By Ted Escobar
I grew up in a day when you were thrown into the fray if your father thought you were big and strong enough.
All of my siblings and I were in the aparagus fields by the age of five, even if it was just to carry water. We were cutting asparagus and picking potatoes at 6 or 7.
Life started to ease up a bit when one of the Herron brothers gave my father a 1940s 2-ton truck after Herron couldn’t pay him completely for work in the hop harvest. Dad started earning money by hauling anything and everything he could from local farms to local destinations.
He delivered potatoes to packing houses in Whitstran, Sunnyside, Toppenish, Zillah and Wapato. We were usually out in the same fields picking. Seeing that truck, with T. M. Escobar on the doors, pass by eased some of the back pain. We also hauled sugar beets and corn silage.
As soon as my oldest sister Della was 16, dad put her behind the wheel when the truck was being loaded. Soon she was hauling down the road.
I vaguely remember that first truck. It was probably traded in for the blue 1949 chevy we had.
We eventually got up to three trucks. In our heyday we had a ‘54 Chevy, a ‘58 Chevy and a 63 GMC. We were the envy of other Hispanic farm working families.
But business was as headache-ridden in those days as now. An engine failure could cost a week’s earnings.
I can still hear mom, who was usually a happy camper, saying to dad, “If you hadn’t bought that motor, we could have gotten that new furniture.”
“What,” dad responded. “You want me to push the truck?”
Then they laughed.
As small truckers, the highlight of the year was the pea harvest in Dayton. It came just about the time asparagus was winding down. I was convinced Dayton was the right place for us when Dad came back one week, during a previous season, with a $1,000 bill in his wallet. Were were used to ones and fives.
The first time I went to Dayton, I was to watch and learn and keep dad company. But when I turned 16 in 1961 and had my driver’s license, Dad put me in the ‘54 and told me to drive it to Dayton. I thought I was just the ferry, but then dad said, “Go to (this place). They should be cutting peas there. Get in line, load up and take them to the viners. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
I started at about 1 p.m. At 6 p.m. I was expecting my relief driver. Then I was expecting him at midnight. At about 3 a.m. a truck whizzed by me in the opposite direction on the road. It woke me up just in time not to crash off the road.
I thought about pulling out of the line, but I didn’t. That might cost us the job. Besides, what would dad think? He and most of the older drivers put in 48 and 60 hours stretches.
I learned how they did it when a driver walked over to my truck in the field waiting to get a load. He could see my head bobbing and weaving.
“Take a nap,” he said. “I’ll wake you up when it’s your turn.”
At about 2 p.m. the second day, my relief driver showed. I was overjoyed. At 16, I really didn’t care about being that much of a man.
The worst of the Dayton experience came in 1963. The peas were grown on mountains there. The swathers cut the peas going around the mountain, making rows that looked like strings of lights going up a Christmas tree.
The loaders were pulled by D-6 to D-8 Caterpillers. As we went around the mountain, the load piled up against the downhill siderack. For safety they tied the truck frame to the Cat with the biggest chains I’d ever seen.
You stopped when you were loaded, the chain was taken off, and you turned the truck downhill immediately. One day I finished loading the ‘58, a sweet red speed demon with a 283 V-8, four barrel carburator with smitty pipes and air horn.
They took the chain off, and the truck flipped onto its left side as I started to move. That afternoon, I took a nap while dad got the truck ready to go back into service. Two nights later, that same truck flipped again with our relief driver.
“That’s it,” dad said. “No amount of money is worth a life.”
We fixed the truck again and headed home, never to go back to Dayton.
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