One of the girls at work was telling me a story about riding on the tailgate of a truck. That got me thinking about when I used to dangle my legs from a sitting position at the back of the orchard trailer.

Most people who grew up during the 50’s and 60’s would remember the days before bins. Those were the days when all the fruit was hauled to the packing house in “apple” boxes. The boxes weighed about 35 to 40 pounds with fruit in them and each one had to be man handled.

To use pears as an example, the picking bag about 3/4 full would fill an apple box, then an empty box would be stacked on the full one for the next load. The boxes were stacked 4 high in as many rows as needed.

Wally would come along with tractor and trailer and load the full boxes onto the trailer stacking them 3 high. Some were 4 high but just those in the middle of the load. The outside rows front and back on the trailer were single stacked while the second rows in were double stacked. This was to prevent those stacks from falling over during transit.

There was usually no room for me to sit with a load of fruit, so I would stand on the trailer hitch right  behind Wally while he drove. We drove to  the platform where we unloaded and stacked the boxes of fruit  6 high.

The packing house sent a flat deck truck out daily to pick up the load of fruit after we hauled it out of the orchard. The driver had a hand truck with a special clamp on the bottom. He would wheel the hand truck up to a stack of boxes, press a lever, the clamp would grip the bottom box enabling him to pick up the whole stack and wheel it onto his truck. When he loaded all our fruit, he would secure his load and leave for the packing house.

When we unloaded all full boxes, I would sit at the back of the trailer, dangling my feet and bouncing them off the ground while Wally drove back to the pear picking site for another load.

I could comfortably pick 50 or 60 boxes a day of pears. Two or three others picking would yield similar results, so Wally could ship 200 boxes a day or so to the packing house.

I haven’t mentioned anything about the empty boxes. The packing house would send them out on one of their trucks and the driver would stack them on the platform before each variety was ready to pick.  Each grower knew how many boxes he would need for each variety of fruit for the season.

With tractor and trailer Wally would pick up the empties from the platform and distribute them throughout the orchard where the picking was being done. To make the handling a little easier, the boxes were clustered together in groups of three.

All this excitement ended when bins came on the scene. The poor apple box became history along with riding on the back of the trailer.

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