Leo and Dorothy Rennhack

In 1945 Leo Rennhack took over the farm his parents bought in 1908. He still lives on the farm but has not farmed it since the 1980s.

[Leo’s] dad was still picking cherries up on that ladder when he was eighty-eight years old. [When] the grandchildren picked berries, they always tried to beat [him]. They just couldn’t beat Grandpa. He [would say], “I must be getting old.”

One of the points of contention now is [that] our government allows us to import food that they wouldn’t let the homegrown people grow [using] certain pesticides. That gets into politics. But we had to stand our ground and we wanted to. We wanted to stay legal. We were part of [the] National Grape Coop and, I’m tellin’ you, they were very strict on the herbicides and fungicides, and the pesticides that they would allow their growers to use.

With the fruit, Lake Michigan helps us a whole lot with the climate and weather. There is a rim that’s probably forty-fifty miles wide on the east shore of Lake Michigan . We get the benefit of slow warming in the spring and slow cooling in the fall.

During and after the war, after the war especially, that’s when a lot of the migrants were busy. Baroda was just buzzing because everybody, all the neighborhood, had migrants. It was good for the whole town, too, because we had three grocery stores. The migrants, at that time, didn’t earn money like they earn today. It must have been in the [19]50s when it started in.

We’d get local help to pick grapes, and then the grape harvester came along. More women were going out to work away from home, too. When we had the raspberries, we’d [hire] women, and they’d bring their kids out. Two or three weeks, they were in raspberries. They earned money [and] they learned how to work.

We’ve known them [laborers] the years because a lot of them are local people, and they learned to work at a young age. They were ten years old and [their] mother thought they could come out and pick. But then all these laws came along. You’re not supposed to do this. And so, I think it affected the young people learning how to work because they’re not going to want to go start working at sixteen and learn how to do it. We have lots of children that learned picking raspberries [and] cherries. They learned how to work. As we think back to where they are today, almost without a doubt they have gone ahead and made something of their life.