IT’S NOT THE PITS
Aerospace veteran’s new job? Picking apricots
“They think it’s kind of funny that a white guy is working with them. But we get along fine. We laugh and joke.’’
In the end, for Jim Pitkin, it’s about the apricots. As a kid, the Santa Clara Valley native was allergic to the fruit. When he went to Clear Lake to stay with an aunt, she made wonderful apricot pie that he could not eat. “It was torture,’’ remembered the aerospace veteran.
As he got older, Pitkin’s allergies ebbed. One day as an adult, he visited the Hick’ry Pit in Campbell and ordered a $9.99 apricot pie. It was a revelation. He loved the fruit.
So it wasn’t that odd — well, maybe it was a little odd — when a thought occurred to him as he passed the apricot trees near Saratoga’s library in June. Seeing that the fruit was ripening quickly, he offered to help pick the apricots for Matt Novakovich, one of the principals in Novakovich Farms, which does the harvesting.
“I knew there was this hot weather coming, and I saw apricots on the ground, “Pitkin remembered. “So I asked Matt, “You guys gonna start pretty soon? You need some help?” And he says yeah.’’
And so Pitkin became the only white guy on a traditionally Hispanic crew. He was the only aerospace veteran willing to work for $10 an hour (later raised to $11). He jokes that it’s taken him a lifetime to get to minimum wage.
The 60-year-old says he downed two gallons of water his first day picking. But he boasts one big advantage: At 6-foot-4, he can touch an 8-foot ceiling with ten fingers. He doesn’t have to climb a ladder to get a big portion of the apricots.
Do his fellow pickers look at him strangely? “They don’t seem to mind,’’ he told me. “They think it’s kind of funny that a white guy is working with them. But we get along fine. We laugh and joke.’’
Jim Pitkin has a storehouse of tales that span the valley’s history. He can tell you about the time he cut apricots himself as a middle-schooler in the summer of 1970 at the Buck Ranch, in present-day Cupertino.
And he can explain in detail how much money he made
— Jim Pitkin, 60, on being the only white guy working with traditionally Hispanic crew
with his lawn-mowing business as a kid: Five dollars to mow a lawn front and back was not bad money in that era.
Pitkin went into the aerospace business right out of Monta Vista High School, where he had nurtured an interest in electronics under a favorite teacher, Dick Clay. He took classes at DeAnza College while working a swing shift for a subcontractor at NASA Ames.
When he fell victim to a round of layoffs in the aerospace industry in the late ’80s, he plunged into a new field, becoming an expert at organizing signature-gathering for political campaigns.
In one of the ironies of his current position, Pitkin worked on the San Jose campaign to raise the minimum wage in 2012. San Jose’s law, however, does not apply in Saratoga.
Finally, Pitkin has enjoyed a stint as a freelance photographer: After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, he headed into the Santa Cruz mountains for shots he was convinced other photographers would miss.
That eye for detail serves him as a fruit picker. On the day I visited him at the orchard surrounding the Saratoga library, he was helping Novakovich operate a big harvesting machine for French prunes. (Though this is a matter of controversy, they are called prunes.)
Pitkin’s job was to rake the prunes to the back of a big box destined to be shipped to the Central Valley for drying. But he added his own innovation. Before the machine grabbed the trees and shook them into an upside-down skirt, Pitkin lifted the branches, minimizing the fruit left on the ground.
I suggested that if he had started out in agribusiness, he could have gotten a few patents. “I think I might have,’’ he said. And he smiled.