Angelo and the Fruit Shed

There weren’t many jobs available to young people in Auburn.  Some kids found work in gas stations and grocery stores.  Some worked on their family cattle and fruit ranches.  The largest employer of summer help was the Mendelson-Zeller Company that operated a fruit packing shed on Nevada Street on the west side of town adjoining the north bound railroad line.

There was another fruit shed further up the road, but it didn’t do as much business, and there were other sheds located in other communities, especially further west toward Sacramento.

Fruit ranchers (we didn’t call them farmers), would pick their plum and pear crops all summer, depending upon the variety.  Some ranchers had their own small packing operations on site, but most trucked their produce to the fruit sheds in “lug boxes” loaded on flat bed trucks.

Most of the ranchers were either Portuguese or Japanese in origin.  We more familiarly called our Portuguese “Portagees,” but not to their faces, of course.  We never called our Japanese neighbors “Japs” because that was a term of derision reserved for the attackers of Pearl Harbor, not our Japanese American neighbors who suffered humiliation, economic loss, and dislocation with dignity.

The ranchers would back their trucks up to a loading dock, and young men, mostly college kids like me would off load the fruit and take it into a large refrigerated storage room at the back of the shed.  We used hand trucks that had a claw-like gripping device that would slide under the bottom box that enabled you to pick up a stack of  six or seven lug boxes at a time.

The trick was to tilt the whole stack so that the entire weight of the stack balanced over the two wheels on the bottom of the hand truck.  If you pulled back too far on the stack, it would topple over on top of you; not good.  By God’s grace, I never dumped a load of fruit.

After you got some experience in trucking the fruit around, you could appoint yourself as a hot shot where you could pick up a stack, tilt it back, spin around and then shoot down the steel ramp slung between the truck and the dock.  Then, when you were ready to place the stack, you stepped on and rode the foot petal while balancing the load into the back of the stack what had been placed earlier.  Slam! Bam! Thank you, mam!

My friend and school chum, Harry Benzie was a top, top dog hand trucker when he wasn’t being “Harry Benzie, New York Yankees.”  He could do the best intricate balances and spins.  I do remember that he took a couple of spills, though.

The head man at Mendelson-Zeller what Angelo Lemos, the father of another chum of my, Dick Lemos.  Angelo wore a thin pencil-thin moustache and close cropped black hair.  He looked exactly as you would imagine a Latin lover.  He was Mr. Latin Macho.  Angelo rarely dealt directly with us workers.  He communicated his wishes through his number two guy, Al, or one of the other supervisors.

We all liked Angelo.  He was our friend Dick’s father, and we always thought of him as a father figure, even when he occasionally yelled at one of us.

Much of Angelo’s time was spent commiserating with the ranchers.  You never met a happy fruit rancher.

“Well, Tony, how’s your crop this year?”

“It’s the shits.  The Goddamn weather has been too wet.  We’re getting screwed on prices, again.  That Goddamn inspector doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  My fruit is the best, but what you gonna do?”

My first year at the fruit shed was in the summer of 1956 after graduation from high school.  Shortly after I went to work, I was assigned the job of dumping fruit lugs of plums on a conveyer belt so that the girls could repack the fruit by size into small wooden containers.  I don’t recall exactly, but I’d guess that a shipping box of plums could hold about a dozen containers.

I don’t know if I got the job because I was real good or real bad at handling a hand truck.  I’d prefer to think the former because you had to be mindful to keep just the right amount of fruit on the belt at any given time.  Too much and it was hard for the girls to pick out the right sized fruit.  Too little and it increased the packing time; the girls got paid for piecework, so they had to develop a skill for packing a container quickly.

There were about a dozen girls working the plum packing line.  They were all in my class or a year younger.  I don’t remember any homely ones.  Maybe Angelo liked to have pretty girls around, too.  In any event, I was happy that they were all pretty.  I could get into a rhythm dumping the fruit and letting my mind wander over fanciful things.  It was surprising how quickly I could make the day pass by.

After five o’clock, the packers went home, and the rest of us loaded refrigerated cars with the finished product.  When I say “refrigerated”, I actually mean cars that have been loaded with ice in bunkers at each end.

A typical workday was about twelve hours.   Since I was earning $1.00 to $1.35 per hour over the three years that I worked there, all the hours that I could accumulate helped.

In subsequent years, I moved from the plum line to nailing on lids of plum boxes, then pear boxes.  It was good work.

Angelo lived to a ripe old age, and passed away in 2004, or so.  Unfortunately, his son Dick, my  classmate, only lived less than a year longer.  He died of cancer.