Why Work

Has anyone noticed the change in the workforce in the last 30 or so years? It is odd that when folks are working two weeks out of four and continue to complain about having to be at work when they are there, and then complain loudly when asked to work overtime often turning the extra time down. It's disturbing to me . . . Dad taught me to work when I was very young living in New Mexico while he was employed by the El Paso Natural Gas Company. We lived in company housing up and away from the small community of Kirtland. Dad was doing shift-work at the processing plant and in his off hours he would voluntarily work on my Uncle Roy's ranch and on my Uncle Grant's apple orchard. Many nights he would get up in the middle of the night to go to Uncle Grant's orchard to reset the water lines during irrigation season. After the picking season was complete, Dad would often go the orchard and prune the trees to get them ready for the next season. When we were big enough to go with him it was our job to collect the prunings and bring them out of the orchard. I was always excited to go help with the work, maybe not always that much help but definitely happy to be there. It was exciting for me to be in the orchard working. In the summers there was always hay to pick up and put up. I was too small to handle the bales, so they put me in the cab of the truck and gave me the job of keeping the truck headed down the row of hay bales without hitting any of them. Someone would put it in "granny" and I would sit there in the drivers seat and steer it down the field while the men moved around picking up bales and throwing them up on the flat bed to a man up there who had the job of stacking the bales neatly on the truck.



Later on I always wanted a job. I had paper routes for a while. In the afternoon after school I would hop on my bike after school and head down to the La Grande Observer office to collect the papers for my route. I had to stuff and roll all the papers before I could load them in my paper bags on my bike and deliver them. In the morning before school I would be up and delivering the Oregonian. Mel or Mom would spot the papers along my morning route because the Oregonian was so big I couldn't haul all the papers for my route in my bags. The paper routes didn't pay very well though and I didn't make much money, so I was looking for something more lucrative.


I had a friend the worked for the DelMonte cannery in Pendleton during the summer harvesting peas around La Grande, and I thought it would be good if I could get on with them one summer. At the end of the summer harvest the harvesters were driven back to Pendleton to the cannery and my buddy convinced me that the company had a sign up list back at the cannery and that anyone that showed up could sign the list and work for them next summer. We concocted a plan to get me back to Pendleton to sign the work list. The plan was for me to hop on the harvester he was driving as they passed through town and ride along with him. I hopped on as the parade of harvesters made their way through La Grande on the truck route. I managed to climb up and into the grain storage bin up on top of the machine. I ducked down so I wouldn't be seen as we made our way east on highway 84 to Pendleton. Everything went well for a while until we were about half way between La Grande and Pendleton when the crew boss saw me as I popped my head out of the bin to see where we were and how the trip was going. He pulled up alongside the harvester and stopped the parade right there on the highway! I crawled out and got into the back of his pickup at his insistence. I suppose I was lucky he didn't leave me there on the highway to make my own way home. I rode the rest of the way to Pendleton in the back of his pickup and tried my dangest to talk them into signing me on for the harvest next summer but nothing doing. Not only were they mad at me for jumping the harvester but I was a year too young to participate in the harvest. Eventually we all loaded up in the crew bosses rig and made the trip back to La Grande. Once again lucky they didn't leave me sitting in Pendleton to find my own way home.

I learned a valuable lesson that summer . . . There is no easy path to success!