Mid-summer, just before I entered the 9th grade, I got a job working at a company that processed fresh cucumbers into pickles. The company was headquartered in Detroit, TX, the birthplace of John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, Speaker of the House of Representatives of the 72nd US Congress and FDR’s Vice President from 1933-1941, Detroit’s most famous former resident. The company was Gulf Pickle Company, LTD, and it local citizens called it the Pickle Shed. I got paid $0.40/hr, and the hours were often from about 7AM to 7 PM six days per week. During peak harvesting season we worked even more hours/week for 3 to 4 weeks. This pace made schoolwork seem like child’s play, and the experience conditioned me forever to be able to withstand hard work for long periods of time. Years later I have come to value some lessons in business and in sociology that I learned in this workplace, but oh what a way to learn.
In modern times, parents would surely think twice about allowing one of their offspring to work at the Pickle Shed, but in those times few other options existed for kids to earn spending money. Cursing was the language of choice, a few people (the main bosses) drank far too much alcohol and may have been functioning alcoholics, a few others were exconvicts, and safety was not high on anyone’s priority list. In spite of these factors, the Pickle Shed was an exciting place to work most of the time. We introduced some new products, and an amazing amount of work was accomplished by an otherwise lackluster group of workers.
Fortunately, due to a combination of genetic temperament and prior exposures, I wasn’t affected by the shenanigans around me, and I wanted to make some spending money. Since I already had good training in dealing with people who cursed, and as I never saw or heard of any employee being cursed for something they did, or did not do, the cursing didn’t concern me much. In fact, the cursing was primarily directed at inanimate objects; e.g., accidentally hitting their thumb with a hammer resulted in expletive-laced cursing that was almost lyrical in its content. However, I had little experience dealing with people who consumed copious amounts of alcohol on a daily basis, and I had to adjust my thinking on this issue. Those consuming the whiskey didn’t require me to participate, and they weren’t noticeably impacted by their drinking habits so I adapted to the situation. The ex-cons were street smart and had good senses of humor – I suppose being out of the worst state prison system on the planet was enough to make anyone feel good and exhibit a good sense of humor.
Cucumber Sources.
Farmers in the surrounding area brought freshly picked cucumbers (cukes) to the Pickle Shed or to one of our outlying stations, and we sorted their produce by size, as #1, #2, #3, #4 and culls, using a grading machine. We paid them $5-6, $2-3, $1-1.75 and $0.50 per hundred weight, respectfully. They took culls home for themselves, for their animals or otherwise discarded them. In the course of a week, the average farm received a gross payment of $90 for delivering roughly 3,600 lbs of cucumbers (600 lbs/day) to us. Most of the cukes were # 3 and # 2 and far fewer were #1, #4 or culls. If the area received adequate rain over the course of the summer, the farmers’ crops could last 10-12 weeks, and the resultant income was something that they took great pride in generating. It undoubtedly paid for lots of things in their lives.
In my first year on the job, there were perhaps 40-50 local farmers delivering cucumbers to the Pickle Shed via car, truck, and animal-drawn wagon. Wagons were hitched to either mules or horses. Initially, there were fewer farmers who raised large acre plots of cucumbers, but that situation changed over time. Women and kids picked most of the cucumbers, but invariably the men handled the money. A fairly large percentage of the farmers were illiterate, but that doesn’t mean that they were dumb – anything but dumb would be an apt description. They just never went to school very often as work in the fields had to be done during a significant portion of the school year or they found other excuses not to go to school. Most of the farmers liked the new owner (Mr.C.) of the Pickle Shed, who was a very experienced businessman, and their trust and his skill running the operation led to continual growth over time. These circumstances inspired me to write about some situations that occurred at the Pickle Shed.
Pidgin English 101
Fast tempo and soulfully sad R&B music had been blaring non-stop for about the last two hours from a jukebox setting under a big oak tree, and a few people were dancing on an open air, packed-dirt floor. My deer-in-the-headlights eyes were flitting between my work and the dancers. In the words of Dandy Don Meredith, there was some “Shucking and Jiving” going on. I had been around dancing all my life, but never had I seen anyone dance with arms and legs flailing in multiple directions while their bodies swayed in synchrony to the beat of the music. These farmers were in excellent physical condition, so dancing hard for an hour or two was not difficult.
Contributing to the dancers’ abandonment was a couple of bootleggers hovering on the fringes of the crowd. These swine were peddling cheap red wine and moonshine whiskey. I don’t know where they obtained the wine, but undoubtedly the moonshine was locally brewed. Although all forms of hard liquor were illegal, the High Sheriff wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and this was probably because he didn’t want to start a riot. Wine was being passed around openly among some of the men, but people ducked behind a building – the combination general store, garage, gasoline station, post office and general hangout - when they wanted to take a nip of the moonshine. I suspected that the bootleggers were taking home better profits than the farmers as wine was about $1.50/bottle, and the moonshine was about $2.50/quart. The jukebox cost $0.25 for 5 plays, and the quarters made a dull thud when they dropped into a vessel inside, a sure sign that this was also a profitable venture. The music was sung and played by the who’s who of R&B, Lowell Fulson, Lightning Hopkins, Muddy Waters, BB King and Etta James, and I recognized them as I listened frequently to radio station WLAC, Gallatin, TN. No Pat Boone or Hank Williams song was heard that day!
The farmers who dumped their cucumbers into the grading machine didn’t want to be left out of the fun, after all it was late Saturday afternoon, and they inevitably paid more attention to the dancers and dumped cucumbers to the rhythm of the music rather than whether or not the machine was overloaded. The faster the tempo, the faster the cucumbers were flying out of the machine at me, and I was panting like a dog trying to keep bushel baskets from overflowing. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I had had any help, but there were only two of us; one to help the check writer, weigh the graded cukes, and load the bobtail truck, and I was supposed to manage the grading machine. However, something from this one-day assignment lasted the better part of a lifetime for me. I handled the pressure well enough, but when I looked up all I could see were mule teams hitched to 4-wheel wagons, all loaded with cucumbers and people, the latter were mostly elderly men and women. Kids were playing tag among the wagons and trees, and some younger women were going into the store in twos and threes, laughing and talking non-stop. The elderly folks sitting in the wagons were staring vacantly at the younger set on the dance floor, and I imagined that all of them wanted to go home and get a drink of cool water and kick off their work shoes. The outside temperature was above 100 F, and even the mules looked exhausted. I seconded the mules’ view of the situation!
The year was 1956 or ‘57, and we were buying cucumbers from a group of Texas farmers whose farms were just south of the Red River separating Texas and Oklahoma. We identified two high school students among the dancers, and they helped translate and spell the farmers’ names correctly. The farmers received a check for their produce, and most farmers immediately signed their names with an X and went into the general store and cashed it. The owner of the store must have known everyone personally, as he cashed the checks he hardly looked interested.
I was getting a rude awakening to spoken English. About 95% of the farmers were descendents of African slaves, and their spoken language was unfamiliar to me. I doubt that I understood more than 30% of it, and some of the words sure sounded foreign to me. Since then I have learned that many offspring of African slaves retained considerable amounts of their native language and blended it with rudimentary English in their spoken language. I don’t know if this was a true Pidgin English, but for certain I wasn’t hearing the dialect of the black hunters and fishermen that I grew up with or the dialect of the migrant workers in the area. Miss Alta’s English class hadn’t prepared me for this, but I was taking a crash course, and it was clear that I was part of the problem because I often didn’t understand the truck driver or the owner of the Pickle Shed either. They were New Englanders. In the 1950s I had been outside of Red River County only a few times, and I knew next to nothing about communicating effectively, even in my own dialect. However, for reasons I could not explain then, or now, I was captivated by the fact that I could not communicate with people who lived less than 30 miles from my home.
Even as an overgrown kid, I tried to imagine myself in their situation – most were unable to communicate orally with the outside world, they were a societal minority, most couldn’t read or write, and they had few of the opportunities to better themselves that were available to me. In spite of these obvious disadvantages, the huge mounds of cucumbers heaped on the wagons were testimony that they were careful planners and hard workers, and they often pitched in to help each other unload the heavy sacks of cucumbers, but their positive attitudes were the really amazing attribute of the people. In a material sense, they had little to be happy about, but they seemed every bit as happy, or even happier than, any other group that I knew at that time.
About 10 years later, I accepted a job as a General Science teacher at the local high school, and a few kids from that area attended my classes. They had a difficult time, just barely passing, and even this feat was amazing. Almost none of my fellow teachers, including the few black teachers on the staff, and very few of their classmates could communicate with the kids from the cucumber farming area. Today, I wonder if the farmers have stopped farming cucumbers and whether or not they have been able to join the electronic age. Overall, I gained inspiration from the farmers that has lasted a lifetime. For example, whenever I have felt depressed or had insurmountable odds stacked against me for many situations, I have often reflected on that group of farmers from a forgotten part of Northeast Texas, and the difficulty of my current situation has seemed to lighten almost before the thought dissipates.
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