An author I admire sent me a quote from a 30-year-old article about strawberry picking in the Pacific Northwest and southern Canada. The author of this article is an accomplished writer and poet, able to create vivid scenes with only a few words:
“Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones even bruise at too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten – every piece of fruit – had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone’s knees, someone’s aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat. Why had no one told her about this before?”
–Alison Luterman, What We Came For
This quote sent me back more than 55 years, to when I was 12 years old. Something I hadn’t thought about in forever. I was in junior high school and miraculously, my mother had given the OK for me to spend the summer at my sister Lois’ house in Kent, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. Even more miraculously, Lois had agreed to this 3-month-long sleepover, considering she also had two young girls of her own.
In retrospect, why she’d want to babysit another young kid is beyond me. For myself, I was simply thrilled to get out from under the watchful eye of my mother for an entire summer, as any preteen kid can relate to. But Lois was the eldest of our siblings and had helped raise six of my mother’s children, so having another child underfoot may have just felt like a normal, crazy household to her.
I quickly became friends with a girl across the street from Lois named Tammy, who was my age. Tammy was friendly, cute, and the middle child amongst a large gaggle of boys in her family. Being the only girl, she was doted on and allowed some freedoms I could only dream of. I spent most days over there, tagging along with whatever they had going on.
As is typical for kids our age, we soon became bored with summer activities. Playing in the yard, puzzles and board games, and riding bicycles wore thin. We couldn’t drive yet and were dependent on the older ones to take us to area lakes to go swimming or to the parks. We were too young to hold part-time jobs.
Tammy’s dad took care of the boredom situation. He saw a sign in a grocery store advertising that a neighborhood farm needed pickers, because strawberry season was upon us. Strawberries started to ripen in June in Western Washington and must be picked at just the right time to hit the stores and farmer’s markets.
The sign said that they would be paying the pickers 15 cents a flat, and the money we’d make was all up to us: the faster we picked, the more money we’d make. The sky was the limit! He told us to be ready on Monday morning and to pile into the back of the truck: we were going berry picking!
When we heard the pay rates and that they needed pickers through September, dollar signs danced before our eyes. Holy cow! We could make a fortune this summer!
I raced home to tell Lois the plan. I sat down at her kitchen table with a calculator, pen and paper. I guessed how many flats I might be able to fill in a single day, then multiplied that by a week, then by the month, then by 3 months. I was delirious with excitement.
“Lois! Do you realize?! We could make ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS by the end of the summer!!”
She was standing at her kitchen sink doing the dishes, and just turned around and smiled at me. She knew better than to dash the hopes of a young girl with big dreams.
“Well, that’s a lot of money. That sounds great. Let’s hope it works out.”
In 1969, $100 was an enormous amount of money to a preteen girl who’d never even had a part-time job before. I had several sets of cousins back in North Dakota and Minnesota who worked on their family farms all summer long, and I knew they didn’t get paid squat. Unpaid child labor was just a matter of course in my extended family. I felt like I’d walked into a gold mine.
The following Monday, Tammy’s dad drove us to the nearby farm and dropped us off at the entrance where the workers were assembling. He told us he’d pick us up at 5 p.m. It was me, Tammy, another girlfriend, three of her brothers, plus two guy friends of theirs, so eight kids in total.
The foreman gave us our instructions and got us situated. We each had a punch card of sorts that would get stamped every time we turned in a full flat of strawberries; we got paid by the flat. He pointed to where we could get started in the fields, and where we could get water when we needed it. He told us about lunch breaks and where the port-a-potties were.
It was a blue-sky day and the sun started to feel hot quickly out in that field. We had to get on our hands and knees to pick the berries, and those of us who wore shorts instead of jeans regretted it immediately—even though shorts were cooler, the skin on our knees was soon rubbed raw by the bare earth between the rows. Not only was it coarse and rocky in places, but we were also crushing berries than had fallen from the plants, so our knees became stained red with strawberry juice.
Us city kids were not accustomed to this kind of labor. Bending over and crawling around in the dirt, picking berries with no gloves. No one thought to bring hats to shield our eyes from the sun. Our northern, unprotected, lily-white skin flashed bright pink, then red, within a few hours. And filling those flats took a whole lot longer than any of us ever thought they would. The joyful chatter and giggling that we started out with soon turned into a grim silence as we worked our way down the rows.
We all looked at each other at the lunch break: covered with dirt from head to toe, backs already aching, sunburned. We’d only filled maybe three flats each so far.
“How on earth are those other guys going so fast??”
“They must have done this before. They must be used to it. All I can say is, this is hard. This SUCKS.”
“I feel like I’ve got dirt between my teeth.”
Discouragement permeated our little group. This wasn’t turning out at all like we’d expected. Not one ounce of it was even fun.
“I want to go home.”
I don’t remember who said it first, but the second it was uttered, the sentiment snowballed. Before I knew it, it was decided: we were going to bail on this little endeavor.
“But how are we going to get home? Your dad isn’t coming until 5!” I wailed.
Tammy’s oldest brother said, “It’s not that far. We can walk. I know the way.”
My dream of making $100 had evaporated in a matter of 4 hours.
So, in defeat, we walked up to the foreman and told him we were sorry, but we’d had enough. He took the news well. I imagine he’d probably seen a lot of citified kids come through his farm over the years and could pick out the ones who’d tough it out and the ones who wouldn’t make it through the first day. He paid us each for the flats we’d filled and sent us on our way. I made a whopping 75 cents that morning.
We began the long slog home. We had about a 3-mile walk ahead of us and luckily, my friends did know the way back. It’s a good thing, because I had absolutely no idea where I was. Our little group started out walking together, but soon we got strung out at least a half-mile along the road. We were tired, hot, hungry, and thirsty, and those 3 miles felt like 10 as we trudged along the roadside. We must have looked like a bunch of filthy escapees from a juvenile detention center.
Lois was quite surprised to see me walk in the door mid-afternoon, grimy and red-faced. “What happened?” she asked.
When I told her how hard the work was, how hot it was out there, and how unprepared we were to be farm hands, she just smiled again. She never said anything about “counting my chickens before they were hatched.” I guess she knew I learned my lesson.
We spent the rest of that summer being normal kids—riding our bikes and playing games didn’t seem so boring after all. And I now had a new-found respect for my hard-working cousins back home.
The episode didn’t entirely quash my desire to go into business for myself. But as an adult, I learned to look for opportunities that were better aligned with my skill sets.
Did you try any get-rich-quick schemes as a kid? Or any money-making ventures, beyond selling Girl Scout cookies? If so, tell us about them in the comments!
