I started cutting Walla Walla Sweet Onions for Harry Hamada, in 1956, when I was thirteen, seven days a week, 12-hours per day, three weeks each summer. Cutting onions followed picking strawberries, starting when I was 12.
The pay for cutting onions was $.85 cents per hour. Picking strawberries paid $.50 Cents per flat, a flat is 12 boxes. My best day when I was 36 flats when I was 14. After that, I became a Patch Boss for $1.00 per hour.
I did this for three years for three weeks each year until I was 16. Then I was was able to work at the Birds Eye Frozen Food Plant. The Birds Eye job was also 12 hours per day, for six weeks. Birds Eye paid $1.85 per hour.
Then out to wheat harvest driving a week truck. This work was from sunrise to sunset, seven days per week, for 3-4 weeks, every summer.
There are always rotten onions! Plus the smell of every onion you cut on your hands and body! When I got home, I tried every way possible to cover up the onion smell to no avail, especially since we had no air conditioning in the hot, humid summer of Walla Walla!
Now Walla Sweet Onions are famous! In my day they were just very smelly onions after you spent three weeks on your knees cutting them! Especially when ran into a few rotten ones!
I was not the only one doing this kind of summer work. Many of my Wa-Hi Class Mates did the same. That is what it was in those days. This is how we bought our school clothes and supplies and had a little spending money during the winter. This is also the way my old Wa-Hi classmate, Mike Friedman and I made enough money to hitchhike to and from Europe where we spent almost a year traveling most of the countries in Western Europe in 1962-1963.
Now I am 75 Winters, and my life seems to have passed like the Breath of a Buffalo on a Cold Day or the Flash of a FireFly on a Warm Summer Night!
