Jobs, jobs, jobs. They were everywhere. The strawberry plants were beyond blooming in late May and ready to be picked by hand. Farmers couldn’t wait for the schools to shut down classes to get those young harvesters into the field. The incentive was clear: Earn a few dollars for fireworks, for clothes and for school needs. A little change clinking in our pockets was good for fun at the Clark County Fair, or the Pacific International Livestock Exposition in north Portland.
Other jobs, in season, favored young hands. They were picking apples, pears, peaches and prunes, usually at the eye-popping payoff of a nickel a box. Clark County might have been prune capital of the world at that time. You could get orchard work or work in one of the many prune driers scattered across the landscape. In my teen years, I took summer jobs at canneries, the Bower lumber mill in Ridgefield and Alcoa’s wire mill. There, we spun aluminum wire around steel cores for power lines.
Two kinds of horsepower
Haying was another summer job that sometimes required hired hands to operate the dump rake that put hay in rows, or work on a hay baler. Baling technology was relatively new at this time, which also marked the transition between real-time horsepower (four-footed) and motorized horsepower, the tractor. The emerging hay-baling technology required a person on each side of the bailer, one to poke wires through the hay to be baled, and the other to grab the ends and tie them in loops on the opposite side.
For the youngster with the whole world ahead of him or her, farm work was fun. Farming with horses was special, the true meaning of teamwork. They pulled the sled with nearly a ton of hay on it, or the plow, the first turnover of soil for the family garden. A horse hauled a rope that lifted a large double-tined fork with hay into the hayloft.
