The Way We Were

In late summer, almost anytime, the old man’s fancy turns to thoughts of nostalgia. This time it was triggered by a slide show presentation attached to an email from one of my nieces, apparently collected and created by J.A.C. and titled Foto antigas, containing a series of early to mid-twentieth century pictures. One of them I identified with especially and I have “borrowed” it to insert with this issue of the Post. It is what ended up as the second photo down of the series of four snapshots inserted along the left margin.

Though the picture is not dated or identified in any way, I think of it as a Depression Era scene in rural California. It is just the sort of scene I was part of about this time of year in the mid-1930’s right here in the Fraser Valley. Most of the families in our then recently developed settlement were recent refugee immigrants from Central Europe who made much of their cash income by working in the hop farms nearby. During the harvesting season, young and old alike were hired on as pickers. We would get up well before dawn, do the home chores, then trudge to the central pick up area to climb into a truck just like the one shown there to be driven to the hop field some ten miles from the settlement for a long day of picking the fluffy yellow fruit from the hop vines in the row assigned to us, rain or shine. It was often dismal, uncomfortable, boring work but for all that my hop field memories of that annual harvest from at least 1932 to 1939 are among my most evocative. There was the competition for the “best” row when starting a new field, to get near the front of the weigh-up line, the buzz of dozens of conversations to listen to, the calls for straying children (“W-i-l-l-i-e-e-e-e!”), the sudden and surprising beauty of a Swiss melody yodelled by a picker at the far side of the field, the haunting summons for “Wire Down!” They were all part of the annual hop harvest in the thirties, with a penny a pound to boot! The top photo of this issue is from my own collection of family snapshots taken at that same hop yard in our valley, likely in September 1930, showing a group of young pickers from that settlement including one of my late sisters, at the picking end of a row of hops where the vines trained up a string to the high trellis have been lowered for picking.

Another memory from those early days involved a sudden move to Vancouver for my first experience of living in a rented house equipped with indoor plumbing. My older sister worked in the city as a housemaid for a wealthy family and three other children were to attend school while my father and 20 year-old brother began development of a swampy four acres in the settlement as a small holding with a cabin to be built with occasional financial help from available work at the hop yard. I continued grade one there in the fall of 1933 after having started in my rural school setting that September. The last photo at left is a picture of that grade one class in the spring of 1934. The third one down was taken back in that settlement in the spring of 1937 as I was completing my grade four there.

Just a few of the memories evoked by these pictures that have stayed with me include:

• Strange hermit-like bachelors who seemed to be living out the Depression years by squatting on Crown land in cabins built by surveyors years earlier high in the woods above our promontory at the settlement who were only seen in the settlement for occasional shopping forays;
• Hobos who rode the rails of the electric interurban from Chilliwack to Vancouver, often coming to the settlement looking for food in return for chores;
• One transient of Asian origin who was attracted to our small holding one summer day by a lush growth of poppy plants which were regularly included there for the poppy seeds used by the family in baking or cooking. He asked us to show him the plants and I remember him picking a green pod and eating it raw, pod and seed and all. Mother told us she thought he was on the lookout for opium poppies;
• Another hobo came to the shack asking for a meal and when mother offered him a drink with bread and a dish of home-made plum jam he ate the whole dish full with the serving spoon;
• Many long spring days harvesting our raspberry crop and attending to chores assigned to me throughout the year and when I was 12 finding another job with my nearest sister and many other locals to harvest the nearby tobacco fields after the berries were done and before the hop harvest. The job involved a five mile bike ride on gravel roads to the tobacco fields and often a twelve hour day at twenty cents per hour in 1939;
• The frightening talk of war, the preparations for war and the outbreak of war during the 1939 hop picking season before beginning grade seven.

Of such memories is the old man’s nostalgia made. Thank you for letting me offer them to you. ☻