Arlene Emery

In Arden, Michigan, Arlene Emery worked on her three generation family farm in the 1930s and 1940s.

When I was very young, I can remember the folks sending us out to pick up apples and they’d give us a nickel a bushel. I think it was more to get us out of the way than anything. Most often, we worked in what they called the shed, which was a sheltered area for where the pickers would bring the fruit in crates. You’d give ‘em tickets for how many boxes they’d have. Then when the day was done or week, or whatever, they’d come in with their tickets and have them redeemed.

I can remember dad driving down to Benton Harbor and picking up migrant help. Not necessarily though, migrant help. There was an old hotel where Mary’s Hotel is in Benton Harbor . I’m using the term hotel very loosely. They kinda hang out there so you just go down. It was near the market in those days. They’d just go down and pick up a few.

It was such a treat to go down to the market with dad because you’d ride on the truck and he’d give us a nickel for an ice cream cone.

During the Depression when it was so difficult, well that would have been late [19]30s, early [19]40s, and very difficult to sell. My father, at that point, made some contact with a pie factory in Chicago , and he would buy apples for a dollar a bushel, tree run, and farmers were happy to get it. Prices were much lower then than they are now. But they didn’t have to grade them; they didn’t have to provide baskets, and so it ended up being not that bad a deal. He liked that idea of taking his apples to Chicago .
We had a fruit stand. My grandfather and grandmother lived across the road from us, and grandpa ran the stand. [On] Sundays, you’d get a lot of traffic on US-31, so there was a lot of traffic from Indiana going past. So they sold quite a bit. There would be people, truckers who would come out and buy directly from the farm, too. [In] fact, that was a summertime job. I think mostly as we progressed from snipping strawberry buds, as we got older, then we were tending the stand a great deal.