Loughary Stories

Now we are moving on from the Roman Catholic World of Worship to the World of Work. The farms of the Willamette Valley provided lots of summer work (at near slave labor) for school kids. I wonder how farmers could have survived with out the regiments of kids doing their harvesting. Boys were tapped at an early age, and girls fell in line a little later. Because, at least it is my take, that summer work has become uncommon, we may do coming generations a historical service by including descriptions and comments on kid work during the 1930's and 1940's. My first recollection of working is when I was 6 or 7 in 1936 or 1937 a year or two after moving from Omak to Eugene and Dad and Mom took us into the hop fields. This must have been weekend work for them because I think that by that time Dad had a steady mill job. Many poor people (yup, we were) did field work on the week ends to supplement their incomes in those depression years. Hell, some of them did it on weekdays as well!

I was introduced to bean picking in the summer of 1942 when I was 11. The Willamette valley was full of truck garden crops, and a large coop cannery had been here probably from the early 1920's or before. String beans seemed to have the longest growing season, lasting from late June through late August. Bean picking had several negative aspects for me. After being hauled to a bean field on the bed of a farmer’s old, in-need-of-repair truck, we pickers began picking about 7:30 a.m. The heavy and cold dew was still on the bean plants on most mornings, and your shirt sleeves and front would be soaked soon after you began your first row. Mature bean plants were infamous for mushy, rotten, moldy beans left over from a previous picking. These were difficult to see, and were discovered only by grabbing. Yuk! I hated picking beans and began early on searching for alternative summer work. It is true, however, that picking beans was part of the poor kid culture of Eugene.

I don’t know how many of our readers know that pickers were paid a couple cents a pound. Some 30 year old elderly women would rack up between 300 and 400 pounds pay. Many kids were in the bean fields primarily because their parents told them to be. Cheap behavior control for the summer months. Because they had little hope of making significant wages, they spent a lot of time horsing around and playing boy/girl games. I was no more keen on being in the fields than anyone, but it seemed foolish not to work as hard as I could. The frustrating factor was that no matter how hard I tried I seldom picked over 150 pounds a day.

There were other kinds of work in the bean fields. String beans were planted in long rows. There were two methods of supporting the plants. One was to pound a one inch square pole in the ground into the center of the plants and let the bean vine do its thing. Pole-setting involved sticking a pole in place and then pounding it about 18 inches into the ground. The pounding tool was a foot long piece of heavy, hollow pipe welded shut at one end with two short handle bars welded to it. This was not a pleasant experience for short fellows, requiring as it did constantly holding the pipe up as high as one could. As a short fellow, I discovered quickly that a change in occupations would be a cool move.

The second method was to run a heavy wire about 5 feet over a row of bean plants and then tie a piece of butcher cotton string from each plant to the wire. The string came tightly wrapped around a large paperboard cone, which in turn was attached to the stringer’s pants belt with a metal wire holster. We were paid by the cone. To begin the stringing maneuver, you bent over and tied the end of the string to a plant. As you competed the knot, you raised your body to a standing position rapidly but carefully pulling the string up and then reaching up and tying it to the wire and then cutting it with a sharp blade that all along you had been gripped in your right hand (left, if that was your orientation to the universe). If you can imagine doing “touch your toes” exercises for 8 to 10 hours, you have the a picture of a day’s work. I became sufficiently skillful to do a cone a day, which paid $10. One aspect of the stringing skill was being generous with the string on the two knots, but not so much so that the farmer caught on. Actually, he had been growing beans long enough that he had the system pretty well figured out and had in his head an acceptable excess string allowance.

At the end of harvest season in late August and early September, the bean and hop fields had to be cleared of their vines, poles cleaned and stacked and things made ready for spring planting. Miserable work, but it felt good to get even with the bean vines. I was farm employed for 3 or 4 summers and was systematically conditioning myself to hate farm work. It was hard, dirty and dull but as far as I could tell there were few options. Or did I mention that?

Prior to bean season, there were opportunities to earn money in fields and orchards hoeing weeds, pulling beats and carrots and picking cherries. I say opportunities advisedly, because even though the work was unpleasant, during a summer a kid could earn enough to buy new school clothes in the fall. Once having taken up the habit of physical labor, it was years before I could kick it. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, this was my first operational definition of the work content/work context construct. Later as an adult, I discovered that physical work was okay and even enjoyable as long as I was in charge of setting the context in which it was done.

Wow! What a work career and all before you came of age. As you know, my earning power never rose above 75 cents an hour. My feelings about field work echoes yours, hard, cold, wet work and little pay. I think that those local farmers never had it so good when they were able to hire kids and unemployed women to literally work for beans while filling those buckets with the green kind. I had never considered who did and who didn’t pick in the fields a class thing. I knew lots of other kids who were riding the bean truck, rising at dawn and sloshing through the sprinkler watered rows. It’s true that I was envious of those like Charlotte Martin who could find summer employment working for a relative. Thinking back, I am now amazed that we were even allowed to climb into those decrepit farm trucks. I guess that Mom and Dad never considered the evils of what could have happened to us, and there certainly weren’t any laws regulating who could pick and at what age, as well at the condition of the transport.

My own experience in the world of paid employment is so different from yours. I’ve been rethinking my own attitudes and values around the subject of employment that I carried with me my entire life.

It was pretty clear that in l946, when I was twelve, there were not a whole lot of employment opportunities that allowed girls to earn money. There still existed a general feeling that women were meant (whoops, I nearly wrote doomed) to keep the home fires burning while birthing and raising the children. And besides that, women who would take any job away from a man who REALLY needed the work, were pretty worthless human beings. I had some opportunities for baby-sitting at 25 cents an hour (upped to 35 cents after midnight). Baby-sitting usually meant dealing with four to ten year old children who generally didn’t want to be tended by someone not much older than themselves. It usually involved, reading stories, playing games and avoiding ten year old boys groping hands. (Would you believe that ten year old boys were already flexing their sexual yearning?)

The summer of my twelfth year our parents decided that it was time for me to hit the big time and gain employment in the bean fields of the Willamette Valley. Like you, I walked the mile to catch the 6 a.m. bean truck, a working farm truck that had definitely seen better years. Of course, there was no such thing as sun screen in those years, so I wrapped my head in a bandana and carried my lunch in a brown paper bag and hoped that the day wouldn’t be too hot. The pickers were of all ages, but all white with not a hint of a migrant worker in the crowd that climbed aboard the broad-beamed truck. If lucky we could find a seat on one of the wooden benches that lined the slatted board side that somehow held us all in a herd. Usually, though, I was standing and gripping the wooden railings and hoping that it would not be a rainy ride.

My bucket seemed to be the only one in the field that had a large hole in its bottom, for it seemed to take me twice as long to get it filled and lugged to the end of the row to dump into the large sacks that were waiting to be filled and weighed. A common occurrence was the theft of those bags by someone who was evidently more in need of cash than I. At two cents a pound there seemed little glory in watching my earnings grow. Along with the list of disagreeable traits of crawling down the muddy rows that you’ve mentioned, there was also the problem of fair, freckled skin baking to a crisp during the long, hot days of July and August. Other kids produced beautiful golden tans while I had a continual burned and peeling face that never seemed to change from pink to tan. I was the sole kid in the field who reflected red rather than a healthy golden glow.

By the time I was entering high school and finally old enough to be hired by a retail store, I cruised Willamette street, applying for work. After filling out umpteen applications, I was finally hired by Miller’s Department store, thinking that I was about to launch a career as a glamorous saleswoman, in my eyes a very important job.

I cheerfully arrived at the store for my first day on the job, The store manager greeted me and asked me to accompany him to the elevator. Thinking that I was heading for the ladies’ wear area, I felt a twinge of excitement as I imagined my new stately self graciously choosing garments for the elite of Eugene.

Now this elevator was in no way related to the high-speed ones that sped up and down the several stories of Meier and Frank in Portland, with the elevator girl cheerily calling out the floors and their contents. No, this elevator rose from the basement to the main floor and then up to the upper floor. That was it! Instructed to keep the elevator stabled on the main floor, my job was entailed waiting for a customer to either want to go up to ladies wear, or down to kitchen supplies. For eight hours a day, at 75 cents and hour, I stood at the door and waited.

The elevator was “run” by moving a metal handle along an arc-shaped slot. Watching for painted black lines on the wall of the shaft I was warned when to come slowly to a stop, open the door, adjust to floor level, and clearly say “watch your step”.

We came to a sudden stop, and it was clear by the look on her face, that I might just have a little crisis on my hands. I crawled around her feet trying to find the handle, reassuring her all the while of the frequency of this mishap. (Meaning that I had handled such a thing many a time, which, of course, I hadn’t.) Babbling consoling words, I found that re-screwing the handle into its receptive hole was demanding more attention than I was giving it. I was finally able to deliver her safely to ladies’ wear, but, I noted that she exited the floor via the stairway.

Looking forward to reading of your further adventures as Jack Loughary, Adventurer.


Loughary Lines Loughary Stories Bagan Stories ThinkPint2.com home		Growing Up On Jefferson Street, set 7 “How I Learned To Dread Farm Work” and “Floor Please” Dear Marilyn, Now we are moving on from the Roman Catholic World of Worship to the World of Work. The farms of the Willamette Valley provided lots of summer work (at near slave labor) for school kids. I wonder how farmers could have survived with out the regiments of kids doing their harvesting. Boys were tapped at an early age, and girls fell in line a little later. Because, at least it is my take, that summer work has become uncommon, we may do coming generations a historical service by including descriptions and comments on kid work during the 1930's and 1940's. My first recollection of working is when I was 6 or 7 in 1936 or 1937 a year or two after moving from Omak to Eugene and Dad and Mom took us into the hop fields. This must have been weekend work for them because I think that by that time Dad had a steady mill job. Many poor people (yup, we were) did field work on the week ends to supplement their incomes in those depression years. Hell, some of them did it on weekdays as well! How I Learned to Dread Farm Work by Jack Loughary I was introduced to bean picking in the summer of 1942 when I was 11. The Willamette valley was full of truck garden crops, and a large coop cannery had been here probably from the early 1920's or before. String beans seemed to have the longest growing season, lasting from late June through late August. Bean picking had several negative aspects for me. After being hauled to a bean field on the bed of a farmer’s old, in-need-of-repair truck, we pickers began picking about 7:30 a.m. The heavy and cold dew was still on the bean plants on most mornings, and your shirt sleeves and front would be soaked soon after you began your first row. Mature bean plants were infamous for mushy, rotten, moldy beans left over from a previous picking. These were difficult to see, and were discovered only by grabbing. Yuk! I hated picking beans and began early on searching for alternative summer work. It is true, however, that picking beans was part of the poor kid culture of Eugene. I don’t know how many of our readers know that pickers were paid a couple cents a pound. Some 30 year old elderly women would rack up between 300 and 400 pounds pay. Many kids were in the bean fields primarily because their parents told them to be. Cheap behavior control for the summer months. Because they had little hope of making significant wages, they spent a lot of time horsing around and playing boy/girl games. I was no more keen on being in the fields than anyone, but it seemed foolish not to work as hard as I could. The frustrating factor was that no matter how hard I tried I seldom picked over 150 pounds a day. There were other kinds of work in the bean fields. String beans were planted in long rows. There were two methods of supporting the plants. One was to pound a one inch square pole in the ground into the center of the plants and let the bean vine do its thing. Pole-setting involved sticking a pole in place and then pounding it about 18 inches into the ground. The pounding tool was a foot long piece of heavy, hollow pipe welded shut at one end with two short handle bars welded to it. This was not a pleasant experience for short fellows, requiring as it did constantly holding the pipe up as high as one could. As a short fellow, I discovered quickly that a change in occupations would be a cool move. The second method was to run a heavy wire about 5 feet over a row of bean plants and then tie a piece of butcher cotton string from each plant to the wire. The string came tightly wrapped around a large paperboard cone, which in turn was attached to the stringer’s pants belt with a metal wire holster. We were paid by the cone. To begin the stringing maneuver, you bent over and tied the end of the string to a plant. As you competed the knot, you raised your body to a standing position rapidly but carefully pulling the string up and then reaching up and tying it to the wire and then cutting it with a sharp blade that all along you had been gripped in your right hand (left, if that was your orientation to the universe). If you can imagine doing “touch your toes” exercises for 8 to 10 hours, you have the a picture of a day’s work. I became sufficiently skillful to do a cone a day, which paid $10. One aspect of the stringing skill was being generous with the string on the two knots, but not so much so that the farmer caught on. Actually, he had been growing beans long enough that he had the system pretty well figured out and had in his head an acceptable excess string allowance. Stringing beans did not enhance my relationship with farm work. At the end of harvest season in late August and early September, the bean and hop fields had to be cleared of their vines, poles cleaned and stacked and things made ready for spring planting. Miserable work, but it felt good to get even with the bean vines. I was farm employed for 3 or 4 summers and was systematically conditioning myself to hate farm work. It was hard, dirty and dull but as far as I could tell there were few options. Or did I mention that? Prior to bean season, there were opportunities to earn money in fields and orchards hoeing weeds, pulling beats and carrots and picking cherries. I say opportunities advisedly, because even though the work was unpleasant, during a summer a kid could earn enough to buy new school clothes in the fall. Once having taken up the habit of physical labor, it was years before I could kick it. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, this was my first operational definition of the work content/work context construct. Later as an adult, I discovered that physical work was okay and even enjoyable as long as I was in charge of setting the context in which it was done. Yours for free choice, brother Jack <><><><><><><><><><> Dear Jack, Wow! What a work career and all before you came of age. As you know, my earning power never rose above 75 cents an hour. My feelings about field work echoes yours, hard, cold, wet work and little pay. I think that those local farmers never had it so good when they were able to hire kids and unemployed women to literally work for beans while filling those buckets with the green kind. I had never considered who did and who didn’t pick in the fields a class thing. I knew lots of other kids who were riding the bean truck, rising at dawn and sloshing through the sprinkler watered rows. It’s true that I was envious of those like Charlotte Martin who could find summer employment working for a relative. Thinking back, I am now amazed that we were even allowed to climb into those decrepit farm trucks. I guess that Mom and Dad never considered the evils of what could have happened to us, and there certainly weren’t any laws regulating who could pick and at what age, as well at the condition of the transport. My own experience in the world of paid employment is so different from yours. I’ve been rethinking my own attitudes and values around the subject of employment that I carried with me my entire life. It was pretty clear that in l946, when I was twelve, there were not a whole lot of employment opportunities that allowed girls to earn money. There still existed a general feeling that women were meant (whoops, I nearly wrote doomed) to keep the home fires burning while birthing and raising the children. And besides that, women who would take any job away from a man who REALLY needed the work, were pretty worthless human beings. I had some opportunities for baby-sitting at 25 cents an hour (upped to 35 cents after midnight). Baby-sitting usually meant dealing with four to ten year old children who generally didn’t want to be tended by someone not much older than themselves. It usually involved, reading stories, playing games and avoiding ten year old boys groping hands. (Would you believe that ten year old boys were already flexing their sexual yearning?) FLOOR, PLEASE by Marilyn Loughary Kok The summer of my twelfth year our parents decided that it was time for me to hit the big time and gain employment in the bean fields of the Willamette Valley. Like you, I walked the mile to catch the 6 a.m. bean truck, a working farm truck that had definitely seen better years. Of course, there was no such thing as sun screen in those years, so I wrapped my head in a bandana and carried my lunch in a brown paper bag and hoped that the day wouldn’t be too hot. The pickers were of all ages, but all white with not a hint of a migrant worker in the crowd that climbed aboard the broad-beamed truck. If lucky we could find a seat on one of the wooden benches that lined the slatted board side that somehow held us all in a herd. Usually, though, I was standing and gripping the wooden railings and hoping that it would not be a rainy ride. My bucket seemed to be the only one in the field that had a large hole in its bottom, for it seemed to take me twice as long to get it filled and lugged to the end of the row to dump into the large sacks that were waiting to be filled and weighed. A common occurrence was the theft of those bags by someone who was evidently more in need of cash than I. At two cents a pound there seemed little glory in watching my earnings grow. Along with the list of disagreeable traits of crawling down the muddy rows that you’ve mentioned, there was also the problem of fair, freckled skin baking to a crisp during the long, hot days of July and August. Other kids produced beautiful golden tans while I had a continual burned and peeling face that never seemed to change from pink to tan. I was the sole kid in the field who reflected red rather than a healthy golden glow. By the time I was entering high school and finally old enough to be hired by a retail store, I cruised Willamette street, applying for work. After filling out umpteen applications, I was finally hired by Miller’s Department store, thinking that I was about to launch a career as a glamorous saleswoman, in my eyes a very important job. I cheerfully arrived at the store for my first day on the job, The store manager greeted me and asked me to accompany him to the elevator. Thinking that I was heading for the ladies’ wear area, I felt a twinge of excitement as I imagined my new stately self graciously choosing garments for the elite of Eugene. Now this elevator was in no way related to the high-speed ones that sped up and down the several stories of Meier and Frank in Portland, with the elevator girl cheerily calling out the floors and their contents. No, this elevator rose from the basement to the main floor and then up to the upper floor. That was it! Instructed to keep the elevator stabled on the main floor, my job was entailed waiting for a customer to either want to go up to ladies wear, or down to kitchen supplies. For eight hours a day, at 75 cents and hour, I stood at the door and waited. The elevator was “run” by moving a metal handle along an arc-shaped slot. Watching for painted black lines on the wall of the shaft I was warned when to come slowly to a stop, open the door, adjust to floor level, and clearly say “watch your step”. The biggest, no, only, adventure of my life running the cabled car involved the time that the handle came unscrewed for the leveling mechanism. There was a sudden clunk as the handle fell out of my hand and rolled to the feet of my only passenger, an elderly, grey-bunned lady headed for ladies’ dresses. We came to a sudden stop, and it was clear by the look on her face, that I might just have a little crisis on my hands. I crawled around her feet trying to find the handle, reassuring her all the while of the frequency of this mishap. (Meaning that I had handled such a thing many a time, which, of course, I hadn’t.) Babbling consoling words, I found that re-screwing the handle into its receptive hole was demanding more attention than I was giving it. I was finally able to deliver her safely to ladies’ wear, but, I noted that she exited the floor via the stairway. Looking forward to reading of your further adventures as Jack Loughary, Adventurer. Love, the eternal apprentice, Marilyn Back to story menu





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