Remembering My Young Days Harvesting Onions, Cauliflower, and Processing Peas
I started planting cauliflower, as well as cutting, filling, and sewing sacks and loading, for sale, Walla Walla Sweet Onions for Harry Hamada in the summers of 1956-1958. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for three weeks each summer.
Now Walla Sweet Onions are famous! In my day, after spending three weeks on your knees cutting them, they were just very smelly onions! Especially when you ran into a few rotten ones!
Every year it was hot, humid and I smelled like an onion, for at least two weeks after cutting the last onion. Everything, but sewing the sacks and loading them on a wagon, pulled by a small tractor, was on your knees!
The first year I earned $.75 an hour. Last two years I got a raise to $.85 an hour.
Usually, I would bring a sack lunch from home, but every few days I would go over the fence to eat at a little place called, Tommy's Dutch Lunch.
Not only did they have good and inexpensive sandwiches, but it was air-conditioned. I don't regret any of my work experiences growing up in the Walla Walla Valley. This started with picking Strawberries at Klicker's when I was 12.
Later, at 16, I went to work at the Birdseye Frozen Food Plant, during the Pea Harvest season.
I worked as a flume operator, high above the production lines, directing different grade peas to different belts for cleaning and freezing. I received $1.85 per hour.
I thought I had entered work heaven! I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week until the Pea Harvest was complete.
I spent my 12 hours of work, each day, by myself, continually moving, back and forth, on the metal runways, overseeing the production lines, to open and close different gates and flues. I was very thankful to be entrusted with this particular job, as it paid a bonus. I continued this job, each summer until I was 21.
My work career began at 6 when I sold Christmas Cards, each year. I delivered and sold the weekly Hermiston Herald, from 8-12 years old.
As well, I had many Lemonade Stands when we lived in Mc Nary, Oregon, before moving to Walla Walla, when I was 12.
I also raised four chickens, that I kept in an old army trunk, in those early years in McNary. I raised them since they were day-old chicks.
The more I write, the more I remember. I will put a bookmark here for now!
I feel for those many young peoples who now, don't have the same opportunities, as we did, to earn their own money for their clothes, school supplies. To buy lincoln logs, ant farms, erector sets, and airplane models from a Sears and Robuck Catalog!
But those days are past never to be again! And soon these days will be lost in the memories of this world of time and space, but they will be forever remembered in the World of Light!
