Bernard Herman Bernard Herman was born on a fruit farm where he worked for all of his life.  He sold his fruit at the Benton Harbor Fruit Market and the Coloma Fruit Exchange in the 1950s.

• The weather raises havoc with the fruit.  We’ll get a freeze [that] decimate[s] peaches for a few years and it comes back.  Now, we’re in the cycle [of] that weather.  Peaches aren’t a profitable crop in Michigan any more

• He [my son] switched from apples to grapes.  Fire blight devastated a lot of the orchards one year and he didn’t like apples.  So he pulled out a hundred and fifty acres of apples and planted grapes.  [He] hasn’t got that many grapes yet, but he’s planting.

• Don’t ask me what the countryside is going to be in the next twenty years because it’s really changed.  Used to be you’d drive down some road and [find] one farm after another.  [They were] as neat as a pin, planted, and really taken care of.  Now there are abandoned orchards just sitting there and a lot of open land, or they’re growing corn or soybeans on it.  Fruit isn’t all that exciting any more. 

• Pickers are almost one hundred percent Spanish now, “Texicans.”  That changed twenty years ago.  When you only had forty acres, you didn’t have that much help.  Then you got so you’d have eighty acres and you didn’t have a lot more help.  You’d have some more.  Constant change.   

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WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY / THE HERITAGE MUSEUM AND CULTURAL CENTER