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Being a New Jersey public school teacher for thirty-four years meant that I had to find summer employment to supplement my mediocre yearly income. Since schoolteachers are contracted employees they are not eligible to collect unemployment benefits during their ten-week unpaid summer vacations. In fact teachers dont receive paid vacations at all! My job predicament allowed me to find and explore many different alternative occupations that I wouldnt have dabbled in if I had been in a profession that demanded a twelve-month -commitment and a corresponding twelve-month-remuneration. In 1965 and 1966 I worked on my father-in-laws four hundred- acre fruit and vegetable farm on the White Horse Pike (Route 30) in Elm just outside Hammonton, New Jersey. I drove a forklift, loaded tractor trailers, spent many hours in the packinghouses cold storage and generally helped manage the growing, harvesting and shipment of peaches, nectarines, apples, sugar plums, zucchini squash, corn, peppers and tomatoes, for they were the principal crops raised on White Horse Farm.
My father-in-law was a tough Sicilian taskmaster and we often didnt see eye-to-eye in regard to personnel management and our colliding philosophies pertaining to ordinary day-to-day operations were often at different ends of the thought spectrum. From 1968 to 1981 I co-owned and operated Dealers Choice, an amusement arcade doing business under the Atlantic Hotel at 410 South Boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. People (mostly tourists with money to burn) would come into the establishment and play poker machines that were activated upon the drop of a dime into a slot, and if they obtained a hand of Jacks or Better the customer received a coupon of different values depending on whether the hand was a pair, two pair, three of a kind, a straight, a flush, a full house, four of a kind or a fabulous straight flush. If a rare Royal Flush occurred the player was entitled to Choice of the House, which constituted the top-value-prizes ranging from a giant stuffed animal to a blender, a roaster oven, a desk radio or an electric frying skillet. The arcade also featured money pushing games like Flip-A-Win, Splash Down and Pot of Gold where the player would insert a dime or a quarter and moving arms would push the inserted coin against a pile of similar coins. The object of the Money Pushing Games was to force coins to accumulate and then fall down a chute.
Lets say if seven coins fell down the appropriate opening seven tokens would be won and would be ejected into the winning tray situated below where the player was standing. Each token was equal in value to a ten-cent coupon won on the poker machines thus making the coupons and the tokens compatible in terms of monetary exchange. From 1972 to 1981 I also co-owned the New Horizon Gift Shop on the boardwalk in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware where the enterprise specialized in applying decals to tee shirts using a hot heat transfer machine. And for four summers I was also a partner in an arcade business called Wheel and Deal on the Atlantic City Boardwalk near Missouri Avenue that was similar to the Ocean City, Maryland operation.
Wheel and Deal lasted until legalized gambling was passed for the New Jersey resort. My two partners and I lost our lease as competition for boardwalk space heated up and when prospective casinos began buying up strategic real estate all over the Queen of Resorts. So from 1977 to 1981 I was hopping back and forth like a neurotic jackrabbit from New Jersey to Delaware to Maryland riding the Cape May-Lewes Ferry delivering and shuttling around merchandise for the three independent summer operations. In 1982 and 83 I returned to White Horse Farm to give the place (and my obstinate father-in-law) a second chance but the aging man stubbornly refused to relinquish any authority so I again bolted from that Hammonton, New Jersey business and began managing an almost defunct farm market a mile west down Route 30. Much to my father-in-laws chagrin in three short summers Pastore Orchards Farm Market was miraculously transformed into the busiest and best retail produce outlet on the busy highway.
From 1987 to 2003 I diligently worked the hot summers as a field manager for Atlantic Blueberry Company, the largest cultivated blueberry farm in the world. The farm owned by the Galletta Brothers and Sons actually consisted of two pretty massive plantations. The main farm called the Weymouth Division was located just east of Hammonton and was comprised of eight hundred and fifty acres growing the luscious blue fruit and eight miles away on Route 322 (the Black Horse Pike) the Mays Landing Division of Atlantic Blueberry sported five-hundred and fifty acres. All the berries harvested on the smaller farm were transported by large company trucks from the Mays Landing plantation to the Weymouth Farm to be packed and then shipped by tractor trailers all over continental United States and Canada. Atlantic Blueberry was a massive operation growing anywhere from twelve to fifteen million pounds of the blue fruit (depending on seasonal crop volume) in an eight week harvest season. The biggest problem with blueberries is that the crop is very labor intensive.
A hundred men could operate a fourteen-hundred-acre peach farm but a fourteen-hundred-acre blueberry operation required anywhere from fifteen hundred to two thousand pickers a day during the height of the season. It was impossible for Atlantic Blueberry Company to house that many workers on their properties. The Weymouth Road camp accommodated three hundred Mexicans, a hundred of which worked in the packinghouse and in the bulk house next door while the remaining two hundred men picked with the Home Gang, which was supervised by brothers Mike and George Estrada, Puerto Ricans that had started as pickers back in the 60 s and who had eventually been promoted to lower management positions. Mike and George each have small houses on Farm # 1 and they and their families live rent-free as permanent year-round employees. And the smaller Mays Landing camp houses approximately two hundred and fifty men, all of whom pick berries on that scenic plantation. Juan Lopez (Love) and Ephraim Torres, long-time Puerto Rican employees, had the chore of overseeing the Home Crew and the prodigious harvests at the Mays Landing Division.
Because the combined farms only housed four hundred and fifty pickers Atlantic Blueberry had to contract with Day Haul crewleader's that could provide addition farm labor. Modesto Flores (a mild-mannered long-time Puerto Rican employee) and I managed the Day Haul pickers at Plantation # 1 and I was the Weymouth Road farms liaison to the outside crewleader's and had authority over their respective gangs. In the mid- 1980 s the outside gangs were mostly Oriental with pickers (commuting from Philadelphia in vans and Farm Labor Transport buses) of Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese origins all possessing green cards showing that they were legal resident aliens. The Oriental crewleader's possessed names like Bunyan Yang, Lu Vang, Vang Kusanni, Inlay Pathatogong, Chia Lin, Must Lo, Khammy Python and Yang Lo. One black gang at the Mays Landing Farm still remained from the 1950 s and it was commandeered by a woman crew leader, Frances Dantzler, also called Miss Frances by her obedient underlings. But in the mid- 1970 s area Puerto Ricans that had started out working on the local South Jersey peach and blueberry farms had found employment and more lucrative paying jobs in other industries and this left a giant agricultural work force vacuum that needed to be filled.
Soon an abundance of Mexican crewleader's and their followers began appearing in the early 1990 s and these new groups rapidly replaced the Oriental gangs that had previously fulfilled the farms labor needs. The Laotians, the Cambodians and the Vietnamese pickers had been sponsored by their crewleader's, who practiced a modern type of indenture system. The employees labored for their crewleader's for seven or so years and then migrated to and assimilated into factory jobs, construction work, fish canneries, lawn care services and toiling in nurseries. Most of the Oriental blueberry pickers had traveled early each morning in Farm Labor Transport buses and in vans thirty miles from Philadelphia to begin work on the New Jersey blueberry farms at 6 a.
m. The Mexican crewleader's that replaced the Orientals in the 1990 s had names like Hermann Castro, Juan Bravo, Mario Valesquez, Francisco Fuentes, Tomas Acquire, Margarito Gonzalez, Marco Rodriquez, Carlos Lopez, Olegario Garcia and Marco Sanchez. Most of the Mexican pickers come to Atlantic Blueberry on yellow school buses hired by the company to transport them up to the Weymouth and Mays Landing farms from Bridgeton and Vineland, New Jersey, communities where most of the Mexican pickers temporarily reside. This is a win-win situation for all parties involved.
The farm benefits because the workers now arrive safely to work on state inspected school buses that have the proper insurance coverage. The school bus company benefits because their drivers now have summer employment and the bus owners can generate additional revenue when schools are not in session. The outside Day Haul crewleader's like the new school bus transportation method because they save the expense of having their own Farm Labor Transport buses that had in the past required costly gas, maintenance and high insurance and inspection expenses. My responsibilities at Atlantic Blueberry were manifold and the farm owners had amusingly dubbed me the Director of Documentation.
Each Day Haul picker had to fill out a federal I- 9 Form (Immigration Paper) proving that he or she was legally eligible to work in the United States. Many of the older Orientals and Mexicans were illiterate and could not read or write so the crewleader's would fill out the I- 9 for them and I would check the forms to make sure that the information was correct before approving and collecting them. For example, a social security number on the I- 9 would have to have nine numbers and an alien green card cited as an official credential eight or nine digits. For pickers that were U. S. citizens, a bona fide state drivers license and a valid school I.
D. or a recently updated voter registration card had to also be included. The federal I- 9 forms were a real challenge to keep track of because pickers would often get on different yellow school buses and travel to different South Jersey farms and work for other crewleader's from day to day so the daily work force was continually changing. The Weymouth Farm would have anywhere between five hundred and a thousand Day Haul pickers show up at the south-end dirt parking lot every morning and the Mays Landing Farm anywhere between three and eight hundred prospective day workers waiting in line at the front gate to hook up with a crew leader and then be admitted onto the property at 6 a.
m. A crew leader would usually have anywhere from fifty to one- hundred-people that he or she would bring to Atlantic Blueberry. Another duty I had besides keeping track of the ever-challenging I- 9 forms was monitoring and collecting daily pay slips. Every Day Haul picker was paid cash by his boss (the subcontracted crew leader) in the farms parking lot after the workday had been completed. At the end of each afternoon every crew leader had to fill out a pay slip contract (on a triplicate form) for each worker with the workers name, social security number, home address, date, hours worked, time in and time out, units picked and total daily wage jotted down.
The white copy went to the field worker, the yellow copy to the farms main office and the pink copy was kept by the crew leader. The following morning or afternoon I would come to the crewleader's fields (Atlantic Blueberry Company had over a hundred and twenty separate fields) and check each workers yellow form to ascertain that everyone made more than minimum wage. Then I would drop off the crewleader's yellow copies to the farms main office on Weymouth Road, County Route 559 for Farm # 1 or to the Mays Landing Division Farm office on Route 322. Checking each Day Haul workers yellow pay slip was necessary because the pickers were all paid by piecework or units picked and not by hourly minimum wage (the pickers that lived in the camps on the two farms were paid by weekly Atlantic Blueberry checks). The piecework system was good for all parties concerned because it provided incentive for the Day Haul workers to fill flats fast since they were not paid by the hour and thus they could make more than minimum wage if they hustled (around forty-two dollars for an eight hour work day would have been the minimum wage daily salary). Most pickers earned between fifty and a hundred dollars a day on piecework being able to fill thirty-three trays to make a hundred dollars.
Some conscientious swift-handed pickers earned over a hundred and thirty dollars a day. Each picker was distributed a plastic picking basket attached to a cord, which the field worker was required to wear around his or her waist. Usually two full picking baskets could constitute a full red picking tray, which was equivalent to a flat of twelve pints when brought to the packing house by one of the crewleader's drivers. When two red picking trays were completed the picker would carry the two flats to the crewleader's field truck and then the worker was given a ticket for each flat by the driver. Each movie ticket (with the crewleader's color code and name printed on it) represented one flat picked and the worker was later paid three dollars and twenty-five cents for each tray filled. The farm would pay the crewleader's three seventy-five for each tray picked so each gang master made on-the-average fifty cents a tray, with some of the bigger crews during the height of the season picking over two thousand flats a day for their ambitious bosses.
The crewleader's were also accountable for maintaining quality control in their assigned fields. The blueberries on their trucks destined for the packinghouse had to be hard and not green. Each flat when brought to the field truck had to be inspected by the driver and by his loader to make sure it was acceptable to take to the packinghouse. After that standard had been met a picking ticket for each red tray was then handed to the worker, who would redeem his or her total tickets at the end of the day in the dirt parking lot for cash, which was (according to New Jersey Law) disseminated by the employees crew leader.
The farm provided each outside Day Haul crew leader with two box trucks. The crewleader's drivers would circle their fields until four skids of forty-nine trays on each had been loaded onto one of the two farm trucks. Then the berries were driven to the packinghouse where each skid would be picked up by forklifts and put on a scale for weighing. If the weight did not conform to a specified standard then the crew leader would be docked deducted trays from his percentage of making fifty cents a tray, so the workers were constantly reminded to pick hard berries and to fill their red trays so that their bosses made a decent profit. At the packinghouse each skid was labeled with the crewleader's name, Field Number and Blueberry Variety and then the berries were transported and temporarily held in the farms cold storage, which for blueberries had to be maintained at forty-two degrees (conversely a peach farm cold storage would be set for thirty-two degrees).
When the packinghouse production crew was ready to pack the berries from the cold storage, a forklift driver would take the skid of forty-nine red trays (neatly stacked seven flat by seven high) to one of ten conveyor belts on production lines. Next each red tray was carefully dumped onto a moving belt. Four sorters on each working line would take out the soft berries and the green ones to again ensure quality control. A weighing device would then insert the exact number of berries to make a standard satisfactory weight for each filled plastic pint. Another machine would then automatically close each lid on each plastic pint. Then the pints were trafficked to one of ten rotary tables at the end of each packing line and next the finished product was hand inserted into a handsome company shipping flat neatly containing twelve pints each.
The flats were then stacked on skids and immediately loaded onto tractor trailer refrigeration trucks to be shipped and transported all over continental United States and to Canada. When the berries arrive from the field the packinghouses un-loading dock and accepted in terms of weight for each skid, the packinghouse manager gives the crewleader's driver a yellow receipt for four skids (usually 196 red tray flats). Late in the afternoon the crew leader takes all of his yellow slips to the farms main office and a secretary adds up all the receipts and then issues a farm check to the crew leader. The field boss then goes to either the Hammonton or Mays Landing bank and cashes the farm check, getting the money to pay his or her people at the end of the day in the farm parking lot.
Of course the following morning or afternoon I would visit each crew leader in his assigned field and check and collect the yellow copies of the pickers daily contracts. Another duty I had as a field manager was filling our and checking working papers for children between the ages of twelve and sixteen that showed up on the farms each morning as part of a crew. These kids were sorted out each morning and not allowed to pick until proof of the proper documentation had been obtained. Even if Asian kids had Pennsylvania working papers or if Mexican children had working papers from another state, those documents were not valid in New Jersey. I had to make sure that each new arrival had an authentic birth certificate or alien card along with a social security card and an available parent to sign the working papers.
Then I would transport the kids to either Hammonton High School for the Weymouth Farm or to Oak crest High School for the Mays Landing Farm to get their credentials officially certified. Since the schools main offices werent open on weekends kids that came with working papers completed and registered on Saturday or Sunday could not go into the fields to pick. And kids under the age of twelve were ineligible to perform labor for wages and were not allowed to work at all and had to remain in the parking lot until quitting time. I also drove a bus for the Weymouth Farm. Modesto Flores and his son Willie (the farms parking lot guard) would have each crew leader line his or her people up in single file at 6: 30 each morning and four buses would transfer each gang to their designated picking fields. First the Home Gang had to be transported from the camp to their field and I would assist Mike Estrada driving his bus accompanied by my bus, good old faithful Number 54.
After the two hundred home crew pickers were efficiently deployed to their assigned field I then drove white Bus Number 54 to the dirt parking lot where I joined the other three buses in transporting the eight hundred or so Day Haul pickers to their respective fields. A crew could not go into a field without its crew leader present or a state registered crewleader's agent wearing an appropriate state-issued badge. Usually I would make six or seven bus excursions each morning. The crew leader would assign two pickers to each row in a particular field.
The two workers would stand on either side of the row and together pick each bush thoroughly. When a crew had finished picking a field I (Unit 13) would be called on my radio and I would quickly transport the workers from lets say Field # 14 to Field # 48, which might be over a mile away. Then at the end of the work day I would again drive white Bus Number 54 around the distant fields and pick up tired works at various waiting stations near irrigation pumps on the main gravel roads and courteously return them to the parking lot where they would be paid by their bosses. Usually each field was picked three times by hand at eight-day intervals. These are the berries that are sorted and packed in the packinghouse and then sold to the fresh market grocery stores. After the third hand picking by the crews large farm machines are deployed to do the fourth picking.
The machine-picked berries are generally smaller and of less quality and they are taken to the farms bulk house where they are graded by hand sorters and then frozen and packed in either ten or twenty pound boxes (for the better grade) or in fifty gallon steel drums for the lesser grade fourth picking fruit. The frozen machine picked blueberries are ordinarily sold to large food processors and subsequently used for pies, muffins and jams. My final responsibility as an Atlantic Blueberry Company field manager in charge of crewleader's was to represent them if they received citations for alleged violations from Inspectors from the New Jersey Department of Labor. Citations received might involve an under-aged child working in the field, a child found in the fields between the ages of twelve and sixteen without working papers, a pay slip discovered with a stated salary that did not conform with minimum wage laws, a crew leader without a badged agent in his field or inadequate insurance on a van taking workers to the farm.
Usually the New Jersey state inspectors would visit each farm three times a summer and twice each summer they would stop the buses carrying workers to or from the farms at certain checkpoints on the area highways to look for violations. The federal labor inspectors would check the I- 9 Forms along with other requirements and would visit the two farms once each summer. A crewleader's day might have some significant downsides too. On rainy days the people could not work in the fields and all must go home disappointed without earning any pay. Sometimes it rains at noon and the workers only make a half-days wages. But some gang bosses manage to compensate for their rainy day losses by running food businesses that sell meals to their workers from their own food trucks roaming around out in the fields.
The Weymouth Road Farms parking lot at the end of the day seemed like a combination of a carnival food bizarre and an amateur sporting event in progress. Tomas Aguires wife and brother and Francisco Fuentes wife would sell tacos and burritos from their enclosed food trucks, Ricky's Tacos and Franco's Tacos respectively. Other relatives of crewleader's would set up shop and vend food, chicken, cold soda, snacks and clothes from various homemade stalls or improvised benches and tables set up along the parking lots perimeter. In the meantime children would play impromptu games of touch football and soccer in the center of the huge dirt parking lot until the crewleader's finally arrived with their cash payrolls. Then everyone would quit their preoccupations and get in line to receive their daily wages. In 2003 (my last year at Atlantic Blueberry) the Weymouth Farm had an empty field next to the parking lot seeded and management installed soccer nets to allow for crews to compete against each other in friendly competition.
And a baseball field still existed on the Weymouth plantation where Puerto Ricans from Farm Number # 2 would play softball (and sometimes hardball) against its rival home field opponents. I had witnessed...
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