How Potato Pickers Were Paid for Every Barrelful They picked

Artist Cheryl Dean Everett’s rendition of a 1970s potato harvest, inspired by a diggin’ crew on the Fred Russell farm.

Grampy Orin Russell tossed the contents of a long, wooden box onto the table—hundreds of dusty paper tickets with numbers on them. “There, that'll keep you busy,” he said as he left with the box. “I’ll bring in the red truck’s later.”

The red truck was only used when the newer blue and gray trucks were too busy hauling potatoes out of the field. That meant we had a big production day, which meant a lot more tickets to count. I was old enough, in 1964, to help.

Grapples used to lift barrels filled with potatoes onto flat-bodied trucks.

Every flat-bodied truck had a box attached to the back of the cab, next to the hydraulic lift. Each box had a round hole in the lid attached with hinges where the truck crews dropped in tickets from every 165-pound barrel of potatoes filled by pickers.

Schools all over Aroostook County--including our's in Fort Fairfield--were closed for about three weeks so students and adults could harvest the crop.

Every picker in Dad’s field had a wad of tickets with numbers printed on them, a different number for each worker. A picker would stick one ticket into a groove on the rim of every barrel he (or she) filled in his own section in the field that Dad had paced out beforehand. That’s how we knew how many barrels of potatoes were picked.

Iris Russell sorting tickets in the 1970s.

In the kitchen, Mom grabbed a large handful of tickets and formed three rows in front of her on the table covered with old newspapers. She lined up the tickets in the order of their numbers.

I did the same. Then I pulled out a “5” from my handful and looked at her pile. She already had several.

“That’s Jean,” Mom said. “She’s havin’ a good day.”

Opened ticket box attached to the back of the truck cab, next to the hydraulic lift and grapples.

Jean was the same age as my brother, who was five years older than me. Joe was working in the potato house where, as each storage bin filled up with potatoes, the men lifted more floor boards and moved the conveyors. The potato house crew also made sure only potatoes were stored, not rocks or dead tops from the potato plants that some kids tried to put in their barrels to fill them up faster.

Mom’s tickets made a snapping sound as she laid first one, then two, then three or more on top of each other. Her hands seemed to fly as she sorted, knowing instinctively where number 10 went and where her pile of 22s were.

Blue potato house built in 1960 by Horace Everett.

My ticket piles kept falling on top of each other.

After a couple hours, Gramp came back with more. He had them in a large cardboard box this time and dumped the contents onto the table, sending my piles toppling over. I pushed the new tickets back into the big mound in the middle and re-arranged the ones I’d already sorted.

We finished just before supper. Mom had gone in the car to take her two loads of pickers back to their homes. Dad took more kids in the pickup truck with the caboose—a wooden cab with benches inside—on the back.

Grammy Amy, who had come over to help, got out the bag of elastics.

“Number ones,” she said.

Dropping empty barrels in the “Big Field,” Russell farm.

I grabbed Mom’s pile and mine. She put them together with her’s and wrapped them with an elastic. We lined them up in numerical order inside a narrow, cardboard box. Then I folded the newspapers and put them away until supper was over.

The trucks hauled in later because the pickers had picked more barrels of potatoes than usual. They were picking faster because they could see that the big field was almost done and the faster they picked, the sooner they’d be finished. The weather was warm and dry, the field was dry, and the two-row digger didn’t have any breakdowns.

A portion of the list of pickers and their totals from the Iris Russell binder.

Mom and Dad were both late getting back and supper didn’t happen until 6. After supper, Mom and Gram cleared the table, I unfolded the newspapers, and Gramp dumped the rest of the tickets collected that day. In less than an hour we had them all sorted and put together with the others.

Then we started counting.

I picked up one wad of tickets, rolled down the elastic a little, and flipped each ticket forward, using my index and middle fingers, until I had handled and counted them all. Mom told me to watch for any tickets with a different number and for tickets folded over that might be missed.

Finally, I took a pencil and wrote “42” on the top ticket and put them next to Gram to recount.

After counting them, she said, “I make it 41.”

Mom recounted. “Gram’s right. It’s 41.”

Micmac-made ash potato basket.

An hour later, we had counted all the tickets at least twice to make sure our totals were correct. Then Dad came out of the other room and asked, “Would you mind getting my adding machine?”

I went into the little office next to the kitchen, opened the top right drawer of the roll top desk, and pulled out the Lightening Adding Machine. Painted a metallic green, the machine had seven round dials in a horizontal row across the front. Each dial looked like a miniature telephone dial, and a brown stand held the machine in a slanted position. I found the metal pen and handed everything to Dad.

“Number 37,” Mom said.

She paused and said, “52,” which was the number of barrels the picker with number 37 tickets had picked.

“Boys,” Dad said, “he did good today.”

He took his metal pen and placed the point in one of the dial holes and twirled it around just like you would if you put your finger in a telephone dial and twirled it around to get the number you wanted. Then he twirled the one next to it to record 52.

He kept adding more and more barrel totals onto the machine. The total figure showed up in the slots above the dials. At the end of the tabulations, the top number on the machine—1,625—was the total of barrels picked that day.

“That was the best day we’ve had yet,” he said, pushing the machine back and folding his hands.

Mom wrote the number down in her spiral leather binder that listed, on lined pages, the pickers’ names and ticket numbers, the totals they picked each day, and grand totals during the season in barrels and hundredweight. A good day was around 1,200 barrels.

At the end of each work week, Mom multiplied the pickers’ totals by 25 cents—the going rate for a barrel of potatoes back then—and Dad handed out the checks.

Mom put away her binder on top of the desk. I put the cardboard box of ticket bundles on the enclosed porch. The next morning the pickers would see if our totals were right or if they thought they might have picked more and the tickets had blown off their barrels or somehow went missing.

Frosty morning in Aroostook County.

Dad would be up before 5. If he thought it was going to rain, he’d be up earlier to hear the forecast, see if it had rained already, and answer any phone calls from workers wondering if we were going to dig. He’d also call the radio station to announce if he wasn’t digging because the ground was too wet.

Some farmers had started using mechanical harvesters, but Dad said machines bruised potatoes more than hand crews and he wanted perfect potatoes. He wasn’t planning on farming forever, and if he invested in new equipment, he wouldn’t get his money’s worth.

I couldn’t imagine Dad and Mom not farming and life not continuing like it had. I didn’t want anything to change, except me counting tickets faster and better, like the adults. (This story was also published in Stories of Aroostook )