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. 

Working in Aviation: Cherry Tree Aviation

 

Writing about my experiences flying on company passes and about the role of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in commercial aviation, gets me thinking about the eight months I spent working for a fixed based operator (FBO) at San Carlos Airport in California. I was a recent college graduate with a BA in sociology. My plans for graduate school had fallen through at the last minute because there was a recession and funding had been cut for the program I had been accepted into. My only option was to come home to my parents and start looking for work. 

Not one of my college professors had ever talked about the kinds of work that a degree in sociology might support. If they talked about anything it was graduate school, and at the time I didn't consider graduate school in sociology to be an option. Years later I learned about all kinds of jobs in local, state and federal government that welcomed folks with sociology degrees. But at the time, in 1973, I only knew to look for businesses. Luckily I had strong typing skills, so I went looking for jobs that would use that skill. 

Something that younger people don't realize is that in 1973, almost all jobs advertised in local papers were categorized by gender. There were two separate columns - jobs for hire male, and jobs for hire female. Rules were rigid and a young woman could not just go after jobs advertised for males. I was dogged, every day for two weeks, I got up, opened up the morning paper, circled all the jobs I thought I might possibly qualify for, then got in the car and drove to each and every location. Some required a call ahead and an appointment, but most one could just show up and fill out the employment form. Most employers gave you a typing test (which I aced), and many also gave a general knowledge test (which I also aced), but in the end, almost all of them hired a young woman with formal secretarial training over the young woman with a BA in sociology. In those two weeks I applied for at least 60 jobs. 

At the end of the first week, one of the places that I interviewed was a small aviation company called Cherry Tree Aviation at the San Carlos airport about 10 minute freeway drive from my parents home. The president, John Pritchard, of the company which was very small, interviewed me and liked me. He was particularly interested in the fact that I'd gone to Oberlin College. He had spent more than a decade working for the FAA at the big tracking station just outside Oberlin and knew the community and the college well. But in the end he told me they decided to go with a young lady who had formal secretarial training. And I went on to another week of job hunting.

 The second week did not provide any job offers either. I was not too discouraged, but rather, more determined than ever to start looking anew the next week. But that Saturday, I got an unexpected call from Mr. Pritchard. He said that the young woman they had hired had not worked out and was I still interested in working for Cherry Tree, if so I should come to work at 8 am on Monday. He told me on the phone that I might not have formal secretarial training, but he knew Oberlin College and if I was an Oberlin graduate than I ought to be able to learn anything I needed on the job. 

So the third Monday in June 1973, I started working at Cherry Tree Aviation. A fixed base operator was the workhorse of general aviation in those days. Cherry Tree Aviation did multiple things in the field of aviation.  First, the company had two pilots and two planes that could be chartered for a wide range of purposes. Second, they owned hangars that could be rented by individual plane owners to keep their planes, and they owned tie-down spaces (places outside to keep a private plane). Third, they had a professional mechanic who maintained their own planes but who could also do work for private individuals with planes. The mechanic was allocated a large hangar for maintenance use. Fourth, they rented space to even smaller, specialized aviation businesses: a parachute jump and skydiving school, a small flight instruction school (who had one plane and two instructors), and a two person helicopter company that did charter work. Fifth, they operated aviation fuel tanks and fuel trucks that scouted the field constantly looking for visiting planes to fuel. Sixth, Cherry Tree entered into a partnership with a man who sold planes, both new ones for Piper Aircraft and used planes. 

Technically I was hired to work for the aircraft salesman, a man who went by the name "Tom" Sawyer. That actually should have been a hint about the man's character. I was to be his secretary, do all of his correspondence, answer his phone, etc. I had a desk in the central  office area, where everyone gathered for coffee and conversation, and the other secretary for the company answer phones. As it turned out, there being a recession going on, plane sales were almost non-existent, and so I got called upon to do lots of other things for anyone who needed something done. Mr. Pritchard would ask me to help him come up with advertising campaigns, and have me work on promotional materials. The pilots would ask me to do paper work for them. Even then I often ran out of things to do. So I started volunteering to do things like learning how to move the planes around and to wash them. I would bring clothes to change into for that, from my "office dress". 

It was the kind of business where one could go many days in a row without anything much happening, and then something would happen and we'd have multiple requests for charter work. Much of the charter work we did would come without any warning. For example, we did charter ambulance flights for the military. It took me a long time to understand what was going on. This was still during the Vietnam War years, and it was not at all uncommon for young men who were tired of serving to go AWOL and run off into the rural areas of California. Then something would happen to them, they'd break a leg, or get sick, or get in an accident, and suddenly local law enforcement or hospitals would notify the military that they had an AWOL soldier or sailor in their jurisdiction. The military would hire us to go get their wayward men. Depending upon the severity of the illness or injury a nurse or maybe even two nurses would have to be hired for the flight from the local nurses registry. There would be a sudden flurry of phone calls and arrangements to be made and the main secretary would need my help to handle all of it. 

After I'd been with Cherry Tree for about six months, the Navy called us with a job to retrieve a man in a full-body cast (he'd had a motorcycle accident) from Chico. We were given several days to plan for this, and it was going to be on a Saturday, so the pilot asked me if I'd like to ride "shot-gun" with him, get to go flying on a beautiful day. It was a gorgeous day, the sky was so blue and it went on forever, there were no clouds anywhere and you could see great distances, that thing that pilots call CAVU (ceiling and visibility unlimited). I actually got a chance to fly the plane for a while, and do some simple slow banks and turns. It was an amazing day. We picked up the man and a nurse at Chico and came home. The man was quiet and said almost nothing. When the flight was over, and the man had been placed into a Navy ambulance and taken away, the pilot reached under the seat I'd been sitting in and pulled out a pistol. It turned out I actually was riding "shotgun" so to speak. He explained that while they had never had a problem, these men were in fact fugitives and might fight to get away. The only reason that he had decided it was safe to bring me, rather than the other pilot who was also former military and trained with firearms was that they knew the man was in a full-body cast and could barely move. 

Another kind of charter flight that we often did was for news organizations, TV stations and newspapers when there was breaking news and the reporters wanted to get there quickly. These also were things that often happened with little warning and involved an all hands on deck response. During my time at Cherry Tree Aviation there were several earthquakes in nearby parts of northern California, for which TV camera crews were eager to get footage. One time when the task of talking to the news departments and scheduling flights for crews, I made a rookie error. I put the camera crews from two competing network affiliates in one plane. No news center wants their aerial footage to be from exactly the same angle as that of their competitors it would seem. 

Not only was there a recession happening, but in October of 1973 an event occurred that rocked the small aviation industry, as well as many other industries that relied on oil from the middle east. On October 6, 1973 (the war started on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur and also was in the middle of the holiest month of the Muslim world Ramadan)  an alliance of Arab nations lead by Egypt and Syria made a surprise attack on Israel. The war lasted until a truce was called on October 25, 1973. One of the many consequences of this war was an embargo by Arab oil producing states against the U.S. and other nations that had supported Israel in the conflict. The oil embargo went into effect almost immediately. Supply of aviation fuel was dramatically cut and prices skyrocketed. Aviation fuel sales had been a major portion of Cherry Tree Aviations revenue. Suddenly, the company only had enough fuel for their own planes, and none to sell. Not only did they need to stop selling fuel, they needed to sell their fuel trucks and lay-off all the young women who worked the fuel trucks. 

A little side note here: selling aviation fuel at a small airport is a very competitive business, at least two other fixed base operators at the very small San Carlos field also had fuel trucks running around the field trying to sell fuel. John Pritchard had very effective, if highly sexist idea. All the other operators hired young men to run their trucks. Cherry Tree Aviation not only hired attractive young women (college age or just out of college), they also outfitted them in bright blue hotpants (the term in 1970s for tight, very short shorts). It worked, until there was no more fuel to sell. 

The oil embargo affected the companies income in multiple ways - including the cost of heating the building.  The decision was made to lay off not only the young women who ran the fuel trucks, but also several of the other workers deemed non-essential, that included the young man who had done all the janitorial work (which was picked up by all of us who were left), the accountant, and the young woman who was the main secretary (who had been there for months before me). Pritchard justified laying her off, instead of me, by pointing out that I was really Tom Sawyer's employee, not Cherry Tree's, but it was really because he had come to find me a far more useful, flexible and interested employee. Moreover, he knew I'd do things like wash planes and get dirty, and the original secretary wouldn't do anything outside the office. I was also paid less, minimum wage, which was $1.80 an hour at that time. Note that the President took a salary only equivalent to $2 an hour for 40 hours a week, despite all the work he did outside those hours. Only the pilots and the mechanic were paid more, because the company couldn't operate without them. I know what folks were paid, because my new chores included doing the books and the payroll. 

My job became more and more interesting, and more and more varied. Mr. Pritchard would often sit down with me or call me into his office to talk about the business and the problems that it faced. He talked a lot about the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). It was almost impossible for a small FBO to land a contract with the CAB for a regular "route" between two locations. Mr. Pritchard wanted Cherry Tree to start regular service between San Carlos and Reno, to take gamblers every weekend. We could do charter flights for people to anywhere, but the real money came from having regular flights, where one could fill all the seats and charge less per person. The big airlines also chaffed at the control of the CAB. The CAB limited the number of airlines and the number of transcontinental routes. Any large airline that was awarded one of the plumb transcontinental routes (like SFO to NYC or LAX to NYC) was also required to serve a number of smaller markets that often lost them money. The CAB guaranteed that every community that had an airport that could handle large planes would be served by the large airlines, even if they did so through subsidiary, regional, commuter airlines.  No city would get left behind, even if they weren't a money making market for the big airlines. But smaller air companies, like Cherry Tree, didn't get a chance at tackling those smaller markets either. 

Mr. Pritchard felt that the solution to Cherry Tree's problems was to be bought out by a somewhat larger aviation corporation. By December 1973, Mr. Pritchard had found a buy, and we became a subsidiary of a larger company. Now added to my work was writing reports of income and expenditures, activities and services and sending them daily to the "head" office. They took over accounting functions like issuing paychecks, all I did was report everyone's hours and the pilots' flight hours. I still had all my other responsibilities, manning the phones, scheduling charters, finding nurses for the ambulance flights, moving planes, washing planes, and being Mr. Pritchard's sounding board. 

I haven't said much about the man I officially worked for, "Tom" Sawyer. He was a slick operator, who craved to be much richer than he was. But he had not been very successful as a plane salesman, not for lack of trying, but simply because the market just wasn't there. Shortly before Christmas 1973, about the time that Cherry Tree was being taken over by the larger company. We became aware that Tom who had been a cosigner on the company checks, had cashed a couple of large checks (several thousand dollars each) with only his signature on them (not legal) and one of them had bounced. This was brought to our attention by the San Mateo County Sheriff who had come to arrest him for writing a bad check. Tom was not in the office that day, and none of us knew where he was. While the Sheriff was standing there talking with people, the phone rang and I answered it and it was someone from Pan American Airlines wanting to talk to Mr. Sawyer to tell him that his flight to South Korea was going to be delayed by several hours. We were able to ascertain that Tom was at the airport already waiting for his flight, so I gave the Sheriff all the information, flight number, gate number and the Sheriff talked to the airline agent to see if they could locate and keep an eye on him. Then off the Sheriff went to arrest Tom. I do not know how the story ended, other than Tom Sawyer was no longer associated with Cherry Tree Aviation after that day. 

Unfortunately, the sale of Cherry Tree Aviation to the larger company did not really help its bottom line. By Valentine's Day 1974, the decision was made to close the business down, and I lost my first post college job. Luckily I met a lot of people, who kept their planes in our hangers or used our charter services, through working there. One of them owned a small manufacturing company, Sanderson Racing Headers (which does still exist!) and needed a new bookkeeper. His current bookkeeper was pregnant and would be leaving the job before her baby was born. So I got signed up to work for Sanderson, before my job at Cherry Tree Aviation ended. 

Couple of little add-ons:  

One of the people who hangered his plane with us was a man named Stephen Bechtel, who drove the most beautiful Lamborghini (with a personalized license plate that said  STEEL) which he left in the hangar while he was out flying. I was in love with that Lamborghini. I didn't know until many years later who he actually was and all the things, many of them reprehensible for which Bechtel Corporation was responsible.

Cherry Tree Aviation rented space to a two person helicopter company called Golden Gate Helicopters. The company consisted of the owner/pilot and his secretary/assistant who could also fly. They did a lot of television and movie work, including work for the very popular show The Streets of San Francisco staring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, both of whom I got to meet on a couple of occasions when they came down to fly out of San Carlos with the chopper. For one episode The Streets of San Francisco even chartered one of Cherry Trees Planes to be the "bad guy escaping" so the whole camera crew, etc. were at San Carlos Airport for that. 

How grooming for motherhood backfired

 

My mother Josie was the fourth of six children. She had two younger brothers, but she never had the opportunity to help with their care. First, her mother (my grandmother Lillian) was not well most of her childhood and she had little patience with supervising a child caring for another child. The family was solidly middle class and hired in home help with cooking, cleaning and child care. The help, as was true of many middle class southern families, was black women, who left their own children at home, to care for the children of white women. Second, my grandmother Lillian died, probably due to complications of childbirth within two days of giving birth to her last child.  

The baby, Thomas, was immediately adopted (officially) by one of my grandfather’s brothers. He and his wife were childless. Meanwhile my mother, just short of her eighth birthday when her mother died, was quickly farmed out to live (not officially adopted) with her aunt Sue whose farm adjoined her fathers. Aunt Sue already had three children older than Josie. As a result, my mother never had any experience with babies and small children.

Josie’s lack of experience with babies and children, left her unprepared for motherhood. She was absolutely terrified to bring me, her first child home from the hospital. She spoke of this fear she had several times to me when I reached adulthood. I’ve also found letters and diaries that she wrote at the time, the speak of the overwhelming fear of making a mistake that she experienced. Consequently, Josie decided that I, her daughter would learn about babies and small children and how to take care of them while I was young. Something that she told me explicitly when I was middle aged. Oddly enough, however, she did not do that by expecting me to share in the care-taking of my two younger brothers.

While I did not know her reasons at the time, Josie’s approach to teaching me how to care for babies and children, was to start me in the babysitting business when I was 10 years old. She essentially began grooming me for motherhood. My first job, completely arranged by my mother, was with the family next door to us. They had recently moved in and were composed of a young couple in their early twenties and a baby under 6 months of age. The couple went out to dinner or a movie, not sure which, and were gone for at most two hours. I stayed in their home with their baby sleeping in his/her (?) crib.  I remember the awesome sense of responsibility I felt for this tiny thing in the white crib. But I otherwise remember very little about it. I don’t remember if I had any trouble, if I had to call my mother, or if everything went smoothly. I do remember how nice it felt to be given a crisp dollar bill (fifty cents an hour was my fee).

My mother arranged a few more jobs for me, taking care of babies, in homes that were within view and earshot of our house – one of the advantages of growing up in a new suburb during the baby boom, lots of work for babysitters nearby. By the time I was 13, however, I was managing my own work. I was a popular babysitter, mostly for older children (2 to 8) because I liked playing games, singing songs, and watching kids TV with them. I began to work for families that lived several miles away (where either my dad or one of the parents would provide transportation before I got my license). I liked being with children. I liked the money I earned (officially still fifty cents and hour, but regular families often added a little extra). But most of all I loved being able to stay up late on weekends, and watch late night TV and late-night movies.  This was not allowed at home. At home we went to bed at 9, and the TV was never on in the evening.

In High School babysitting was a doorway to adult life, to money of my own, to being up late, to watching adult shows. While I liked children and enjoyed playing with them, that was secondary to the pay and independence babysitting afforded me as a teenager.

Continuing babysitting was not something that I had thought consciously about when I went away to college. However, when the directors of my dormitory turned out to be a young couple with an intelligent and interesting five-year-old, I volunteered to babysit. The dorm directors also had friends living within walking distance of the dorm that had small children and would refer me as a babysitter.

One family (let’s call them Goodfolks) in particular became regulars. Babysitting for the Goodfolks over the next four years offered me something that was the opposite of what I had found in babysitting as a teenager. They offered me a warm and welcoming family life and a respite from the “adulting” of college. I became part of the Goodfolks family, a bond that continued at least 15 years after I graduated. I would come back and visit them many times over the years as a family member rather than an employee.

I also continued babysitting as a source of extra income in college, and although I continued to state my fee as 50 cents an hour, the majority of families simply paid me a flat five or ten dollars per session depending upon the amount of work involved (more for cooking meals, getting kids off to school etc, less if I was just watching TV while the kids slept).

Then one summer I got a job as an au pair.  Another student who had worked for a wealthy family through an agency was asked by the family to find someone to work for them (they did not want to go through the agency again – I should have taken that as the red flag it was). She knew I did a lot of babysitting and recommended me. The family like my phone interview, and they liked my references. For ten weeks, I got an insiders view of the domestic life of the corporate elite. I spent most of my time in bucolic Greenwich, Connecticut. An easy train ride to NYC and art museums, although I only got two chances to go as my “day and a half” off, wasn't always honored (remember the red flag). The family also took me with them on vacation to Maine, and I have longed for the coast of Maine ever since.

Somewhere along the line, in college spending so much time with young families and their children drastically changed my own personal views about having children. It wasn’t that I came to dislike children, quite the contrary. But I came to be more and more cognizant of how hard it was to raise children in the modern world, and to balance family and career. I saw this playing out in the families for whom I worked. I began to question whether or not I wanted children of my own.

I made the mistake of bringing this up once with my mother while visiting during a holiday. That’s when I began to learn about how getting me started in babysitting had been her plan to groom me for motherhood. Now I was telling her that my experience made me question whether I wanted motherhood at all.

My babysitting experiences in graduate school expanded my doubts. In graduate school, I had a half dozen friends who were divorced, working (or grad student) mothers.  As a friend, I would look after their daughters (they all had daughters), to give them a break. Sometimes they paid me, sometimes they just fed me, sometimes I fed them. These weren’t jobs, they were expressions of solidarity among friends. They were also a telling insight what life as a single female parent was like, and how none of these women had gone into parenting with the expectation of becoming a single parent. 

Between all the years of experience with scores of children between 1 and 10, and multiple courses in development psychology and family sociology, I became quite the expert on childhood development and child behavior. I developed the confidence and knowledge that my mother had hoped for, but I also developed a healthy skepticism about my ability (and desire) to be a parent. My career seemed more rewarding. Some times too much knowledge is an impediment.

My first husband wanted children. His family was large and loving and very supportive. So we tried. But as fate would have it. I couldn’t get pregnant. The marriage ended within a couple of years before alternatives such as fertility treatments or adoption even became something to discuss. Had I gotten pregnant easily, then I would have become a parent, but I did not. I suspect that I would not have wanted to put in any extra effort to become a parent, even if the marriage had lasted. By the time I met my present husband I was already experiencing menopause, and he was not interested in having children.

Sometimes I think about my mother who passed away more than a decade ago, never having any grandchildren.  She was so anxious for grandchildren that she began grooming me at age 10 with babysitting jobs, but she never did anything to prepare my brothers for parenthood. None of us had children.

Getting Work Done is Hard These Days

The pump in our dishwasher died weeks before we realized what happened, what alerted me finally was noticing white hard water stains on the kickboards of our cabinets, where small, but daily overflows had been soaking in. Once we realized it on February 4th, we turned off the water and power to it and began hand washing. 

We had the plumbers come to diagnose whether we had leaky pipes or leaky dishwasher, and they verified our suspicion that the pump had failed.  I did some research on-line, decided on some highly recommended models and we went that weekend (February 12th) to Lowe’s to buy a new one. 

We did not realize the extent to which the pandemic had changed the way Lowe’s operated. We’ve bought appliances there before (most recently a new stove in 2021), where within a day or two a Lowe’s truck and Lowe’s employees would show up to install the purchased item, for little or no additional cost. Now Lowe’s contracts with a 3rd party installation company (which turns out to not be an installation company but a company that then hires 4th party local businesses/workers to do the actual installation). 

It was a week before we heard from the installation company, and then another two weeks before they could come and make the measurements (why they had to do this and could not trust us on the measurements I don’t know).  The (4th party) installer (a nice feller) told us for the installation contract (and payment), which Lowe's never did.  So I called them and discovered that because of an illness/accident the young man who sold us the dishwasher was out on leave, and no one really knew what was going on with our order.  It took 24 hours to find someone who could get access to all the documents and write up our installation contract, which added another $150 on to the original cost of the appliance (only 15% of the original cost but still unexpected). 

We had to wait again for the installment company to contact us with an appointment to actually install.  The first appointment we were given was March 15 (at this point we had been without a dishwasher since February 4). The day they were suppose to show up we got a call to reschedule, because the local (4th party) installer had one truck and it was broken, so they rescheduled for today March 21. 

First thing this morning the young man who was suppose to do the install called us from Lowe’s to tell us that the store had somehow misplaced/sold/lost/never gotten (??) our dishwasher and he had nothing to bring to install. He said the appliance department at Lowe’s would reorder the dishwasher and let him know when it came in and then we would get another appointment to install. 

This afternoon, someone from Lowe's installation department called us.  Now this is one of the things that really annoys me in all this. Lowe's has a department called "Installations" but they don't actually DO installations any more. They just contract with 3rd parties to do them. I realize that this has to do with protecting their workers from COVID or other things, and that it does provide jobs for small local businesses. But, often those small local businesses are overwhelmed with more than they can handle, and they don't get all the money paid by people, because Lowe's takes their cut first. And workers in small businesses don't have the same benefits or rights or opportunities that Lowe's workers do. 

The Lowe's installation department worker was very apologetic and promised to provide us with information within two business days about what happened to our dishwasher and when they would get one for us. But, in all likelihood, given how busy the  (4th party) installer is, things will be pushed at least two more weeks! Which means that we might end up with them wanting to install the same week that my husband has surgery. 

There was no ill intent or willful stalling involved here. Some of the problems arose because a key worker got ill, or a key piece of equipment (truck) broke down. These are things that happen. What is problematic is that current business practices involve skimping on redundancy in labor and equipment, there are few if any backstops. Ground between the demand by stockholders/owners for more profit and the demands of consumers for cheaper goods and services, the costs of doing business are pared to the quick. So it is not surprising that it takes one persons illness or one truck breaking down, to cause the hold structure to come to a stand still.

My brief life as a farm worker Part 3

What was most important to me about working at Yoder Brothers during the summers of 1970 and 1971 was my fellow workers. It is also the hardest thing to write about. One reason for that is that 50 years later I recognize how self-absorbed I was at 19 and as a result I did not learn very much about the women with whom I worked, nor did I do much to keep in touch with them when I went back to college. Yet those women touched my life and my ways of thinking much more deeply than I realized at the time. It was their fellowship that brought me back to the job for a second summer, not the $1.30 that we earned per hour.  

This is something I haven’t mentioned yet. Minimum wage in 1970 was $1.65.  At college working as a waitress and in the cafeteria, I earned federal minimum wage.  I knew what it was. When I applied for the job, I was told we’d be paid minimum wage; when the first paycheck came, I was flabbergasted. We were being paid $1.30 an hour. My first thought was that this was illegal, that they were taking advantage of the fact that most of the workers were immigrants who only spoke Spanish and could not really advocate for themselves. I called the same Cooperative Extension agent that had told me about the job in the first place, and he explained reality to me. There was a separate, lower, minimum wage that applied to farm workers.  Therefore $1.30 was completely legal, but my view that it was exploitive and taking advantage of immigrant workers was also true.  I learned later that the men who worked there earned $1.65 because they had more options as to jobs and would have left to work somewhere else if paid less than non-farm minimum wage.

The First Summer

 When I started work there in June 1970 all of the other women who worked there were Hispanic in that they were all native Spanish speakers – despite significant differences in dialect. They came from several countries. The largest number were from Mexico, but there were women from both Central America and South America, the four countries that I am sure about are Guatemala, El Salvador, Columbia, and Peru. All but one of the women had come to the United States as either teens or adults. That one woman, Conchita, had come to the U.S. as a very small child with her parents and had attended school entirely in the U.S. While she had grown up speaking Spanish at home with her parents, she was truly bi-lingual and spoke unaccented, colloquial English like anyone person who went to school here.

Connie as she was called, was my life-line in the beginning, helping me get up-to-speed in my Spanish. Like most kids growing up in California in the 1950's and 1960's I learned some Spanish vocabulary in grade school, and by middle school was taking formal classes in Spanish every year.  I studied Spanish in school for 4 and a half years (middle school, high school, and a semester in college) and earned mostly A's (except in college) but really wasn't fluent until working at Yoder Brothers. Connie helped me with the work specific vocabulary, that hadn’t been covered in my classes. She also helped ease me into the social network by inviting me to her home for dinner twice, where I got to meet her mother, husband, and six-year-old son – and have my first truly authentic Mexican cuisine! Yoder Brothers was a temporary stop for Connie who with a high school diploma and other skills soon found a less physical office job somewhere else.

It was harder to be part of the group after Connie left since everyone else spoke only Spanish, but nothing teaches a language faster than necessity and total emersion. I soon made my best friend at Yoder Brothers, Gloria. Gloria had come to the U.S. because her brother suffered from a congenital illness than could at that time only be treated properly in the U.S. Like the vast majority of immigrants, she had not really understood how difficult it would be for her to find skilled work like she had in Mexico, especially lacking English language skills. She was having difficulty saving up enough money to bring her brother to the U.S. working as a field hand.

Gloria was breathtakingly beautiful. She looked like the fairy tale description of snow white: ivory pale skin, ruby lips, shining dark hair. One of the things that I was quick to observe at Yoder Brothers was that “Hispanic” covers a very wide range of racial and ethnic groups. Gloria looked like she would have been at home on the streets of Madrid. By comparison the oldest, most senior worker at the plant, Irene from Peru had the deep bronze skin and high cheekbones that we Americans associate with native Americans. The rest of the women ranged somewhere in between those two poles, representing a wide mix of indigenous people and European invaders.

In many of their home countries these differences in racial and ethnic heritage mattered a great deal, social status and opportunity varied based on a person’s degree of European heritage. Here in the United States those differences were largely obliterated; from the point of view of the larger society and employers they were all Hispanic immigrants, they could not speak English, and they were vulnerable to deportation, even documented immigrants though the undocumented were especially so. Here tenure in the U.S. and knowledge of how the system worked were the primary forms of status, not racial and ethnic differences within the group.

Sitting and talking with Gloria before work, at lunch, and after work really pushed my Spanish fluency. Unlike the other women whose conversations revolved around their families or their relationships, food and clothing, Gloria wanted to talk about music, politics, and religion or perhaps more properly about beliefs. She wanted to tell me about her life in Mexico and her family and learn about my life and my family. We explored our similarities and differences and we taught each other songs.  I can only remember one of the many songs she taught me, because I have sung it often over the years to cheer myself up.

Ven a contar conmigo,

Si tristes estas.

Cuando te sientes deprimido

Ven a contar conmigo

Y el sol saldra.  

Translation: Come sing with me if you are sad. When you are feeling depressed sing with me and the sun will come out.

One of the funniest things that happened to me that first summer was due to an odd lacuna in my Spanish vocabulary. Gloria lived in an apartment with Bonita another one of the Yoder Brothers workers, about a mile and a half from the Yoder Brothers plant.  It was walkable, there were sidewalks the entire distance. But there was heavy traffic and in the summer it was hot. So early on, I suggested that I at least give them a ride home at the end of the day.  It was on my way and not at all inconvenient.  Our first ride was quite comical.  Neither Gloria nor Bonita knew the name of the major cross street where I would need to turn, so I told them to let me know before we reached the intersection. So I’m driving along, and the first major intersection is coming up so I ask izquierda [left] or derecha [right],  they replied “derecho” which I took to mean I should turn right, so I started to signal and make the turn and they started yelling “no, no, no” and pointing straight ahead.  We went through this two more times. Finally, I stopped the car and looked at them and gestured to the left saying “izquierda?” they nodded, then I gestured right and said “derecha?” they nodded. Then they pointed straight ahead and said “derecho!” In all my years of studying Spanish I had learned left and right, but I had never learned that “straight ahead” is derecho.  For days afterwards this was the subject of much discussion and laugher at lunch time.

In addition to providing Gloria and Bonita rides every day, I several times invited them to come to my parents’ house (where I lived) for meals, providing transportation to and from. At least once they both came, but two other times only Gloria came. They would invite me to eat with them, and I would accept their hospitality as to do otherwise would have been rude and insulting, but I would try to eat very little because they had so little. I felt very close to Gloria and I think she also felt close to me despite all our differences.

fairy stone crystal

At the end of the summer of 1970 when it was time for me to go back to school, Gloria and I exchanged lots of hugs and tears.  She also gave me an amazing gift one that I felt terribly guilty about accepting but knew that to refuse it would hurt her immeasurably. We had talked a lot about our religious beliefs, and one of the difficulties that I encountered in doing so was that for Gloria, a Spanish speaking Catholic, no distinction in her conversation was made between Jesus and God, she referred to both indistinguishably as “Dios.” As a consequence, I had been unable to explain to her satisfactorily how while I had a deep and abiding faith in God, I was not a Christian. This was probably made more difficult because I wore a necklace that had a small locket and a fairy stone cross on it.  I wore the fairy stone not because it was a cross, but because it was given me by my favorite Aunt and reminded me of trips on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I was overwhelmed when at parting she gave me the exquisite gold crucifix that she wore all the time when not at work. It had been a gift to her from her deceased mother.

At that point in my life I was pretty sure I wanted to be a Jew even though I was still ten years away from formal conversion to Judaism, I would have felt sacrilegious wearing a traditional Catholic crucifix with a tiny Jesus impaled upon it.  In response I removed my own necklace, removed the small locket, and gave her my fairy stone cross, explaining how it was a natural mineral that grew in the shape of a cross, and who had given it to me.  I kept Gloria’s crucifix close to me for the next 12 years, never wearing it, but holding it often and thinking about her. In 1975 my first graduate school roommate was a physician from Belgium, Arlette Lepot.  Arlette’s primary language was French, but she was fluent in Spanish and German. We discovered quickly that I was marginally more fluent in Spanish than she was in English, so we sometimes spoke Spanish together rather than English. For a variety of reasons Arlette reminded me of Gloria and I ended up telling her the story of Gloria’s crucifix and gave it to her, because she would wear it and honor it.

Gloria was the only woman at Yoder Brothers that I kept in touch with after I went back to college. We wrote letters to each other in Spanish. Mine were pretty simplistic. So I learned that after I left that she and Bonita had been able to get better paying (but still very hard, hot and miserable) jobs at a laundry. Then the letters stopped and my last letter was returned. I lost touch with her and it was not until the next summer that I was able to learn why. Both Gloria and Bonita were undocumented so an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) raid on the laundry where she worked, caused her to go underground and leave the area. I’ve always wondered what happened to her after that.

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!