Life on the Blueberry Farm
by Jay Dubya 
Being a New Jersey public school teacher for thirty-four years meant that I had
to find summer employment to supplement my mediocre yearly income. Since
schoolteachers are "contracted" employees they're not eligible to collect
unemployment benefits during their ten-week unpaid summer vacations. And in fact
teachers don't receive paid vacations or paid holidays at all since they're
contracted to work a hundred and eighty school days! My job predicament allowed
me to find and explore many different alternative occupations during the
summertime that I wouldn't have ordinarily dabbled-in if I had been employed in
a profession that demanded a twelve-month-commitment and a corresponding twelve-
month-remuneration.
In the summers of 1965 through 1967 I worked on my father-in-law's four hundred-
acre fruit and vegetable farm on the White Horse Pike (Route 30) in Elm just
outside Hammonton, New Jersey. I drove a forklift, loaded tractor-trailers,
spent many hours in the packinghouse's cold storage and generally helped manage
the growing, harvesting and shipment of peaches, nectarines, apples, sugar
plums, zucchini squash, corn, peppers and tomatoes, for those were the principal
crops raised on White Horse Farm. My father-in-law was a tough Sicilian
taskmaster and we often didn't see eye-to-eye in regard to personnel management
and our colliding philosophies pertaining to regular day-to-day operations were
often at different ends of the thought spectrum.
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Copyright-The Hammonton (New Jersey) Gazette
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