Farm Work
Frances Koral
— It was very hard. It was very hot and we were not experts. At the beginning we were practically crawling through the rows and we were very hot. We did not sing, not like the movies. Some of us kvetched. I don't think we talked much 'cause these were rows and everybody was at a different place. I guess every once in a while we came up to somebody and we would chat with them a little while and then we kept going.
Marjorie Brockman
— I think we sang, but I don't remember talking. We'd yell at each other occasionally.
Phyllis LeShaw
— We sang on the bean fields and we harmonized as we're picking peas and beans. "When You Were A Tulip," "Dream," the top songs of the day. War songs. "He's A-1 in the Army and he's A-1 in my heart."
Elliot Levine
— In our honor they had the worst summer of rain since 1917. We were told that. And I remember standing out in the field with the rain pouring down and there was an airplane hanger nearby that belonged to the U.S. Navy air Force and we weren't allowed in it. It was off limits. We just had to stand there and get drenched. At another place there was a barn where we were able to duck in until the rain stopped, and we hung around there until the truck came and took us back. I went out in the field and picked a few pocketsful of peas and shelled them and ate them to stave of the pangs until we got to dinner.
Frances Koral
— There was no special place to eat lunch so when it was time to eat lunch we sat down where we were, and maybe if somebody was next to us then we would chat at lunch. And we ate our sandwiches and drank whatever we brought to drink. Never in my life at home did I make a peanut butter and peach sandwich, but we did have peanut butter and we did have peaches.
Elliot Levine
— You were supposed to grasp a whole bunch of the vines and rip them out, sort of hold them on your lap, and then with one hand, hold onto the vines, with the other hand, strip off the peas and throw them in the bushel basket. And I was going one by one by one. Well, of course, I never even filled a basket that first day till I learned some of the tricks. With beans somehow it was a little easier. You weren't supposed to rip up anything. One got reprimanded by Mr. Booth for making it look like a bulldozer went through his row. But I had a friend, we were picking on adjacent rows, and although we were having a very lively discussion about whatever, I was amazed how fast his hands were working. I was never that fast. No matter how involved he got in a conversation he never stopped. And he was always way ahead of me in picking. That was Max. We became pretty good friends.
Phyllis LeShaw
— And there was one guy Abe, he used to run with the bushel and he got the first prize the first week. He would go like a maniac filling up the bushel.
Marion Greenstone
— I remember we used to sit— we discovered that that was the easiest way to do it. They grew in rows about so high, and we'd sit between the rows in our overalls. I don't even think we wore hats, we were so stupid. And it took us a long time to get the beans picked. And by the time you got a bushel, the beans would settle down and Hinman would always say, "You've got to top them. You've got to top them." And that took another hour, probably. And we'd get forty cents a basket, which was not very much money. So we were being exploited. But it was an interesting experience.
Marjorie Brockman
— We made fifty cents a bushel for picking the beans and you had to pick thirty-two pounds and make sure the bushel was crowned. Thirty-two pounds of string beans is a lot of string beans and if you wanted to support yourself and pay for your food and housing you had to pick many bushels a day.
Elliot Levine
— We were told that we would be able to pick an average of six bushels a day of peas or beans, those were the crops we picked, at fifty cents per bushel.
Phyllis LeShaw
— They were telephone peas, big, big peas called telephone peas, and sometimes regular peas, and a lot of string beans.
Marjorie Brockman
— We also weeded corn and that was the most horrible job, Walked between the huge corn stalks with large sort of machetes and cut the weeds down. I lost some of my romantic feeling about rural life.
Elliot Levine
— There was very little consciousness of what we were doing in relation to the war effort. We were just preoccupied with our own problems. I do remember two things. One of the boys, when we were moving bushel baskets around at the end of the day, said something like, "Come on! Let's fight those Nazis by moving those things over," or something like that. Suddenly there was a patriotic streak to it. And one day we came back on the truck and one of the faculty members held up headlines in a newspaper saying that we, the allies, had just taken Kiev. I'm almost embarrassed to say that my recollections of the Farm Project have very little to do with the fact that we were at war.