Now that the tomato season is upon us, I am reminded of the years when my parents, Joe and Anna, contracted with the Heinz Co. to raise five acres of tomatoes for them. This was a way that the farmers had a “guaranteed” market and the Heinz folks received the tomatoes they needed. Five acres seems pretty small in today’s farming world but when you consider that about 75 percent of the work was done by hand it was enough for us.
As I recall, the Heinz folks provided the plants so they knew what kind of fruit they were getting, and they also provided baskets for picking. It was up to the farmer to properly plant and care for the crop. The Heinz agent would sometimes stop by to check on the progress and was available to address any issue that might have arisen. The contract required that our tomatoes be delivered, in the baskets provided, to the Heinz facility in Hilton, from where they were loaded on bigger trucks and taken to a processing plant elsewhere.
In those days, weeding and hoeing tomatoes was a regular job for most of the family, primarily Anna, since Joe had a regular job as a carpenter. He would, however, help with the farm work after supper, or take a day off his job as needed.
At the time the younger kids, including me, were not required to help pick, but did have the job of making sure the pickers always had empty baskets strung out in front of them. Of course that meant we were out in the field all the time and could play when not busy distributing baskets. One of the things we did was to take the cone shaped baskets, lay them on their side and arrange them in a cross pattern. With a child’s imagination they looked like a WWII fighter plane. We sat in the center of the configuration, with our legs in the basket in front of us and took off. If there were two of us and we had enough baskets, one would be the American plane and the other a Japanese Zero. Given our (German) heritage, the other plane could hardly be a Messerschmitt.
We imitated the ack-ack-ack sound of the machine guns as we pretended to have the other guy in our sights. He invariably would shout that it was only minor damage, and he continued flying. Our high flying reverie was suddenly broken by the cry of “baskets” – usually from Anna. This was a major offense, similar to causing the shut down of an assembly line in a manufacturing plant. We were told that although ours was a minor task, it was essential to the efficient functioning of the picking operation and therefore required responsibility on our part. A life lesson learned in the classroom of the farm fields.
After that lesson, baskets were quickly and properly distributed then, just as soon as we could, we returned to the planes and continued our sorties.
Oh, how high we flew – despite the fact that we never left the ground …
9/1/13
