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July 1936. "Picking cherries. Yakima, Washington." Photo by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
When I was a kid I spent one day picking cherries at an orchard in Loveland, Colorado. I ended that day scratched, sticky and 35 cents richer. The only good thing was the mid-day meal, which included unpasteurized milk and homemade bread. This suburban boy might as well have been on another planet. Today it's a cherished memory.
Yakima is just down the road a piece from where I've lived all my life. When I was a kid my brothers and I would go into hysterics when TV ads for cheap junk told us to send our $1.95 ("cash only, no checks!") to Box 10, Yuh-kee-muh, Washington. It's actually pronounced Yak-ih-maw. Likewise, we could sometimes buy our cheap Like Seen on TV junk from an address in Spoh-cane Washington, instead of the real Spokane, pronounced Spoh-can. Washington State has some unusual place names, many of which get routinely mangled when spoken by non-natives. Puyallup and Sequim are probably the most mangled.
She is beautiful and very elegant in her khaki linen.
She's at the top of a 3 legged cherry picker ladder, favored for its stability on rough ground and the ability to wedge its way into brambles of branches. Have seen those up to at least 20 feet high. The basic principles of ladder safety are not being well observed here, but there's a lot of cherries to be picked and not much time to do it.
There are still some orchards in Yakima, though most are now in outlying areas. Most of the workers and increasingly orchard owners are of Mexican heritage. The wires in the background are probably there for hops to climb, not power lines.
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