the electric utility arrived, on exactly the date and time scheduled. The electric utility was a marvel. Our utility company had a centralized office which coordinated all the activity on the job and we had one contact with a single person who managed all aspects of the job – and it was a big job. They had to run a new line from a completely different direction, get right-of-way permissions from other homeowners, have trees cut down, and install a new pole and transformer. Everything worked like clockwork. The electricity was turned on. The house warmed up, the heat pump company came and installed the heat pump. Then with heat in the house the plumbers came back and connected the water line and finished the septic connection. The old house was disconnected and the new house had functioning water and sewage in less than 6 hours. We only had to use the porta-potties twice. It was breathtaking how smoothly everything went, until we got to the telephone service.

            We had a land line from AT&T. Because we live in the mountains with some pretty harsh weather both winter and summer, electrical outages are fairly common. We averaged five to ten power outages a year (varying from an hour to ten days) and not even one land line outage. Phone lines can come down without shorting out, unlike power lines.  I didn’t want to trust our lives to an internet connection for phone. Those mountains also made (and still make) our property a dead-zone for cell phone service.

            I contacted AT&T several weeks in advance of our move. The problem began with that first conversation. I told the person in customer service that we were “moving” from one building to a new building on the same property at the same address. The service rep typed “moving” into the computer and started taking information. That’s when the trouble began. He needed two addresses one for service to be terminated and a second address for new service to be started. No matter how many times I explained it, he couldn’t understand why I didn’t have a different address for the new service. I couldn’t just ask for a stop/restart, because work crews were going to have to come out and string entirely new line in a different direction for the new house. The service rep’s bright idea was to use our current address 136 and then change it by 1 number making it 135. The computer would accept that when it wouldn’t accept the same number. Then it turned out that the earliest that we could get this service change would be January 21, almost a month after we moved into the new house.

            On our own we came up with a brilliant solution for that month. The houses were so close together that we bought new wireless phones, plugged the based phone into the still working old house phone lines, and set up the wireless extensions inside the new house. It worked like a charm, until January 21^st when AT&T cut off the old service, but no one showed up to hook up the new service. They’d told us the guy would be there in a window between 8 AM and 5 PM (you know how that goes). I took off work, on a bitter cold day with snow and ice on the ground to wait for the truck to show up. It didn’t. The next day, during customer service hours, I drove two miles from my home where I have no cell service and sat in the car to call AT&T. They could not explain why we had not received a service visit, but rescheduled one for the next week. The next scheduled visit came and went without anyone showing up. The next day, I needed to call customer service but it was 10 degrees above zero Fahrenheit and with two feet of snow on the ground. I wasn’t going anywhere in my car. I walked around outside and finally found a spot where I could get 2 bars on my cell phone it was in the middle of snow covered road where I, bundled up three or four layers with hats and gloves and scarves, dialed customer service. 

            If you’re not an AT&T customer or have never called their customer service, you probably don’t know that AT&T has dozens of customer call centers in widely separated geographic locations. Every time you place a call you end up with another call center and another customer service agent. It is never possible to call back to someone you’ve talked to before. Each time you call you have to explain the entire story from the beginning all over again. On that day, I talked to six different customer service agents in at least five different call centers. I would explain my story and get put on hold and then after holding for 10 to 20 null the phone would go dead. They kept asking me for a number for a call back later that day or the next day. And I would explain once again, that I had no phone at which they could call me back, because I had no phone service in my home, and my cell phone only worked in the middle of the road, and I was not going to sit outside in 10 degree weather on the off chance that someone might call me back in a few hours or “sometime tomorrow.”

On the fifth call I was in the middle of a call out there in the road in 10 null weather, with someone who actually seemed to be sympathetic and helpful, and I slipped on the ice, fell in a snow bank, losing hold of the cell phone in a snow bank. By the time I recovered it the connection was gone. With my hands increasingly numb I dialed the service number again. Of course, I got yet another call center and another service rep, and had to begin my explanation all over again.  She too wanted to know if she could “check into it and call you back later today.”  At that point, 3 PM with the sun and the temperature dropping, having been without phone service for 10 days, I began weeping hysterically. I sobbed uncontrollably. Suddenly, the service rep entire manner changed, and she immediately transferred me to some supervisory person, who stayed on the phone and talked me down from my hysteria until I was able to able to choke out my story one more time with some degree of coherence. 

        This supervisor, without putting me on hold, contacted to work crews in my area.  She was able to ascertain that 99% of the problem was that the address of 135 (that the initial pencil pusher put in the system) was “not a legitimate 911 address”. The supervisor then directly linked me to the field workers so that I could give them directions to my home, and guaranteed that they would be there within the hour (they were there in 50 minutes) and that I would have telephone service before the day was over. Over a period of 10 days, I had talked reasonably, clearly, and respectfully to at least 8 different customer service agents. None of whom had been able to tell me why we weren’t getting the scheduled service visits, none of whom was able to solve my problem. But with one totally unplanned, spontaneous, break down into hysteria and tears got me hooked up with someone who had all my telephone problems solved within 8 hours.

            The workmen who showed up at 4:00 PM as twilight was falling, who had to climb poles and crawl under my house in temperatures hovering just above zero degrees Fahrenheit, were not at all happy about the situation.  They grumbled a lot, but they got the job done. 

            There was one really odd note in the evening. Not long after it got dark, one of the workmen came to the door to ask me if I knew whether my neighbor’s “German shepherd dog” was friendly or not. He said the dog was sitting up on the hillside and staring at them, and it made them nervous. I told him that he must be mistaken. No one in our neighborhood had a German shepherd. One neighbor had an old coon hound that spent a lot of time in the hills above our house, and another had a black lab, but there were no German shepherds. I told him all the neighborhood dogs were friendly. He did not seem to be fully reassured but went back to work, and nothing more was said about the dog. They finished the work and left about 11 PM that night. It was two or three days later that I realized that the unfriendly “dog” they had seen on the hill was probably a coyote because quite a number of coyotes live on the old strip jobs in the hills above us. They come down into the neighborhoods looking for stray cats and other small animals to kill for food. I was really glad that they had not realized they were being scrutinized by a coyote! 

I am still astounded by how quickly I got service and assistance after my breakdown into tears and hysteria. Why couldn't I have gotten that kind of service long before things things reached such a state?

The All But Not Quite Most

I  have been a college teacher for 36 years. It has, for the most part, been a very rewarding career. Seeing the faces of students when they "get" something is the biggest "high" in life. Continuing interaction with students in and out of the classroom is very gratifying. Some of my students even became life-long friends. As rewarding as the experience has always been I have still hankered after some formal recognition. I occasionally wished that at least once I could receive a teaching award.  Every college I've worked at has given teaching or faculty awards, and every few years I'd think it would be nice to receive one.  About six months ago, I finally made peace with the idea that I was never going to get a plaque or a certificate and that the only teaching reward I really needed was the intrinsic  positive value that comes from making a true connection with a student. 

Then suddenly a month ago I got an e-mail telling me that my college president wanted to nominate me for a prestigious, state-wide teaching award, one that came with not only a plaque but a significant size check. The downside was that there was a lot of work to be done on the applications - two different essays to write and a detailed accounting of everything I'd done for the past 20 years to demonstrate my commitment to teaching and to life-long learning. I was thrilled just to be nominated. It didn't matter than I was going to be one of a dozen nominees. Just to know that my own college administration acknowledged my contributions was enough. It took me six days to pull together all the materials for the nomination, but once I did, I set the entire matter aside and did not think of it; being nominated was more than enough. 

A couple of weeks later, out of the blue, I receive an e-mail from my college dean issuing me congratulations on winning the teaching award.  Not only did he send these congratulations to me, but he copied them to every single person in our entire five campus college organization.  His congratulations incorporated an entire e-mail conversation from the community college system office and the leadership from other colleges.  As I read over the previous e-mails, it seemed to me that my dean was incorrect, that I had merely been chosen as the community college system's nominee to be forwarded to the state-wide selection committee, not an actual winner of the award. 

I sent some queries back up the hierarchy, wondering if perhaps I was merely a nominee rather than a winner. What I got back restated that I was the "winner" of the award.  I still didn't trust this fully, as the information I had received about the award said in several places that one requirement of a "winner" was to be physically present at the awards ceremony in September, which suggested that the final decision was not announced until that ceremony.  But over the next ten days I was barraged with congratulatory messages from colleagues who had received the initial e-mail. I slowly began to think of myself as a "winner" rather than a nominee - a shift in expectations - and even began to think about ways that we could use the prize money. 

I was still cautious enough not to accept an invitation to do an interview about the award. I explained to the reporter that the award was not official, and that I was uncomfortable doing publicity until I was officially notified. I copied my e-mail to the reporter to the chair of the selection committee in hopes that I might get some clarification of the time table. 

The word I got back was that my caution was warranted. I was indeed a "nominee" for the award - I was my community college system's top nominee, but they were required to send three names to the state organization making the final selection.  So I carefully began to dial back my expectations. By the time that the final decision was made, selecting the third ranked nominee because she taught in a "technical" field, I no longer expected to win. But I was still having to deal with dozens of congratulations from work colleagues as the misinformation of the original announcement spread after the semester started. 

In my personal life catalog 2015 will go down as the year that I almost, maybe, not quite, did not win the teaching award that I had craved for my entire career.