Saratoga News

Saratoga Stereopticon

Willys Peck

Prunes once dictated school's starting date

The opening of school is upon us, and so is the prune harvest. Time was when these two events were inextricably intertwined, the latter having a considerable bearing on the former. All of which leads to a discussion of some basic terminology, prompted by occasional printed and spoken references to "fruit farms" and "plum orchards."

Strictly speaking, neither term is incorrect. Orchards, which is what most of the present city of Saratoga--and practically the whole valley, in fact--used to be, certainly constitute a variety of farm. And, to quote Saratoga patriarch Vince Garrod, "All prunes are plums, but not all plums are prunes." Some people think of the term "dried prune" as a redundancy since a prune, by definition, is a dried plum. There is some dictionary authority for this, but it never did fly locally. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, prune is a prune is a prune is a prune.

About that school connection. Back a couple of generations ago, kids of school age were expected to work in the harvest of prunes and other crops, and it made economic sense to have school dates correspond to these seasons.

In the late summer and early fall, the prune harvest was the main determinant. Picking prunes was hard, dirty work. The fruit was picked from the ground, which, though plowed and usually harrowed in the springtime, was still lumpy, with sharp clods. Picking generally was required during one of the hottest times of the year. At the Saratoga Historical Museum there is displayed a pair of leather knee pads of a kind favored by some pickers to avoid an otherwise bruising experience.

Payment was by the 40-pound lug box, two large fruit buckets being required to fill one box. Ten cents a box was pretty good pay. At the bottom of the Depression, I am told, it was as low as 5 cents a box. School kids, depending on how thick the prunes lay on the ground, would do well to average 10 boxes a day. I remember the festive atmosphere at home in the late summer of 1934 when my older brother reported that he had picked 20 boxes. It was hard work but, in a sense, it was character-building. Kids who picked prunes really knew the value of a dollar.

For my own part, I can't claim to have been part of that scene, a circumstance I now regret. I did have the task of picking prunes in our yard on Orchard Road, where there still were a dozen or so trees left from a previous era, but it wasn't like the daily ordeal of my brother and others.

I am reminded of the stirring words spoken by the king just before the battle of Agincourt in Shakespeare's King Henry V: "And gentlemen in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here." I may not quite think of myself as accursed, but I would like to be able to say that I was there, sweating out some of those long days in the orchards.

This brings up another issue, that of terminology. Some grammar purists might argue that the term "prunepicker" should be hyphenated. I, in turn, would argue that the heat in which these people often worked was sufficient to fuse the words together, and that one who picks prunes professionally is not a prune-picker but a prunepicker.

I've always thought that Saratoga High School missed a bet in not designating its teams Prunepickers. There's a lot to be said for indigenous names for school teams. Los Gatos High School Wildcats is a good example, wildcats being responsible for the town's name.

I have admired Whittier College, which I attended briefly until the Army intervened, for denominating its teams "Poets," after the Quaker namesake of the town and college, John Greenleaf Whittier. There is a delicious incongruity in sports story references to the Poet varsity, or the fighting Poets of Whittier College.

I know it won't happen, except in the mind's eye, and in my mind's eye I can see the erstwhile Saratoga High School Falcons trouncing their conventionally named foes on the gridiron, the court and the diamond.

Go, Prunepickers!

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