In high school, my friend, Diane told me about a great summer job at the Dole Pineapple Cannery. You could make a little over a dollar an hour. She and I were trimmers and we discovered what grueling work it was.
You had to mostly stand or rarely sit on metal chairs in a HOT cannery full of the cacophony of machinery and the constant reeking smell of pineapples. It was not pleasant. Pineapples are acidic so getting pineapple burns on your arms were common. We wore gloves with lotion and powder to protect ourselves as best as we could.
It wasn't all that uncommon to see a stretcher go by carrying one of the trimmers who had fainted.
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I took these photos in 1983 when we visited Hawaii. The cannery has since closed. I was showing Tif and Jon where their mommy worked for THREE summers and decided college was my next step.
I remember sitting at the trimming table holding my knife, sweat dripping down my forehead as I looked up at the slow moving clock every so many minutes to see how much money I'd made. Each minute was a little less than 2 cents. At the height of the pineapple season, we worked twelve hours. When I left for work, it was dark. When I returned, it was dark. We each had two aprons. I paid my brother, Dennis 25 cents to wash it for me every night.
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This is the Ginaca machine that cored and partially skinned the pineapple. A trimmer was trained to cut out the eyes and skin that the machine missed. We also had to catch all the sour (rotten) pineapples to be discarded.
It's amazing how good we got with wielding that sharp pineapple knife.
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This is where the pineapples were canned. You could be a trimmer or a packer. The packer's job was to grade the pineapples that came out of the machine that sliced the fruit that the trimmers cleaned.
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To this day, when I smell or taste a fresh pineapple, I'll get a sheen of sweat on my forehead. It could be the dead of winter in Chicago or in a chilly, air conditioned room. My forehead is still somehow conditioned to sweat when it smells fresh pineapple.
That cannery job also nudged me forcefully into going to the university and finding a job where I wouldn't have to hold a knife in the suffocating heat.
Granted, I still had to stay on my feet as a teacher and put in long hours. However, I didn't have to smell pineapples and I loved my job.
Boy, can I identify with you, Kay. I didn't work in a pineapple factory in Maine, of course, but I worked in a folding-rule-making factory, standing at a conveyor belt and picking up 6"-length of sticks and putting them into a beveler machine. The hours were so long and boring, and I, too, looked at the clock every few minutes. I remember the first few days of my summer job, I cried as I walked from the end of my driveway, where I'd been dropped off at day's end, to my house. I was so gosh-darned tired. But, like you, this miserable job certainly motivated me to get a college education.
ReplyDeleteGoodness, Kay, that was hard work and very poorly paid.
ReplyDeleteOh Kay -- this is EXACTLY why I tossed my daughter out of the house last year, when she was getting lazy about college and seemed to think she could just stay home drawing all day and make a living at daydreaming. I thought if she had to go to a job each day and try to make ends meet at entry-level, it would wake her up. It worked! She's at college now.
ReplyDeleteI love pineapples, but every time I eat them now, I think of you LOL.
Reading your words my heart is filled with intense respect for you...your story touched my heart.I am speechless.Thanks for sharing :)
ReplyDeleteI remember, in 1953, going through Hawaii and taking a ride in a bus past a pineapple plantation. Later, in 1955, I went past several plantations and the pineapple plants were small. I never saw any workers but could smell the pineapple smell.
ReplyDeleteMy mom used to work every summer in tomato cannerys. She had to peel the skin off after the tomato had been in scalding hot water. She used a tomato peeling knife. It was a hot job and not much pay.
To this day, I am not fond of pineapple, because of that smell all those years ago. But I can't get enough tomatoes.
Kay, what a very touching story! What hot and terrible work that was for you! I am glad you went to college and became a teacher. Every time I eat pineapple I will think of you and all the hand labor it takes to make a perfect pineapple slice! HUGS to you!
ReplyDeletewow, our kids today have it so easy...they don't realize what real work is. even washing clothes is so easy. I just got a fresh? pineapple from some friends. But they don't taste as good as the ones in Hawaii. Interesting post...
ReplyDeletehaven't eaten too many pineapples, myself, since those days, either. I worked on the other side of the wall (the pineapple machine side) and the female trimmers would pound on the glass windows, "stop the machine, idiot, stop the machine," either because their pineapple belt was already overloaded and spilling all over the tables, or the pineapple machine was not trimming off deeply enough off the pineapple skin. They would get so pee-ed off with the machine attendant all the while the machine pumped more pineapples onto their tables at 70-80 pines per minute. Actually, there was a flashing red light that the trimmers turned on, on our side of the wall, for us to stop the machine. But after standing for hours manning the pineapple machine (12-hrs during peak season), the attendants' minds weren't at it's sharpest.
ReplyDeleteWhat slave labor! Thank God I never worked in the cannery, though some of my high school classmates did.
ReplyDeleteI hated the odor every time I drove past the cannery later in life, and was not sorry to see it close.
It puzzles me when you say your parents were poor when you were a child. Yet, your mom lives in a nice house in a good neighborhood, now. How did that happen? Did she win the lottery? Sorry, just being facetious!
Very interesting story. I cannot imagine working a job such as that. One does what one has to do!
ReplyDeleteAnother parallel in our lives, Kay. We were poor when I was growing up too. But there was never any question of my going to college. That was not considered an option. I was the first one in all of my father's large family to get a college degree. But I always worked in the fields during the summer, and then during college, I worked summers in a strawberry processing plant, on the belt. We had to grab the rotten berries, the clumps of dirt, the earwigs that like to live in the wooden crates. You had to squish the earwigs before throwing them in the slop bucket so they didn't crawl up your leg. Sometimes I worked at the top of the belt where it was my job to make the last grabs, and to stop the belt if there was too much bad stuff on the belt. But the company was not happy if you stopped the belt, so you just worked as hard as you could to prevent that. We usually weorked at night, after the picking was done that day. We made a dollar an hour. A couple of times I worked on the other side, where the packing was done. These were boys jobs, and the got paid $1.75 an hour, but when I susbtituted over there, I still got my $1.00. Ah, the good old days.
ReplyDeleteAnd no, I'm not that fond of strawberries.
Oh that young people today who want to quit school could read this post. It's hard for some people to understand education is the key to getting away from those kind of jobs. Anyone who did not have the opportunity to get an education and worked years on end in that plant would I'm sure urge young people to get an education so they didn't get stuck in that kind of job.
ReplyDeleteIt was a cleaning service job that sent me off to college. I got my fill of cleaning other people's toilets quick fast! Yuk!
ReplyDeleteI toured the Dole Cannery after it was closed and turned into a Mall. Even so, one could see that those weren't ideal working conditions.
Kay -- It sounds just dreadful, and I'm pleased you were able to go to college and escape from the pineapple cannery.
ReplyDeleteMy grandfather was a foreman in fish canneries, and fruit canneries, in British Columbia when I was young, and I know it was hard work. We were very happy when he went from that to selling real estate when he was over 50.
-- Kay, Alberta
Wow...I worked in retail and as a waitress..not as challenging as your job Kay...
ReplyDeleteI was fortunate in that I was an only child and my parents were well able to give me the pocket money I needed, but I still had lots of different holiday jobs to make the extra money that I wanted. I worked in offices and waitressing and children's summer camps and apple picking. When my sons were growing up we did much the same - gave them just enough pocket money, but if they wanted more they had to get jobs, which they both did of course, because our idea of what was enough pocket money was nowhere near their idea of what they needed!
ReplyDeletewow Kay, what a fascinating (true) story. I'm sorry for people that have to do that work now. There must be a better way. Is this the fault of capitalism? or industrialization?
ReplyDeleteWow Kay, you have such EXPRESSIVE eyes.
ReplyDeleteI have never asked my sister about the cannery. Hmmm, come to think of it, I've never seen her OR my brother eat pineapple.
At our next cousins get together please be advised that you are hereby declared fair game for scientific experiments to determine just how fast that sheen on your forehead takes to develop. If I can remember to get some pineapple before then.
walt