Working in the muck was a rite of passage for the kids in my family. I saw my older cousins sunburned and dirty after they got off work…and I couldn’t wait for my chance!
The “muck” is a group of produce farms that were established in 1896, in a swamp bed south of Willard, OH. Dutch immigrants bought the swamp, drained it and farmed the rich black dirt beneath.* My brothers and I worked for Holthouse Farms, one of the muck’s original farming families, in the summers of 1978 and 1979. Even after decades of farming, the soil was coal black and fertile.
I was fourteen, and my brothers were fifteen and sixteen, when we took to the fields. I crawled in the dirt to cut parsley, and pull radishes and beets. My brothers cut endive, leaf lettuce and escarole—vegetables I’d never heard of before—and parsley. We labored for an hourly wage of $2.10. We worked like mad when a crop was to be harvested and shipped on a deadline, for which we got paid piece rate.
The Ohio summers were hot and humid, stifling. But in the fields, we covered every possible bit of skin to defend against the blistering sun. Another foe was parsley poison—think poison ivy—a miserable ailment all by itself, without the sun, sweat and rapid movements of field work to irritate the skin further. Our uniform of necessity was blue jeans, t-shirt, flannel shirt and one or two pairs of tube socks.
It was hard work to be sure. But the satisfactions of earning a paycheck and the camaraderie of working with other teenagers ferried us back each day for another grueling day in the dirt.
No comments:
Post a Comment