Why I Count My Pennies

We were poor when I was growing up. I just didn't know it because we were all poor in the sugar plantation camps. My mother sewed my clothes until I could do it myself.

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.


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.


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.


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.


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.