MAY CONTAIN NUTS
HOME
 
JUMP TO PAGE   100  >  200  >  300  >  400  >  500  >  600
VINTAGRAPH • WPA • WWII • YOU MEAN A WOMAN CAN OPEN IT?

American Picker: 1936

July 1936. "Picking cherries. Yakima, Washington." Photo by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.

July 1936. "Picking cherries. Yakima, Washington." Photo by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.

 

On Shorpy:
Today’s Top 5

Why is this woman smiling?

When I was a kid I spent one day picking cherries at an orchard in Loveland, Colorado. I ended that day scratched, sticky and 35 cents richer. The only good thing was the mid-day meal, which included unpasteurized milk and homemade bread. This suburban boy might as well have been on another planet. Today it's a cherished memory.

Yuh-KEE-muh

Yakima is just down the road a piece from where I've lived all my life. When I was a kid my brothers and I would go into hysterics when TV ads for cheap junk told us to send our $1.95 ("cash only, no checks!") to Box 10, Yuh-kee-muh, Washington. It's actually pronounced Yak-ih-maw. Likewise, we could sometimes buy our cheap Like Seen on TV junk from an address in Spoh-cane Washington, instead of the real Spokane, pronounced Spoh-can. Washington State has some unusual place names, many of which get routinely mangled when spoken by non-natives. Puyallup and Sequim are probably the most mangled.

Khaki Linen

She is beautiful and very elegant in her khaki linen.

Classic three leg ladder

She's at the top of a 3 legged cherry picker ladder, favored for its stability on rough ground and the ability to wedge its way into brambles of branches. Have seen those up to at least 20 feet high. The basic principles of ladder safety are not being well observed here, but there's a lot of cherries to be picked and not much time to do it.

Still Picking

There are still some orchards in Yakima, though most are now in outlying areas. Most of the workers and increasingly orchard owners are of Mexican heritage. The wires in the background are probably there for hops to climb, not power lines.

Syndicate content  Shorpy.com is a vintage photography site featuring thousands of high-definition images. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago. Contact us | Privacy policy | Accessibility Statement | Site © 2024 Shorpy Inc.