Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Let's Travel Back in Time to Old Michigan



6 comments:

  1. Are all those white chicks picking cherries and waving at boaters in a cult of some sort?

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  2. The cult was called Traverse City High. Back then, all the school kids were hired to pick cherries in July and in the fall, school was shortened to allow for the harvesting of apples, pairs and other fruits. Probably before the migrants were coming up from the Saginaw valley to work the orchards after topping sugar beets and picking beans in the tri city area. The pictures of the girls looked a little more modern in dress than the forties though. Sometimes a caravan of old trucks and cars would stop in the business district on Fenton Rd. (US 23) and buy stuff. I was a little kid then. I thought the migrant families were beautiful and I wished I could play with those kids,but soon they were back on the road and headed north up to the thumb.

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  3. Sure makes the Traverse City area look very appealing. I laghed too when I saw white chicks picking cherries...Of course this was a time when the macro economics made this a viable teenage summer job.

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  4. When I was a kid in the early 50s, ripe tart cherries were hard to ship, and the canned pie filling market didn't absorb all of the production. Some of the extra went to a canning and freezing plant in Traverse City. My parents bought fifty pound cans of frozen pitted cherries, I think at Mansour's, and repacked them into plastic boxes for the new-technology chest freezer they'd bought...so we got to eat cherry pies, cherry cobbler, etc. through the winter and spring.

    Anybody know where to buy bulk frozen tart cherries these days?

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  5. JWilly....My wife and I go down to Central Lake and Traverse City area in the first couple weeks of October to get all our canning fruits. Some of the roadside stores have red bings frozen for sale, but not the big metal cans anymore. Everything down there was a bumper crop this year with good prices. Cinderella pumpkin pie and Northern spy pie were on the table for thanksgiving.

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