Traverse City Record-Eagle

Terry Wooten: Elders Project

Related Photos

  • Terry Wooten

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  • Moses Butler, third from left with bucket around his neck, and the cherry-picking crew, circa 1910. Special to the Record-Eagle/Elk Rapids Historical Society

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July 12, 2010

Lifelines: Poetry of lugs & shakers

Adventures in cherry harvesting through the ages

By TERRY WOOTEN Local columnist

Cherry farmers are too busy. They hardly ever make it to the Cherry Festival. I married into a cherry farming family. You can imagine how excited they were when their youngest daughter brought home a poet to meet the family.

Farmers are very practical people. My wife's grandpa wouldn't even let his sons have bicycles.

He said they were dangerous. However, when my father-in-law turned 13 his dad put him in the flatbed truck and told him, "You're going to haul cherry lugs to the co-op."

My experience in cherry harvesting was driving a cherry shaker for several summers. I slowed the whole operation rescuing baby birds' nests out of the trees.

I figured out you could carry extra nests on the shaker machine, and how to rescue baby birds off the conveyor belt. Mother birds would accept the substitute nests. Or I would climb the cherry tree quickly and remove the nests before we shook it, then put it back. The world would be a much duller place without songbirds and poets.

This month the Elders Project explores our history in cherry harvesting. Marie Veliquette, Bruce McLachlan and Janet Morrison, local farmers, were interviewed by Elk Rapids junior high and high school students.

For folks visiting the Cherry Festival, the Elders Project mixes young people with community elders. Students interview and tape record elders, then write free verse poems using the elders' own words. I transcribe and write around the kids' work.

Poet Bard Terry Wooten has been performing and conducting writing workshops in schools for 27 years. He is the creator of Stone Circle. Learn more about him at www.terry-wooten.com.

Marie Veliquette, 1930s

Dad died when I was six.

Mother had to get some kind of income,

so we picked cherries

for the neighbors' farm.

 

We'd get up before daylight,

have our breakfast,

feed the chickens and pigs,

water and milk the cows

and pack our lunch

before we went to the orchard.

 

We would be there by the crack of dawn

when you could see the cherries

on the trees.

 

We worked till six o'clock.

Then we would go home

and do the chores all over again.

 

We picked cherries for fifteen cents a lug

and worked hard

to get seven lugs each,

so we could make a dollar

a day.

 

One day mother climbed on top

of a ten foot ladder

and fell off.

She didn't get hurt.

All she did was spill

a pail of cherries.

Mother was mad about that.

— Poem by Terry Wooten

Bruce McLachlan, 1940s

In 1943 my two brothers

were both in the service.

We had a cherry farm with no help.

It was mom, dad and me.

 

During harvest

we had about a hundred pickers.

They picked in eight or ten quart pails

and emptied them in lugs.

 

We had a cherry separator

the horses dragged along

to sort the cherries.

It was hot

out there in the orchards.

 

There was an old honey tank

full of drinking water

with a dipper everybody used.

A top fit right over the dipper.

 

When I was fourteen

in 1944 the price of cherries

started going up.

It was the first time we had any money.

 

We were so busy

we hardly had time to eat.

Dad would buy a case

of Franco American Spaghetti.

It tasted awful good

because we'd never ate it before.

We hardly had any store food.

 

Mother would go in

and warm it up.

We'd gobble it down quick,

and go right back out

into the orchards.

— Poem by Terry Wooten

Janet Morrison, 1950s

All the cherries we harvested

in lugs.

Before we had the processing plant

Pete had to haul

the lugs of cherries

to Traverse City,

and wait in line to unload

by hand.

 

My husband would be in line

for hours waiting.

He did that the whole summer.

 

It wasn't like now.

They haul cherries in water,

and chill them

to ship better.

 

At Cherry Festival time

Pete would have the truck in town.

If he got it unloaded

he'd have stacks of empty lugs.

 

The family would sit on empty lugs

and watch the fireworks.

That was fun!

— Poem by Terry Wooten

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