Sam Smith - News that cucumbers are being widely recalled due to a Salmonella outbreak, gives me an excuse to tell about my one summer as a teenager heavily involved with cucumbers. As I wrote about it:
In the course of their constant search for productive uses of the land, my parents one summer stumbled upon the idea of growing cucumbers for pickling. Growing cucumbers is easy; growing an acre and a eighth of them for pickling is not. The pickling factory bought them at prices that varied in inverse ratio to their size. The best price by far were for those barely larger than one's finger. The ordinary cucumber of the magnitude one would find in a grocery store was well past its pickling prime and brought the least per pound. The time between the former and latter state often appeared to require less than a day. Despite one's certainty that all of the smaller cucumbers -- or A grade -- had been discovered underneath the long lines of vines, the mere existence of the larger -- or C grade -- cuke provided evidence that the search had been inadequate. There were always an embarrassing number of C grade cukes.
Fortunately, the task was so great, and required so many pickers, that my parents could not discover individual responsibility for careless plucking. After all, it could easily have been one of the numerous house guests dragooned into the operation in order to stay ahead of the life cycle of the common cuke On one occasion, even my grandfather appeared in the field in his black tie and black suit to pick for awhile.
At the end of the morning, my brother and I would load hundreds of pounds of cucumbers into the 1941 Plymouth station wagon and haul them to Portland 20 miles distant where they would be weighed and then dumped into huge, malodorous vats. I learned that summer that loading things and driving them some place was fun. Picking them was not. On the way back we would pass five widely spaced small red signs with white lettering. They read:
Big new tube
Just like Louise
You get a lot
In every squeeze
Burma Shave
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