George Glade

After his father’s death in 1949, George Glade took over the family fruit farm in his mid-twenties. It was located north of Eau Claire, Michigan.

Back many years ago, you stood on top of the spray rig with a gun in your hand and you sprayed everything. Then they came out with those speed sprayers and you’d run those off the tractor, and some of them had engines and some of them would run off the tractor. [If the wind was blowing on you], you wore a mask.

[Pesticides] changed over the years but even when I was just a kid, we still had [them]. We had sulfur and arsenate lead and that type of stuff, and they’d interchange. The sulfur was for spraying the leaves so they wouldn’t get a disease , particularly apples. The arsenate lead was a poison to kill worms and bugs and stuff that got into the fruit. They had several different kinds [that have been] banned. It’s changed a whole lot over the years. [Even though pesticides were] quite expensive, you had to protect your fruit.

[My dad] had one man that worked for him on the farm [for] a dollar a day. Dollar a day and anything he wanted out of the garden. On the weekend, my dad might give him a chicken or something for Sunday dinner.

[During the war], I worked a lot of German prisoners on the farm [who were in] camps here. When they first came to Benton Harbor , they stayed at a place called the armory. They [would] go out there on Sundays and sing all day. Everybody [would] go and listen. They pretty much knew English. Everybody liked them and they liked us.