THE KOHN-GRATIOT
PICKLE GRADING COMPANY
An Essay By George Cathcart
We graded no pickles at the Kohn-Gratiot Pickle Grading
Company in the summer of 1966. We graded a lot of cucumbers,
but no pickles. The fact is by the time they became pickles,
they had been graded long before.
We graded cucumbers fresh and raw from the field, with clumps
of dirt still clinging to their frogskin covers. The migrant
workers backed the trucks full of burlap bags stretched full
by cucumbers right to the entrance of the Kohn-Gratiot Pickle
Grading Company plant. The trucks came directly from the fields
where whole families of Mexican-American migrant workers stooped
in the sun to pick the cukes while supervisors tallied the bags
each picker brought in. They got paid by the sack.
On the back of the truck migrant boys opened the sacks and
poured cukes on the conveyor belt where they fell like muted
thunder and rolled down the chute like green commuters at rush
hour. Redolent of rich soil and fresh-cut vegetation, they paraded
past a gauntlet of dark-skinned women speaking non-stop Spanish.
The women looked for defective cukes: bent cukes, stunted cukes,
bitten cukes. Those had a different destination, a harder road
still to travel.They removed those from the mainstream and dropped
them on a separate conveyor. While the mainstream cukes rode
proudly onward to the grading machine, the rejects rode to a
dusty little vegetable crate off to the side of the machine,
all but forgotten.
Everyone watched the cucumbers that had passed the inspection
of the women. Those cukes fell from the conveyor belt onto a
field of parallel wooden slats that sloped down to the far end
of the machine ten yards away. The slats grew narrower and narrower.
The spaces between the slats grew wider and wider. The machine
shook with a loud rumble. The cucumbers slid down the slats.
When the cucumbers fit between the slats they fell onto chutes
and slid into wooden boxes that could hold a ton of cucumbers.
Whenever a box filled up, Mr. Zenger, the owner, threw a switch
and stopped the machine, and everything got quiet for a moment.
The pickles rested. Then we could see the beauty of the cucumber
grading machine. The box contained a ton of cucumbers that appeared
to be identical, all the same size, all the same color and curvature.
At one end were little ones destined to be gherkins, and at the
other end were big iceberg dills in training. Here at Kohn-Gratiot
Pickle Grading Company they were still just cucumbers. But they
had been graded and were beginning to take on an identifiable
purpose. If cucumbers could feel, it was just about this point
where they would start to feel proud.
Then a forklift whined to life and wailed its way into position,
lifted the box full of shiny conformist cucumbers and carried
it to a scale by the back door. There Mr. Zenger weighed the
box, subtracted the weight of the empty box from the total and
recorded the net weight of pickles on a tag tied to the box.
Meanwhile, workers had weighed another empty box and pushed it
into position to catch another ton of identical cucumbers. The
machine shook back into action, moving more cucumbers toward
pickledom.
By the time the cukes were ready to harvest and the trucks were
rolling steadily to the Kohn-Gratiot Pickle Grading Company,
I had already been working there a month or more. I was starting
to feel like my usefulness had run out.
I had come to Ithaca, Michigan, to live on my uncle's farm
for the summer after flunking out of college before joining the
army. My uncle had talked Mr. Zenger into giving me a job, at
$1.25 an hour. Mr. Zenger didn't usually need workers at his
plant in early June, but in 1966 he had bought and disassembled
12 redwood barrels from a defunct brewery in Pennsylvania and
brought the pieces back to Michigan. He needed to reassemble
the barrels beside the big tin-roofed shed that housed the grading
machine. He liked my uncle, so he agreed to hire me, sight unseen.
I guess my uncle told him I was young and strong. I was 18 and
strong enough.
The only workers there before the cucumbers needed picking
were myself and a couple of Mexican-Americans who spoke bad English
and rolled their own cigarettes with one hand. We caulked and
pounded together the barrel floors, and we reassembled the long
staves by pushing their notches onto the floors. We cut threading
spirals by hand in the ends of long steel rods. We wrapped the
rods around the barrels as hoops and drew them tight through
nuts on the threads we had cut. We slid cat-tail straw between
the staves as we tightened the hoops to make the barrels watertight.
The barrels stood about 12 feet high. So I helped to build
a raised walkway about eight feet high using one by sixes and
ten penny nails. We built it sturdy enough to hold a forklift
carrying a ton of cucumbers. Then we filled those barrels with
water and poured tons of salt into the water.
I was proud of those barrels and the walkway. There was a
fresh smell of old wood and sawdust and machine oil about us.
Each day I could see how much work I had done. In the evening,
when I got back to the farm, my uncle sent me to drive the tractor
through fields of cucumbers and beans, pulling some implement
behind me. Every night I was more tired than I had ever been
in my life when I finally sat down and ate my aunt's home-cooked
farm meal. Once a week, "Laugh-In" came on the black
and white television, and we all watched that and laughed ourselves
to tears. Otherwise, I just went to bed.
When the cucumbers ripened in the fields, the migrant workers
arrived. They came in pick-up trucks overflowing with children
of all sizes. They moved into barracks, called camps, two and
three families of 8, 10, 12 people all living in those camps.
The smells of beans and tortillas cooking filled the air. I learned
that the migrant families traveled together and picked together.
On Fridays each family lined up at the pay window in size order,
father first. Papa collected his pay, in cash, and then stood
aside. Mama collected her pay, handed the money to Papa and went
outside to wait in the pickup truck. Then the children collected
cash for the cucumbers they had picked and turned it over to
Father. It was true. I watched them do that, and nobody seemed
to mind.
Mr. Zenger told me that at summer's end, Father would take
the money the whole family had earned and buy a new pickup truck.
I don't know if that was true. I had left the farm by then to
join the Army.
Once the barrels were built and the cucumbers were being sorted
many times each day on the slats of the grading machine, I had
little to do. I didn't know how to run a forklift. Sometimes
I helped push empty boxes into position beside the grading machine
and signaled for it to be turned on. Sometimes I weighed the
full boxes and recorded the weight on the tag and did the math
to figure the net weight. I watched the forklift arrange the
boxes of graded, sorted, identical cucumbers on the backs of
the trucks that carried them off to Vlasic and Heinz and other
big pickling plants.
I also swept the floor a lot. The floor got pretty dirty and
needed sweeping, or at least that's what I determined when I
felt guilty about not doing enough to earn my $1.25 an hour.
As I was sweeping I saw the little vegetable crate overwhelmed
by rejected cucumbers. I identified with them. I was feeling
kind of useless and rejected, bent, stunted and bitten in those
days. I had flunked out of college and had chosen to go to my
uncle's farm rather than home to face my father. I knew that
the Army was my next step, and there was a war on.
Mr. Zenger told me the first day the trucks came in from the
fields that the reject cucumbers should go in the barrels full
of briny water outside. He never told me to do it, but it seemed
like the right thing to do the first time I saw that box overflowing
with sad little rejected cucumbers. Everyone else was busy looking
after the big fat healthy cucumbers, the ones chosen for pickling
glory. The box was heavy, but I just carried it out on the dock
I had built and dumped the refuse in the barrels. The brine sizzled
when the cucumbers fell in.
I brought the empty box back inside and filled it by hand
with more discards from the floor and dumped it three or four
times before the stream of rejects slowed enough so I could put
the box in place and let it fill on its own.
Mr. Zenger preserved the rejects in brine so he could make
relish out of them. That was progress. In the past he had either
thrown them away or sold them to pig farmers. In 1966, for the
first time, the rejects had a destination, after all. That made
me feel better about them. It gave me hope. Those deformed, stumpy,
bitten cukes were simply being chosen for a different purpose,
but they needed a helping hand, my hand.
I try to keep that in mind now when I see piles of rejects,
and there are so many. Somebody's got to make the barrels. Somebody's
got to get them to the brine. But it is so much easier to take
care of cucumbers, and I don't really understand why. Today I
see the stunted and bent and bitten on the street corners and
freeway exit ramps. Some hold signs. Some have children. It's
very hard to miss them. It's easy to ignore them. I do.
Is it fair to compare people to cucumbers? Sure it is. What
isn't fair is to treat cucumbers better than people. Because
there is one big difference between cucumbers and people. The
difference is this: The cucumber's destiny is fixed when it passes
the Spanish-speaking women. The good ones, the chosen ones, will
go on to fulfill their pickle destiny. The others will become
relish.
But at the Kohn-Gratiot Pickle Grading Company, relish had
not always been the fate of the rejects. People can allow cucumbers
to become more than they expected, to be of use. People can do
the same thing for other people, but they often choose not to.
It's very easy to know this. It's still not so easy to do
it.
-END-
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