<Begin Segment 25>

AI: And where did you go? Where did you live?

RT: Well, I guess Mr. Blatter must have been there to haul us to our new home, which was a regular labor house. And, of course, to me it was rather unbelievable. I often think now, "What did my mother think?" I mean, here she had finally gotten a fairly nice house that she could call her own, and we went to the labor house. And they are much like the labor houses as they are now, just a place to sleep and eat, two rooms for the six-man crew. One room was the kitchen eating area and the other room was for the beds. And of course, we had my little sister, so we had three beds. I slept with my aunt, my two brothers slept together, my mother and dad, and then we did have, I believe, a crib for my sister, all in this one room. And the only source of heat was the kitchen stove. The outhouse was out back like it always is, but I'm sure, in retrospect, that the Blatters probably thought that this was adequate, that this was the regular type of housing that laborers got. Yeah. So that's what we were: laborers.

AI: So then what was it, what was your life like? What was a typical day like then after you got there?

RT: We worked. Now, this is in the fall and our job was to top beets. Now, sugar beets are, they range in size, of course, and Montana, in Montana the shorter growing season, you don't get as large a beet, but nevertheless, they, they weigh in the pounds. And they are harvested by, number one, the farmer goes along and digs them up and then the labor crew has to come along and cut off the tops of the beets, because they save the tops to feed the livestock in the field. And the beets get taken to the factory where they convert them to sugar.

Well, a typical day, we get up at dawn and we would get out to the fields -- I don't even know how we got there, 'cause we didn't have a vehicle of any kind, probably we got a ride from Mr. Blatter in his truck. We would all go out to the field and it would be very cold and chilly, not uncomfortably cold, but nevertheless, it was cool, and we would start the job of topping beets. We used a machete-like like knife, and on the end of the knife is a hook, a steel hook, and you stab the beet with the hook and then you chop it off with the, with the machete knife. And then you throw the beets into a little pile, because we would each take two rows. And then we would pile the beets into the center of these four rows, so two of us would be more or less lined up, and we would take four rows at a time, two apiece. And then the truck would come through, in between these rows of beets, and three people on a side -- and I can see now why you had to have six -- would throw the beets into the truck. You had to be careful you didn't throw too hard. Yeah, sometimes get a little rambunctious. But that was the harvesting of beets. And we did it from early morning until, because of the days being shorter, yeah, from, from the time that you could see, and finish when it started getting dusk.

We had a little addendum there because my little sister was not able to go out and work beets, so, what are you going to do with your little sister? Well, she was carted off to the field and she would just be stuck on the end of a, on the edge of the field someplace, and they would, I guess, put some stuff for her to play with and then she would, they would more or less keep an eye on her. Eventually, Mrs. Blatter had the fore-, the good-heartedness to ask her to come and play with her kids who were about the same age. She was the young wife of Mr. Blatter. He had a grown-up family, and then he had this second family with the younger wife, and so my sister ended up staying, during the day, very often she would be with the Blatter kids, and she would play with them. So, that helped out.

AI: But for you, it was a very long day, it sounds like.

RT: Oh, yeah. That's a farmer's day.

AI: You're bending, you're stabbing, you're chopping, you're throwing.

RT: Yeah. Yeah. You always have a little mishap. You stab yourself, or you throw the beet and hit somebody on the head, and that kind of thing. There was another crew that worked for Mr. Blatter and that was a legitimate crew: a mother and father and four sons. And they were... the youngest son was older than I. He must have been in his teens. He was probably three or four years older than I. So four men plus the parents. And I, I don't know what they must have thought when they saw us come out and start working as a crew. I mean, these kids and these women, and just this one man, but oh, we managed. Oh, yes, we worked. And we were good. We got good.

AI: Did you see very many of the other crews that had come out from camp?

RT: No, we didn't. We pretty much were limited to staying on the farm. We had no way of gettin' around. And I understand there were several crews at that time that had come out from the camps, many crews. Mostly young guys that made up a crew and then came out and got assigned to a farm and worked it. Yeah. But we worked in all kinds of weather. It was nice sometimes, nice fall weather, and other times it would rain. And oh, some of that land was Montana gumbo. It was pretty tough.

AI: And how long did this beet harvest last?

RT: At least a month. Usually it would start toward the end of September, and you would try to get it all done by the end of October. Yeah. So I would say like four or five weeks, maybe six at most. Yeah.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.