Bumper crop
Summer job is taxing, but has a few quirks.
As in past years, in 1951 my dad, Albert Bolzenthal, had several acres of beans on my grandfather’s farm. Early in the morning, we’d pile into the car for the drive to the farm in Shoto, Wisconsin, to pick the beans. Dad worked a day job, so my mom, Sylvia, was in charge of making sure we cleaned the rows, and didn’t crush or pull out the bushy plants. Mom was a fast picker; I was 12 and my brother, Francis, was 9, so the three of us did the serious picking. Often we got extra help from neighbor kids. My little sisters, JoAnn and Carole, came, too, but they were allowed to sit in the shade or visit Grandma. In the late afternoon Dad came back to pay everyone who helped. We were competitive, and while we waited in line to have our bags weighed, there was a lot of guessing about who picked the most. Each type of bean earned a different rate. The big flat green beans were light and easy to pick, but paid the least. Wax beans had to be a particular shade of yellow, but they were worth a little more. Green beans were the hardest to pick, weighed the most and paid 3 cents a pound. After Dad took everyone home, he had to go pick up the beans and haul them to the canning company, where he was paid. There were other bean growers in the county, and they needed a lot of pickers. Bigger operations had buses that picked up kids. If we committed to picking for them, we had to keep our word or it was likely the end of finding work in that field. As an almost-teenager, I preferred going on the bean bus rather than picking for Dad, though it was not much different—a bigger field, more kids and a bean boss who wasn’t Mom. There was still the outhouse, a communal water dipper and the endof-day competition. I always brought a bag lunch of peanut butter and jelly on white bread. (Oh, how I wanted Wonder Bread, but it was too expensive.) The growers looked out for us, reminding us to wear our straw hats, drink water and rest in the shade if we seemed to need it. Picking beans was an important part of my growing up: I learned to be on time, to answer to a boss, and that my pay would directly reflect my effort. Most days I made $3 to $4; one day I made just over $1 after I found a snake under a bush and moved very cautiously the rest of the day; and a few days I made $5 to $6. I learned to spend that money wisely because I’d worked really hard for it. I also learned that it’s OK to reward yourself. Dad always gave us time off to go to the county fair, and we enjoyed every minute of spending some hard-earned money on rides, arcade games and cotton candy. Bean picking season the following year turned out quite differently for our family. There was no county fair for us—we were quarantined at home and Dad was in the hospital, in an iron lung, with polio.