Picking cherries during the Great Depression

By Helen Westie
Sun contributor
In the midst of the Great Depression, American families harvested the cherry crops here in northern Michigan. They were the forerunners of the migrants who came much later. It was 1931 and I was 13 years old when my family camped in the orchard of huge cherry trees (the trees are much younger today) at the tip of Old Mission Peninsula, which at that time consisted solely of cherry farms.

Our method of hand picking was a far cry from the cherry shaking described by Norm Wheeler in the July 29 issue of the Glen Arbor Sun. A pail was hooked onto our wide belts, leaving both hands free to scoop all the cherries from a branch into our pails. And we had to get them all. I wore my brothers’ overalls or slacks because girls wore only dresses then. Blue jeans would not come into wide use until several decades later.
We started at the top of the tree and when a pail was full, we would climb down from the high ladder and empty it into a cherry lug. We were paid 15 cents per lug — I was a good, enthusiastic picker and could earn almost a dollar a day. My father’s daily wage was $1.50 or a little more. My two brothers, a little younger than I, were not as productive or motivated. My mother stayed back at the tent airing our bedding and packing our lunches. When she delivered them, she would stay and pick for a while.
Right from the start, she became friendly with the farmer’s wife — they made an arrangement that my mother would bake two casseroles or two pie pasties (having been raised in the Upper Peninsula, she was an excellent pasty maker), one for us and one for the owner’s family, and we would eat dinner at our camp table.
Often after the day’s work, the farmer, Mr. Kilmurray, let us three kids ride on the truck loaded with full cherry lugs to the canning factory in Traverse City. For the records, the truck drove onto a scale and after unloading was weighed again. There was a story told to us about an incident one year before … When the farmers brought their loads to the factory, the price for sour cherries had gone way down. The farmers, in protest, dumped their whole day’s pickings into Grand Traverse Bay. The whole Bay was red with cherries as far as the eye could see, and the story and photographs appeared in newspapers throughout the United States.
One of the men who lived in the barn played a banjo. We would sit around a campfire at night enjoying s’mores, the first we ever had, and we sang and sang all the well-known songs, “Oh Susanna” and the like.
My brothers and I regarded the very first cherry-picking year as the most wonderful adventure of our young lives. We had left our home in Dearborn, MI in early spring of that year. My uncle Ed, who had hunted in this area, assured my parents that living was much cheaper and there was always fruit picking for a little extra income. My mother and father were feeling desperate; every insurance policy had been cashed, their life savings all but gone. There had been no work for my father for two years and now it meant going on welfare. My proud Finnish-American parents did not want to do that, so they bought a little Ford truck for 25 bucks, packed up our belongings and moved to Rapid City, near Kalkaska. Thus began the big adventure. Years later, the grandkids, grandnephews and grandnieces would ask, “how long were you in Rapid City?” We would say, “Well, almost two years,” and they would respond incredulously with, “and all that happened in two years?”
My brothers, now deceased, were better storytellers than I, and often regaled the kids in the family about the Rapid City characters (notably Helen’s boyfriends) or about skating parties, snowball fights, toboggan slides and pranks. Our lives could not have contrasted more with what they had been in Dearborn. It was life as it had been lived a generation or two before. The large house my parents were able to rent was furnished for $7 per month and was one of the nicest in town. Our Dearborn house was rented out for $10 per month. We were thrilled with our two-holed outhouse, but by mid-winter it had lost its fascination, and we longed for our city bathroom. We planted our big backyard at once with vegetables and berries. A number of chickens were fenced in for an egg supply and for special dinners. Mom had no qualms about cooking and baking on an old-fashioned cast-iron wood range. Dad was always busy chopping wood for the upcoming winter and the demands of the big kitchen stove. A pot-bellied stove with chrome fenders and isinglass windows was the only source of heat. In the bitter winter ahead, we dressed around this stove.
In Rapid City, we were intrigued by our new friends of the same age. At school we had farm friends; they knew so much, especially about taboo topics like reproduction, and they taught us plenty that we didn’t know. In turn, we intrigued them with our hints of urban sophistication. We were given lead parts in plays. We enjoyed a popularity that we’d never had before. We loved our new friends, and Mom and Dad also became acquainted in town. Often there was a Box Social, a picnic, or a Pie Social, and everyone in town participated.
After two years, we heard from friends back home that the factories were hiring again, so of course we had to move back. I shed bitter tears because I was smitten with a senior boy. We were “going together” it was told around town, though where this expression came from I cannot imagine. There was no place to “go” in this dating system except the walk home from Sunday night Christian Endeavor meetings when he walked me home. He never called my house. We had a sad goodbye and what I chose to think was True Love’s First Kiss.
None among us could ever, ever forget the evening before we left. The whole town and nearby farm friends gave us a potluck farewell party at the Rapid City Town Hall. All the way back on the long drive to Dearborn, we talked about the speeches, the presents and how sad we were to leave.