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Permission to use or quote from this transcript must be obtained from the Delaware Agricultural Museum and Village.

William B. Chandler Interview
June 2, 1992
Interviewed by Judy Fuehr

JF:This is an oral history with William B. Chandler, Jr. being conducted by Judy Fuehr of the Delaware Agricultural Museum on June 2, 1992. Mr. Chandler can you tell me where you were born and raised?

WC:I was born in Dagsboro, Delaware in Sissex County which is about six miles from the Maryland Line. If you went six miles further you would be in Maryland. The southern part of Delaware. A small town, Dagsboro, total population about four hundred people. That's not varied a lot in all those years. It runs from about three to four hundred. But I was born in 1921. You want to try that now and see how it sounds.

JF:Okay, you were telling me about Dagsboro, Delaware. You were born in 1921.

WC:Born in 1921 in Dagsboro. I have lived there all my life. I'm a resident of longstanding. My father was born there and his father was born there. My father being William B. Chandler, Sr., his father being Josh B. Chandler. My eh... The rest of the family - there was my father, my mother, my sister who is five years my elder, which she doesn't like to hear, and myself. So there was a boy and a girl and my father and mother. My father in the early years was a school teacher, later became a cashier in the local bank and then chose a career as a fruit broker. And so from about eh.... My earliest knowledge of that was.... Like I say I was born in '21 and Dad was a fruit broker at that time. When I say fruit broker, he bought and shipped in carlots. Eh white potatoes, sweet potatoes, strawberries, holly, holly wreaths, all of those products. And had customers all over the mostly northeastern part of the country that he shipped to. Customers that he'd dealt with for years. And he bought in most cases for them using a system where he spoke with them by phone, quoted the market. They knew what they were going to pay, then he bought the quantity that he knew they wanted. Following the line of mostly at this point talking about strawberries we'll go with that first and then go back to holly a little later.

JF:Okay.

WC:But going with the strawberries Sussex County at that time, in the early part of my recollection, was a primary
strawberry growing area. Hundreds of acres of strawberries.

JF:Did your parents grow strawberries at all?

WC:Eh, we had.... Dad had a couple of farms upon which they grew strawberries. But he had tenant farmers who lived actually on the farm. We lived in town. But I had several uncles on my mother's side of the family who were ??? who grew substantial acres of strawberries. And like I say it was a real strawberry growing area because Dad bought berries locally, right in Dagsboro, but most of the berries locally were sold down at Selbyville which was kind of a strawberry center for that area. You know in thinking back to that far away, to those days, the strawberry auction block was kind of in the western part of the town near what is now the dual highway. It wasn't dual then. It was single lane. But farmers would come from all around that area bringin their berries in either by small truck or in a good many cases by horse and wagon or mule and wagon. And I can remember those lines of producers with their berries coming in reaching from the place where the block was located all the way through the town of Selbyville out on to what we call the Roxanna Road which was on the eastern side of town. So I would say there were times when that line of people bringing in berries would extend a distance of half, three-quarters of a mile maybe.

JF:How old were you with this memory?

WC:Well, in '21 I was born. This memory would be through the time that I could remember going down with Dad which I did a lot of times, down to the block. So probably from about 1928 to 1936. Dad passed away in '36. At the time I was fifteen. So it would be at a time when I was eh.... From about seven years old to fifteen in that eight year span. At that point not a full-grown business person, but Dad being a real business person and totally involved in what it was he was doing I did spend a good bit of time with him when he went on these buying trips.

JF:What would you do with him when you went with him on the buying trips?

WC:Usually just look and have fun like an eight or ten year old would. You know, being in wrong places at the wrong time sometimes. You know, popping a few strawberries when you're not supposed to from off of one of the crates. And in general I'm sure to some degree getting in everyone's way, you know.

JF:What did you see then if you were looking?

WC:Well, of course, you saw these lines of people bringing their berries into market. You heard the conversations that were.... that ran the same course back then, I guess, as they would now in a similar situation where the..... There would be times, if the supply was short, when the farmers were well pleased with the price that they were getting for the berries. If supply exceeded demand, it's just like it is now, you know, then what you heard around the edges of the conversation was how they were being robbed and they weren't getting what they were supposed to for their crop. So in that regard I don't suppose the feeling was any different then, then it would be now under similar circumstances. But, you know, you saw the various buyers. Dad being one of them and there were others, Senator Townsend who was not a senator at that time but later became a U.S. Senator and then eventually, of course, founded the company of Townsend's, Inc. which is now one of the big, major poultry integraters in Sussex County. Has since passed away, but he was usually a figure that you couldn't miss because he was a pretty subsantially built fellow with, in my recollection even in early times, with snow white hair and a snow white mustache. And he was pretty eh impending looking person to a little guy that was ten years old, you know. But, you know, it had a lot of eh.... You know, thinking back on it, it's memories that you are fond of, you know, most of it.

JF:Tell me what would happen when a wagon-load of strawberries would come into the block.

WC:Well when they came into the block the buyers would usually go to the crates of berries, inspect them. Take a quart of berries and they had a method of kind of shaking them out in their hand so that they could see that the quality ran pretty the same all the way through, and then place them back. Of course, like anything else most of the buyers through the years, you know, there was a reputation that got established by..... In other words there were always farmers that you could depend upon that they put up a quality pack. There were a few cases where that was not the case and usually the buyers were kind of aware of that and they seemed to make a little closer inspection of those farmers that they maybe felt the pack would not be uniform, you know, all the way through. But the buyers looked at the quality and then they'd bid on what they felt they wanted to pay for that particular load. There may be five crates. There may be twenty-five on that particular wagon or whatever and whoever was the high bidder bought them. And then they sent them over to, dependant upon what market they were going to reach, if it was eh.... Back in those days if it was a local market.... When I say local I'm speaking about something within a three, four hour ride maybe. The berries could be shipped like to Wilmington or maybe Philadelphia by more or less open truck. See they were not any refrigerated trucks back in those days. So if required refrigeration, if it was going to go to Detroit or Pittburgh or someplace like that, then they would be loaded on refrigerated rail cars. That same condition existed, I mean what I'm speaking about now is the berry farming and the berry brokerage business in Sussex County. In my own particular case my father when the berry season.... In other words, right after Christmas each year Mother and Dad and my sister and I would go to Plant City, Florida. Dad drove the car with Mother and my sister and I and drove to Plant City, Florida, which was a strawberry center then and still is. They had an auction block at Plant City to buy berries that were being produced in wintertime. And we would go to Plant City. There was a hotel in town that is no longer there. It was brand new at that time, called Hotel Plant. Dad had, now let's see.... One, two, he had four rooms on his.... There was only three stories in the hotel, three floors, and he had rooms on the second floor right at the corner near the elevator, where he had a room and bath. And so did my sister and so did I, and then one room that served as his office. So that's where we were headquartered from sometime right after Christmas until usually sometime in late April or mid-April when that season would begin to wind down. And in most cases Dad would drive the car back up home with my mother and my sister and myself. And in a lot of cases he would go back down to Louisana, South Carolina, North Carolina and buy berries in those states as they were produced until the berry season came on up here again.

JF:What was the berry season up here?

WC:Berry season was eh round usually from eh first week or two maybe, depending on the variety, but first week or two in May on through the middle to the, in some cases, last of June.

JF:We got sidetracked. You were talking about the inspectors taking a look at the quarts of berries.

WC:Right.

JF:Then what would happen?

WC:Well once they determined quality then the auctioneer would start the bidding on that particular load of berries. And these weren't inspectors. These were people who were buying them.

JF:The buyers.

WC:The brokers. And so then the brokers would bid on those berries. And whoever the high bidder was is the one who ended up buying the berries and then, like I say, either loaded them on refrigerater cars, they were going someplace close enough by then they sent them out to the truck that would be waiting outside the block area.

JF:Were the farmers paid immediately or was there a delay in that?

WC:No in most cases what they did, they gave the farmer a so-called slip, ticket, sales ticket, or whatever that they had bought X number of crates of berries at so much money. And then usually the farmer could go in within the matter of a day or two, into the local office of the broker, and pick up his check for that amount of berries. And there was.... You know, surprisingly enough, I think mainly because most all the brokers were local people too, and I don't recall any instances really where there was anybody who did not maybe get paid for their berries because someone went in bankruptcy or these kind of things. It was pretty well eh.... Because you're in an area too in Sussex County where the old saying goes "People's word is their bond". You know, you can relate it. I don't want to get off the track but you can relate it back to the broiler industry where for years and years and years millions of dollars worth of broiler chickens changed hands between grower and buyer without even so much as a sales ticket being written up. And, you know, in most cases it all worked out. I mean everybody got paid.

JF:So because of that feeling already established in Sussex County the same thing happened with the berries?

WC:Yes. Although berries came before the broilers and so it may be the reverse, that feeling and that policy that was established with the berries carried on through and might have made it a lot easier with the broilers.

JF:If the berry season was from mid to late April or May to the last of June what else did those farmers grow?

WC:Well, see berries were just another commodity in what they did on the farm. In other words, lets assume for instance that a fellow's living on a hundred acre farm. He may have, it varied, but he may five acres or he could have, depending on how many.... A lot of it was dependant on the amount of labor that he felt that he was able to aquire. The had to be picked. There were no U-Pick patches back then. All of them had to be picked. The local schools, all of your local schools, excused any child that was in school that was part of a farm family who was needed to pick berries. They were not penalized for the fact that they.... And they always.... It was arranged so that the school year got out much earlier than it does now. You know you end up out now like June, I think next week, like June the 10th or something is going to be the last day of the school year. Back then it would be more like the third week in May at the very latest. So eh....

JF:You said your uncles grew berries.

WC:Right.

JF:Tell me about one of their farms.

WC:Well, Joe West and Eb West lived, actually both farms were within the town limits of Dagsboro on the south side of twon and both of those farms are still there. The two people, the principles, Joe West and Eb West, who were both uncles, of course since a long time ago passed away. The members of their family still live each on the farms. Neither of the families now actually engage in the farming process. The acreage is still there and it's still being farmed, but it's being farmed by some larger farmer who has all the equipment to do with and they just simply rent the land to him. But both of those farms were real large berry farms. I'm going to have to guess a little bit because, you know, you're going back to a time when I was maybe ten, twelve years olds, but and I have picked berries on all of those farms. Like any other kid, I guess, that age you're always looking for someway to aquire a little extra spending money, you know. Plus the fact that you were more or less encouraged, you know, to do your part by helping to get the crop in. Especially being Dad was a buyer. But I'd go over to both of my uncles places and pick berries. Now they couldn't depend on just local pickers. They would employ any local picker who came and chose to pick, but they had pickers back in those days that eh, they had like a crew leader, similar to the way it is now with migrant help, who went down into Virginia primarily. And there were lots of people down there who wanted to supplement their income on a short-term basis. And they would go down and bring all this help up. And they provided housing on the farm for those people to come up and pick strawberries. Of course, I guess it's a sign of the times in the price of berries now in the price of picking and so-forth, but, you know, I can remember the prices most were like.... It varied but the things I remember best were like either one or.... From one to two cents a quart. One, sometimes they paid one, sometimes they paid a cent and a-half, but I don't ever recall them paying more than two cents a quart for picking the berries. But you got to remember it's all relevant, if you look at two cents a quart for picking berries and a real good picker, who was willing to start early and quit late, if the berries, you know if the crop was good, could pick as many as two hundred quarts in a day. So two hundred quarts of berries.... I would say maybe average in a day's time would be a hundred, but there were some who could pick two. So the average at two cents a quart would be $4.00 for a day's work, or $2.00 if they were a hundred quart picker let's say. That was good money in the '20's and early '30's.

JF:What could you buy with $2.00?

WC:Well, if you had $2.00 multiplied by three hundred that would be $600.00 and you could buy a brand new Chevrolet automobile with a radio and heater.

JF:What would you do with your spending money?

WC:I never made enough to buy a Chevrolet with, but, you know, there were other things. You know, any soft drink was a nickel. I didn't actually do any smoking until I was out of highschool, but it still gets into that same time frame and I do remember my first experience at doing any smoking. Camel cigarettes and Lucky Strike cigarettes and Chesterfield, they were the three popular brands at that time, were fifteen cents a pack, two packs for a quarter. I don't know what they are today. I don't smoke. But they're like $2.00 or something a pack, I think. But money went a long ways then.

JF:Can you describe for me the activity of picking?

WC:Well, in the morning, usually they'd try to wait, if possible, 'til the dew got off some because otherwise the berries would tend to collect a little bit of dirt. You know if you dropped one or something. But they'd wait until the dew got off and then they'd take the pickers into the field or have the pickers come to the field. There was a.... Usually most fields if it was a large field they had a packing house as it was called. Or a berry shanty in some cases it was called. It was a real simple, fairly crude structure in most cases that was just simply like four poles that they'd cut in the woods. You know, four small trees that were put in the ground and then it supported a canopy over top of it made from whatever was available. And a little, like a fairly long workbench or work table that would be made up of maybe three twelve-inch boards side by side. So when the pickers came up with their berries.... See the pickers picked in, back in those days, in quart cups made of wood. There was a local sawmill who manufactured the crates and the cups. But the pickers would pick in those quart cups and then place them in their row. Each picker was assigned a row and he would pick down his row and set his quart cups up and down that row as he picked them, as he filled them. And he was supposed to pick the berries fairly clean. You know you're supposed to pick all the ripe berries. You don't just pick the big ones and leave the little ones. You know you pick whatever is there. Otherwise if you left them they would rot, because once that field is picked over you're not going to come back to it for several days until it's ready to be picked again. And so once he completed that row or whatever distance down that row that it took to fill the so-called carrier. There were carriers built, again fairly crudely, but with a long handle on them and the berries sat two quarts side by side. And the carriers varied in length, but I would say probably as many as eight quarts in some cases in a long carrier. Six in shorter ones on each side and if you doubled that you had twelve to sixteen quarts so that you then took your carrier, so that you could carry up that carrier full of berries to the packing shed. In other words you weren't walking back and forth with one quart at a time see. So you took them up to the packing shed and when you..... The person who would be taking care of that transaction saw to it that you set your berries in the carrier on to the table and then they seen you got sixteen quarts and then they gave you strawberry tickets as they were called then which were simply little pieces of pasteboard, like a little theater ticket, only they were fairly thick so that it wasn't something that would blow away. If you dropped one it would just simply fall on the ground. But they were like little tickets and they said Eden P. West, Dagsboro, Delaware, P.O. Box whatever. More or less just an identification that that was his ticket. In a lot of cases they were colored, some pink and some orange, some yellow. And a lot of times a particular color identified a particular grower. You know, they all had their own format. So those tickets would have on them denominations like from one quart up to thirty quarts or forty maybe. So that if you brought up that many at one time, in other words if you brought up two carriers and you had sixteen quarts on each one you had thirty-two quarts they may give you, depending on what's laying in front of them, they may give you one twenty quart ticket, one ten quart ticket and one two quart ticket or whatever. It was like used in the place of money. You were paid with tickets so that they actually only had to go to the bank and have the cash available for you so that on a given day, like Friday or most time maybe Saturday of that week, you went in with your tickets and cashed them in. That's kind of the way the system worked.

JF:That's pretty neat.

WC:Huh?

JF:That was pretty neat.

WC:Yeah, it's eh.... And then everyone back then the farmer who grew the berries it was a cash crop for him. The people locally who picked the berries, you know it was a cash thing for them too. It may not seem like an awful lot but it was just as important to them then as anyone working in other kind of..... In other words now you've got, for instance, tourism and at the beaches you've got lots of people who work summertime at the beach because that's where the help is needed. And it provides income for them. And in lots of cases helps provide for their schooling, you know, later on in the fall. And it was the same case then with people who picked the berries.

JF:Were there a lot of students in town who would go out to the farms and pick that you lived in town?

WC:There were numbers of them yes. Eh... And, of course, those farms kids, kids who lived on a farm whose parents did not happen to grow strawberries. See you're talking about a time of the year, at least portions of it, that occured before they really got into anything like harvest season for the other crops like corn and what not that they grew. So it was a crop that like I say fitted a niche and even the other people in the farming community would go we'll say to a neighbor or someone close by who had berries to be picked because it provided some cash income for them too.

JF:So after the berries were picked you brought them up to the packing shed and you got your ticket as a picker. Then what happened to the berries?

WC:The berries then were loaded on whatever conveyance that that farmer happened to have. Whether it was some truck of some kind. Trucks were not near in the '20's or '30's like they are now. Usually they were different looking trucks but they were capable of hauling a number of crates of strawberries. And if the farmer had access to that or owned a truck he would maybe take them by truck. Otherwise, in some cases, it depended how close he was to the block, what distance he was, in a good many cases they took them by horse and wagon or mule and wagon. Sometimes even some type of what ordinarily what would be used as a pleasure car, Model T Ford or Model A Ford, you know, they'd make arrangements to set three or four crates on the back seat of the car if they maybe had and take them the block that way. I've seem them in a few cases where they had a trailer, a little homemade trailer built and put in back of the pleasure car and put the berries on it and take it to the block, so. They did what the farmers do now. They got the product to market one way or another.

JF:How often did they take them to the block? Would you pick on a farm for a week or at the end of the day would they then go to a place?

WC:Most all the berries, eh.... It kind of begin to follow a pattern. Naturally you have to pick the berries when they're ripe and ready to be picked. But the farmers tried to time it and the buyers encouraged that. For instance, to ... In other words you would pick the berries a particular part of the week up until we'll say..... In other words if you're going to pick berries on Friday afternoon, you know, that means that they're going to have to be carried into the block on Friday afternoon and placed on a truck on a Saturday and they're going to end up in a city where the market can't possibly open until Monday. And usually Monday's market is not as good as it is from Wednesday through Friday.

JF:You were telling me about timing the berries getting to the block to get to the market.

WC:Right. It was a kind of a joint effort on the part of the producer and also the buyer. The producer understood that his berries would naturally bring a better price if he was able to get them there when they were going to be the most a acceptable to the buyer, you know. There was always.... As I recall there was always the so-called juice market. In other words if you brought berries in that they couldn't possibly get to the market maybe until a day or two too late, then that would mean that the berries, you know, would be a little bit overripe or this kind of thing. And there was a market, there was always a buyer who bought for like ice cream plants, the kind of thing where you would use the berries in a fashion other than as fresh fruit.

JF:Do you remember who were some of the customers your Dad bought for?

WC:Gee whiz! I was afraid you were going to ask me that.

JF:Maybe not their names proper, but were they juice market customers? They were fresh...?

WC:No, he bought and sold.... I say bought and sold. Most of Dad's customers, like I say, it wasn't so much a case of Dad buying ten carloads of berries and wondering what he was going to do with them. He was in contact on a daily basis with his customers. And so if he contacted his customers in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Schnectady, wherever it may be, and he was on a first name basis with those customers and he talked with them everyday by phone, and they let him know what they needed. In other words if they said, you know, Bill we need eh... We're going to need a carload of berries and can you get them here for us by Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever, then he would buy for them. They knew approximately what the market was. They knew that he was going to buy in their behalf and they knew approximately what that market was and whatever that was then Dad had his brokerage commission that was added on to that. And they knew that. And so in a sense he was an agent for all those people that he bought for. You could on occasions and I guess the thing that would point that out, I recall maybe the year before Dad passed away we were on our way over to Pittsville to the Pittsville auction block and berry block, and that was over in Pittsville, Maryland. And somehow or other we were discussing the berry season and various things and he just simply made a comment to me. He said, "Bill I know at this point I'm sure you can't decide exactly what you want to do with your life." "But", he said, "At the present time I would certainly not give you advice as to going into the brokerage business". And I said, "Well why do you say that?" He said, "Because times have changed. When I first went into the brokerage business everyone operated on the same principle we always have right here in our area in Sussex County. That is your word is your bond and if I tell you that I'm going to do something I do it even it costs me money." "But", he said, "Now there are cases and I've run into them and they're beginning to be more prevalent where I buy for someone knowing exactly what the market is going to be. And in the old days when I did that they took what they bought and told me that they stood good for their word. They were honest." He said, "Now every one in a while you run into a case where, particularly if you have a severe drop in the market and I buy the berries for someone.... That usually happens with someone that's not maybe an oldtime, regular customer. But even some of those customers the status has changed. The same people that I dealt with in the company have gone on and someone else has took over. But there are cases now where if you ship the berries and the market drops while they're in transit then by one means or another, you know, maybe calling an inspector and sadly enough give him ten dollars to say the fruit is deterioting so they've got some documented evidence that they can then say I'm sorry this is not what I bought, you know." So he said, "More and more of that kind of thing does take place." So he said, "Because of that, you know, at this point my advice to you would be to go into some other type of business other than a fruit broker because it's not near as safe and risk-free as it used to be." So I took his advice when I got out of highschool a little while and went into the broiler chicken business which is probably about the riskiest business that anyone ever went into, particularly back in that time. When I think back on it a lot of times I'm not so sure maybe I would have been better off to stuck with the fruit brokerage business.

JF:What haven't you told me about the strawberry business?

WC:Well, I guess the thing that I haven't told you is that as time went on that industry that existed in Sussex County, the strawberry industry, disappeared for more than one reason, I think. To begin with along in the '30's the broiler industry took over and that kind of as the old saying goes "soaked up" the local labor to a degree. 8hat was one thing. The other thing was other areas had started growing strawberries. And not only that when the poultry industry came along it meant that the demand for corn and soybeans was much greater. So they didn't really want to devote a good bit of acreage to a crop that is labor intensive that a farmer can't.... You can't combine strawberries, you know, with a combine. You gotta have labor out there able to pick those and it's a perishable crop. You know, there's no delay. When it's time it's time.

JF:You picked berries. Did you get into any of the brokering with your Dad?

WC:Not really other than just being involved in the process. He had his office in the house. We lived in Dagsboro in the home that he and Mother built back in 1912. My sister was born in '16. I was born in '21. You know, it was a big place, about three acres in the yard. It's still there. It looked like Tara in Gone With The Wind with the big white columns out in front of it. A big place. And we all enjoyed it, you know when we were living there and all. But anyway on the east side of the house Dad had a big room that served as his office which was a part of the house. And, you know, they had the desk in there and sometimes like in the evening I'd utilize that spot and do my lessons when I was in school or whatnot because the day was over as a work day. But, you know, thinking back to those times the telephone system was operated with an exchange in Millsboro who had actual physical bodies. Operators who handled all the calls locally. I don't know why it is I've got no less than ten thousand phone numbers that register around in my head all the time. And I can call all of them from time to time. But the thing that's difficult about it is my phone number for instance, is now 732-6829 at home. The exchange that existed before the present exchange our phone number was Rodney 3901. And if you go back to the 1920's at home, when I was living at home, the telephone number was simply 43. And when the operator rang it you had your ring. And when you wanted to dial the operator you picked up the phone and turned the crank and ??? And they did all the connections for you. His phone bill even back in those days was .... Would be considered tremendous in those days because that's really what the business was about, being able to stay in constant contact. I say he died in '36. So this happened prior to that. It had to be probably in the early '30's. He had installed in the office a telegraph system. In other words it was connected through the phone system into the nearest Western Union office which was in Salisbury, Maryland. You know, I guess I remember it so well because it was in the house. So everyone in the house had to be knowledgable about what to do if a message came in on the telegraph machine. It was like a big, huge electric typewriter affair. And if the message was being sent from Western Union in Salisbury it typed it on a piece of tape that came out of this end of the machine. You threaded it through a little hand-held thing that moistened it. You had a Western Union blank that you pasted it.... You get the telegram by pasting it on there. And the code was when they had a message to come through the machine started making a signal. And so that they knew that you were ready to receive, his name was W. B. Chandler and so you just simply went to the machine and punched in on the hunt and peck system G.A.W.B. Go Ahead W. B. ????? And once you did that then the message would come through. And even if Dad wasn't there you could take it and so when he comes in he's got his telegraph ready to read, see.

JF:Who would he get telegraph messages from?

WC:From his people that he sold to. His customers. Oh, occasionly there would be things like something that would be.... If it were just prior to the season something that maybe important to him in Florida, that berry season that was coming up, that his people that he worked with down there, because he had local packers and what-not down there that packed the berries and all. You know, loaded them on a freight car. And his person down there maybe would send him a telegram more or less keeping him up to date on how the season was progressing, how it was about to start and so forth.

JF:You've talked about.... We're going to skip around a little bit. You've talked about picking them in the quarts and carrying them to the carriers. How did they get from the quarts into the crates?

WC:That was part of the packing house process. In other words, it's fairly simple. In other words if you can visualize you're now sitting where several pickers have come up to the packing house and on a long, flat table, we'll call it that, made of boards now you got quart baskets sitting all around. So then you take one of the wooden crates and you put, let's see, thirty-two quarts. So in the very beginning there were thirty-two quart crates, eight layers..... Eight quarts to a layer. In other words you had a wooden crate that you placed eight quarts of berries in. It would be four long and two wide in a thirty-two quart crate. Then there was what's called a flat or divider which was.... All these things were made out gum wood, thin veneer, and so they were like three slats across and three heavier slats underneath so that when you sat that down you actually had the thick slats resting on the edge of the berry cups. The same way in the center. So that when you sat the next layer of eight quarts down you weren't pressing directly one quart down against the top of the other quart. It was supported to a degree by that divider or flat that went in between. So you put eight quarts in, you put in a flat or divider, put eight more quarts in, put in a flat or divider and put your fourth section in which made up the thirty-two quarts. And then it had a lid that came down with a latch on it that fastened that crate down. You could then pick it up with both hands and load it on a truck. And you know it would stand a lot of handling once you got it in that state.

JF:So the berries were pretty well protected because they stayed in those quarts.

WC:To the degree that you could with the technology that they had in those days. It's much better now naturally. But they improvised pretty good.

JF:It must have kept the sawmills busy then building quarts for them.

WC:It did a lot of things for the sawmills. You know, and even, you know like the refrigerator cars. Being no tractor-trailers. Just like you loading berries, step back for one second to Florida where Dad worked the berry season, you're talking about berries leaving Florida and going to Detroit or Pittsburgh or New York City when the roads through Georgia were red clay. You know, they didn't lend themselves to truck traffic. If you did who knows how long it would take you to get there. And so all of the berries back then in Florida were loaded on refrigerator cars. Those refrigerator cars had insulated walls that were I guess maybe five or six inches thick. Same way with the doors. They had two bunkers they called them on each end of the car that were..... It was a compartment with a perforated front section in it and they loaded both ends of that car with ice. Big, huge chunks of ice. And so when those bunkers were sealed down and the car was loaded with berries and you sealed the two doors in the front, they were very similar, as close as you could get in those days, to what you would now have in a refrigerated tractor-trailer. And so even though, you're talking about sending berries from Florida to let's say Pittsburgh, if you loaded those berries and the car went out of there this afternoon you're on a rail and those locomotives could pull those cars at sixty miles and hour straight through. You know they weren't being held up anyplace. And so they pretty well had the next day very easily in markets even though they were, you know, fairly good distances away.

JF:And they'd be in very good shape then?

WC:Yes, uh huh. Unless the market went down in transit and then they deteriorated real quick. With some people.

JF:What were the berries used for? You told me about juice, you told me about the ice cream plants.

WC:Most of the berries back then were used as fresh fruit, just like most of the berries, I guess, you'd say are now. Probably more berries maybe are used now in ways that eh that they did some of back then. I guess what I'm saying is you've got major companies like ..... I can't think of the names of them, but Mott's or Smuckers or whatever, you know, that sell strawberry jam for instance or strawberry jelly by the thousands and thousands of jars which does require a good many berries. And there were some of that taking place back in those days, but it was a lot smaller. That portion of the industry was a lot smaller than it is now. So the major part of the berries were sold as fresh fruit so you could slice them down, sugar them down, make strawberry shortcake and you did it mostly in season. If you had it out of season it would be because it had been made into strawberry ice cream or strawberry preserves or something because there was not a frozen food market then where you just simply walked into any store and find frozen strawberries in it. You didn't have that back then. Most people enjoyed strawberries during whatever season that was and that's the reason they commanded a real good price for the Florida berries because then you were shipping berries north at a time when they normally wouldn't being expecting to get them.

JF:What did local people do with the berries that they grew for uh.... That they didn't want to take to the block?

WC:They didn't have any that they didn't want to take to the block, unless it was berries that, you know, so the season's over and you got a few berries here and there through the patch not worth going in. Then, you know, then they would pick some amount of berries for their own use. If they were using them fresh they made strawberry cobbler. They made strawberry shortcakes. But they did some amount of preserving of the berries too. You know, so they'd have them in the wintertime, because that meant they didn't have to go to the store and buy them.

JF:What haven't we covered? What haven't we covered with strawberries? Do you eat them?

WC:Do I eat them? Yes I do. I sure do and I make strawberry preserves too.

JF:You do.

WC:I do. What's the recipie for your strawberry preserves?

WC:The recipie was my mother's recipie. And it.... The difference being you've never eaten any real good strawberry preserves unless you ate the ones made from this recipie.

JF:Why not?

WC:Because if you go to..... Let's face it the best you can buy if you go to the store today and buy Smuckers or any real good brand of strawberry preserves all of them use a process where they use a preservative like Certo or things that cause them to gel. And so when you reach in and put it on your hot biscuit and you dip it out with a spoon and place it on there, you know, it's like you've placed a piece of Jello on there. You know it may quiver a little bit or something. When we fix strawberry preserves we take the berries and my mother insisted that you can't take a big pot and do this. You cook two cups at a time only. And so you tkae two cups of berries and you take two cups of sugar and you bring it to a full rolling boil. And you stir this during this process too so that it is not sticking or anything. Bring it a full rolling boil, then reduce your heat a little bit so you still got a boil going on but not real heavy. And you cook them for exactly ten to twelve minutes. You can tell a little bit when you're cooking them yourself what state they reach. While this is going on you keep stirring but the berries will so-called foam up a little bit or whatnot. And we keep a, just like she did, a bowl on the stove and we take that tablespoon and we.... As that foam forms we take it off and put it over in the bowl. And you just real easily keep - so you don't get the berries in it - but you just keep dipping that off. And you dip it off until, and you keep reducing your heat a little bit until it's, you know, it's finally fairly smooth on top with no foam anyplace that you can find. And then you take that batch of two cups of berries, two cups of sugar and you have lemon juice fresh squeezed in a bowl or dish or whatever and you have a big bowl that you're going to pour these in and you pour that batch, that two quarts of berries and two quarts of sugar that's now cooked into that big bowl. And you take two teaspoons of lemon juice, one for each cup, and put right in with it and then just stir it around. Then you keep right on cooking two cups at a time. And you do this until you get your bowl full. Then you let it sit overnight. By that time the next morning it'll be..... And you cover it with something and the next morning it'll be cool and you stir it around some and then you put it in your jars. And when you take your hot biscuit then or next winter if you choose to take one of them out, when you take your hot biscuit and put the preserves on it you need to do like this. If not it'll run down your arm because it is a eh.... And those berries are just as..... See there's no eh.... They're a real red, bright, clear berry because no foam is in them. In other words nothing in there to discolor or take away from the texture or the quality of the berries. And they're cooked to the point where, you know, they're preserved but they're not congealed.

JF:Are your berries whole or do they get smashed in the process?

WC:They'll get smashed up a little bit, but a good many of them are whole. In fact we really like to eh, if you can do that, get the berries when they're about the right size for us. Some patches, you know you get a great big berry like this, but a berry that big, if you preserve it that big, it would cover up your whole biscuit it, you know. So if the berries are about this size it's ideal you know. What I'll have to do, I'll have to bring a jar of them up someday and give them to Tom and then you draw your own conclusions.

JF:Okay. Now after you cooled them overnight and you put them in jars, do you have to give them a water bath then to seal the jar down?

WC:No truthfully....

JF:Or did you cover them with parafine?

WC:Because of the fact that..... I've tried this all different ways. What Mother did and you could still do that, but what she did when she put them in those jars, then she put parafine on top of the jars before she ever put the lids on whatnot. And they will keep indefinitely that way.

JF:So you didn't have to reheat them and take a chance of destroying them?

WC:However, the way I've done it for the last several years. I've got a pretty large refrigerator that we keep just to put excess stuff in. And so what I've done, you know, if like we're going to do up whatever amount, twenty pints or twenty-five pints or whatnot. I don't do a thing but just.... I sterilize the jars which she did and sterilize the lids and the caps and then put that cap on it and then sit it right in the refrigerator until we'll ready to use it. I've got them in there now that were put in there last spring. They're just as bright and clear as they were the day I put them in there.

JF:Sounds good. I'll take you up on that. Bring me a jar at a time.

WC:I may even bring you up eh..... Because I've not done any yet this year but I...... Because I had quite a few left over from last year. But I've got them labeled, you know '91. And so I might even bring you up one of the '91's that was done last spring and let you draw your conclusions as to how it's been for the year.

JF:I know I have to take it over the museum.

WC:Yeah.

JF:Amd share it with them.

WC:Sure you will. It is runny. If you want something really delicious just take a big plate of vanilla ice cream and just take it out and spoon it over top of it. If you want a strawberry sundae out of this world, it's it, you know.

JF:You enjoy the strawberries. What else?

WC:I'm not sure.

JF:Maybe we've covered everything.

WC:I think we've touched most of the bases. I'm sure we'll think of something later that.... But....

JF:Oh no, you did tell me that your Dad, after the strawberry season was over here, then your Dad would eh...

WC:When the berry season was over here we would, sometime right after Christmas, we would, he and my Mother and my sister and I would go down to Florida. Plant City, Florida which is where the strawberry center was. In my last trip that I went to Plant City, within the last five years sometime, we were in Florida and took a trip over to Plant City. I just wanted to see, you know, what the place still looked like. And naturally it's changed a lot from then. However, there was one of the brokerage houses right at the berry yard, at the auction block in Plant City that still was the same company that was there when I was down there with Dad in the '20's and '30's, Wisnasky and Nathal. I stopped in to see who might be around and apparently it's the grandchildren, I guess, of the person who I knew back when I was down there with Dad, you know, the old gentlemen. But it is still that company is still in existence there. Dad's company of course, W. B. Chandler & Company, went out of existence when Dad passed away because I did not continue in the brokerage business. I took his advice.

JF:Where did he travel throughout the U.S.?

WC:Well most of his traveling was here on the east coast. In other words he eh.... Like I say he worked the strawberry season, which was the first crop early in the spring, right out of our office there in Dagsboro. And then I guess the next crop would have been white potatoes on the Eastern Shore of Virginia which was still nearby and he worked right from home. And he bought white potatoes and shipped them. Then the next crop would be apples. He bought apples and shipped them. He bought peaches which would be the next crop, I guess. And then in the fall moved on in to holly wreaths. And they're some real good stories about the holly wreath season that I could relay to you. I think we might need to make it another session. But it's eh... It was a..... All of these things as far as the local farmers all fitted a niche. You know, the strawberries was a cash producing crop. Finally it disappeared because of a number of things, one of them being because it was so labor intensive. And so about the only berries now that are grown around here are U-pick operations where that you don't have.... The labor is similar back then. People came and picked them and instead of you paying to do it, now they pay you to do it. But the berries provided that cash crop. Then, of course, white potatoes on the Eastern Shore of Virginia did, and to some degree still do in that area of Virginia. Then your apples and peaches, of course, were crops that have always been here too, but in a lot smaller supply than they used to be. The peach crop, Townsend, Inc., big poultry integrated operation in Millsboro, with several thousand acres of land, and as I told you Senator Townsend was one of the brokers, and he with those thousands of acres of land had a place called Swan Creek Orchards and had apples and peaches, hundreds of acres. There's not a tree there anymore because the broiler industry, the broiler business that he went into later, it disappeared the orchards did. There again labor intensive kind of thing that didn't lend itself to big acreages. You getting a beep?

JF:Yes, I want to thank you very much for talking with me today.

WC:Well, we'll get to the holly wreaths.

JF:Okay.

WC:You know because there's some good stories about the holly wreaths too.

JF:This is an oral history for the Delaware Agricultural Museum of William B. Chandler, Jr. conducted by Judy Feurer on June 18th or is it 17th?

WC:19th - 18th.

JF:18th, 1992. We're fine! Mr. Chandler you wanted to tell me about making holly wreaths the last time we got together.

WC:Yeah it was eh... I'm trying to pick out the time-frame. But I would say from early 1910, let's say, on through to the '30's. It was a popular thing, particularly in Sussex Co., Delaware, because it fitted a real niche. In other words, the harvest, you know, the corn had been harvested and put in the corncrib or whatever, you know, and the tops were cut and the haystacks were eh...... Or fodder stacks we called them then were in in place. So there was really not an awful then to do on the farm in the way of farming operations. So it fitted in that about that time of year, which would be about late October or early November, that they would begin to get busy with the making of holly wreaths. And it was a pastime back then that involved in a lot of cases the whole family. Because the husband and sometimes the wife and maybe the kids, depending on their size, would go out into the woods and collect the holly. Like little branches of holly cut from the trees. Or they collected the what we called switches or sticks that were able to be bent into a hoop and then wrapped with holly wire. Holly wire was an important part of this whole process. And actually the holly wire usually came in early like in maybe as early as September. It came in big rolls and then each person would take one of those big rolls and they'd cut little sticks about four or five inches long and about as big around as your finger maybe and wrapped the holly wire around it. The purpose being that you then had the holly wire on something that would lend itself to going... to wiring the holly onto the wreath, you know, just in a circular fashion and keep it going around. As you placed another piece of holly on it overlapped the one above it and so you made a..... You know some people made prettier wreaths than others, but if you were real good at it you could make a real pretty wreath.

JF:You said the holly wire came in around September. Came in to where?

WC:Well, it usually it came into the local person who would be, you know, the person who would be buying the wreaths. The wreath broker. You know in my case my Father, which I think we talked about when we discussed strawberries, was a fruit broker. And in addition to those other crops, you know, strawberries, potatoes, peaches, apples, all these things, the same thing when that time of the year came then the natural thing to do would be to deal in holly wreaths. So he was a, if you want to call it that, a holly wreath broker. He had the people that he sold to in the cities. And the people who were out in the field were the people who made wreaths for him. And they would make the wreaths, bring them in and then he would go through the packing process and ship them to the city and, of course, pay the people who made them. But he would also furnish those materials that they weren't able to gather themselves out of the woods. So they didn't really have any genuine outlay of cash because there wasn't an awful lot of cash back then anyway. So he would order in the rolls of holly wire and then give each person who was making wreaths for him those size rolls that fitted whatever they were going to do. That's when they would take them and wrap them on these small sticks to get them in a fashion that could be easily used then to wrap the wreaths with. And of course in the early days the berries that were placed on the wreaths were, naturally for color, you know, the red berries were natural berries. The holly berries grow kind of in clumps so it would be like a.... Similar to a rosette that would be maybe an inch and a half or so in diameter would be placed on the green holly that was the holly wreath and it was a Christmas holiday color thing that people enjoyed having. Eventually it got to a point where very little natural berries, for some reason or other, were being produced. And so eventally it kind of began to hurt the wreath business because you didn't have the amount of natural berries that you needed. There was one other problem. The natural berries to some degree are perishable so the shelf life of a wreath with all natural berries was limited to some extent. When I say limited I'm talking about in terms of maybe a week to ten days.

JF:But the holly would have lasted much longer than that?

WC:Holly lasted a good deal longer than the berries. The berries would just simply begin to turn dark some. You know, they're a red berry and I can recall one year in particular that my Mother described the scene for me, but I can remember her telling me about that the brokerage business was to some degree volatile for the simple reason.... I know that the scene that she described to me one time was that in the spring my Father was on the Eastern Shore of Virgina where an awful of the potato crop was grown back then, and they still do but it was big then. And he bought..... It was a bountiful crop of potatoes and so he bought a number of cars of, you might as well say on speculation. He didn't actually have them sold but he bought them because the quality was good and he figured, you know, that if he got them loaded and got them in a car then he could place then in the market. When he got all these potatoes bought and in the process of being loaded and whatnot the market, because it was such a bountiful crop I guess, the market went real flat. And so the price he'd paid for them..... The price he was able to get for them was a good deal less than what the money he had in them. Anyway my Mother was telling me about this, this was after my Father passed away and we were discussing times gone by, and when she was telling me about this she said, you know, he really took a heavy loss and it really hurt. But to show you that there is a balance to some of these things, it came along that same year in the fall after having taken a heavy loss in the spring which was really painfull, it came along to the fall and holly wreath season was approaching. And that particular year there were just no natural berries. So everyone was at a loss as to what they were going to be able to do because you couldn't very well the wreaths without berries being on them of one kind or another. So Dad had been a broker working the whole seaboard from Florida up with strawberries and all the other crops, in a conversation one day with one of the people that he dealt with down in the Carolinas spoke about the fact that the wreath season but the berries were in short supply. The fellow in North Carolina told him, he said "Well our trees are loaded down with berries this year". So anyway Dad got on a train and went down real quick, contracted with this fellow to have them gather these berries and they packed them in boxes just like they do the wreaths, the big wooden boxes, got them on a truck or train, whichever way it was. I guess it probably would have been a train and shipped them right on back up to Dagsboro where he was located and was able to put the natural berries out to the people who were making the wreaths. And it was because of the fact that he had the only wreaths with berries that were available it was a case of supply and demand so he was able to get a price for the wreaths that by the time that wreath season was over he had pretty well recovered his loss from the potato deal.

JF:Networking is marvelous.

WC:It's fantastic isn't it? But eventually it reached a point where natural berries were just, for more than one reason, for the reason that they were difficult to get, and it made the market more volatile because if it haappened to be a year that you weren't just able to get them, maybe even in Carolina, you know, then you were at a loss to be able to do anything. So eventually the company, the company that I remember was located in New York, I think their names were like Brusilaria and Zeiman, who came out with an artificial berry, holly berry. Other than the fact that the natural berry was natural and you could tell that, but as far as color and as far as the way the wreath looked it really was a prettier wreath, in my opinion really, with the artificial berries once they came out because the berries, the process that they used it was like a.... just like a string which would represent the stem and it was like a piece of cord about the size the stem would normally be anyway and it was green. And on each of that stem was a berry, a little larger than you would see a single, natural berry. This berry was a little bit larger than that but it was blood red and real shiny. And so the makers when they'd make the wreaths would take those artifical berries and take about eh.... oh about five or six of them and hold them like this and then just pull it together so that when you took the string with berries on each end and then pulled it together like this, in other words made a loop out of it, then you had maybe ten or twelve berries in that cluster and the end of the loop lent itself to being able to take the holly wire and fit it right into that wreath just like it did with the natural berries. So when that came to pass it simplified things to a degree for the simple reason those berries came shipped in the packages and you could just carry a package of ten thousand or whatever was needed out to your person that you contracted with to make them for you.

JF:Did you ever participate in the holly wreath making?

WC:I was mostly an annoyance because during most of that period I was, you know, from nine years old up to thirteen or fourteen maybe. And Dad had a packing house which was a large barn with a large ground floor area in it where the wreaths were packed, oh maybe back of where we lived in Dagsboro. And the people would bring the wreaths in and he had men working for him who went through the rest of the process. In other words the wreaths that were brought in by the makers, the farmers out there, they had a stake or a pole I guess you would call it that would be maybe five, six feet tall and maybe eh a inch or little more in diameter. And then it had two pieces of lumber that formed a crosspiece at the bottom simply so that the pole would stand up like when you sat it down on the floor. And as they made the wreaths they would just simply lay them over that pole and let them go to the bottom and just keep laying wreaths on there until finally you had a stick, a stick they called it back then, a stick full of wreaths. And then they could take those in that manner and put them in the back of a wagon or whatever they were going to bring them up to the packing house with. And they'd have those several sticks in that one wagon and they'd tie a rope around it so they couldn't turn over and bring it up to the packing house. When it reached the packing house they had boxes that the wreaths were shipped in back in those days, for the want of a better example, similar to a wooden coffin, I guess you'd call it. It would be a simple pine box that was.... That the materials for were made at a local saw mill and partially put together. In other words there would be two ends and then there would be four sides that had like stick braces across each one of them to make them sturdy. But then they'd take the two ends and set them up in a little jig that was made for that purpose at the proper distances apart, and lay the top on it and nail it down, turn it over and do the same thing until they ended up with a box that had a bottom and two sides. Then they would line that box with newspaper. The bottom and the sides. The whole thing. And as they placed the last layer of newspaper on the side there was like half of the newspaper sheet hanging over so when the wreaths were finally loaded they folded the whole thing back in. So they were using something that didn't cost anything and something that was available because they would accumulate the newspapers all through the year for that purpose. So then when the box was ready to have the wreaths put in it then the people who were in the packing house - they usually had a fairly heavy like an overall jumper jacket on because the leaves, you know, are a little prickly. They didn't feel too good if they would get against your bare skin. So they had fairly sturdy jackets on and gloves. And they would simply run their arms down beside of that stick and take off, you know, wreaves that stick over and whatever would rest on their arm which might be twelve, fifteen wreaths together like this. And then that allowed them to just take them off one at a time and place them in the bottom of the box. And they would do that until they got layer on there. And then they'd just start another layer and they'd keep doing that until they'd fill that box. This big box. I'm trying to guess. I would say that eh..... I would say that there were probably at least twenty dozen, maybe even a few more, in a box. You're talking about probably two hundred, two hundred fifty wreaths in a box. Then they would simply fold the newspaper over the top of the full box of wreaths and then take one of those sides, just like what formed the bottom and the two sides, they'd put that one on top and nail it down. And then usually had a stencil that would say on there that this, you know, that this was shipped by W. B. Chandler and Company. And then it would be addressed to whatever that person was that it was being sent to.

JF:How big were the wreaths? The diameter size.

WC:Diameter. I'd say about eh, probably about fourteen inches maybe. Fourteen to sixteen in diameter. You know they were of a size that if you hung one; for instance, on your door, you know, it would look suitable for that location. And, of course, you know, they sent them to the city markets and they were used in stores at that time. Department stores or whatever. Anyplace where anyone needed decorations of whatever kind. You know, churches, the same thing I guess people would use wreaths for now in some sense. Dad was a pretty good size broker. One of the largest I guess. But there were others. There was a brokerage in Bridgeville as recall. I think called W. B. Truitt and Sons. There was another broker down in Bishopville, Maryland, which was about eight miles below where we lived in Dagsboro. And his name was Will Collins. But he contracted with Dad to buy and pack for him. So in other words, Dad had an operation actually in Dagsboro and when the season was in full swing he also had an operation in Bishopville, Maryland, because Will Collins was packing all of his wreaths for Dad, for him to ship. Let's see.

JF:You were talking that the eh.... You were saying that the crates were made at the local sawmill so the sawyer benefitted from the industry.

WC:Oh yes.

JF:Who else benefitted from the industry?

WC:Well you had, in other words like I said the local sawmill and the people who worked there benefitted. The farmers and all the people who made the wreaths benefitted. It gave them money that they would not have access to otherwise. In other words people always more or less looked at that, like I say it was the end of the year, end of the harvest year, and by the time they paid the interest on their debt from the farm there wasn't usually an awful lot of cash money left. And so that gave them some actual cash spending money. Christmas money we'll say. Christmases back in those days was fairly frugal, but at least it gave them some money for those things they wouldn't have been able to got otherwise. Because in those days there was just not an awful lot of cash around. When you went to the store to do your shopping for instance, you didn't take cash or a check book with you. You took the eggs from the hens that you had on the farm that layed the eggs and it was like a barter system. In other words, the storekeeper traded your eggs. In other words took your eggs and put them in a crate so you ended up with whatever amount of dozen you had and that gave you a credit of so much money. And you bought whatever he was offering in the store, salt and flour and whatever else that you would be buying. You know, there weren't the same kind of things being bought that there are today. There was no bread on the shelves because nobody bought bread. They bought flour. They made their own bread. You know, and everybody did that. They just didn't have bread available.

JF:What else did they buy then that they...?

WC:You mean in the food line?

JF:Uh huh.

WC:Eh, I'm trying to think. I know that they bought flour and of course they bought salt. Usually the storekeeper...... Most of the stores were country stores. Old cracker barrel stores I called them with a pot-belly stove in the center of the floor, you know. And they would usually have a cheese, you know, that was big around as an automobile tire nearly. And they, you know, they cut their own cheese. And you could buy a pound of cheese. There was some amount of canned goods. Not an awful lot. There was tobacco. A good bit of it was pouch tobacco I call it because there was just a lot of people chewed back in those days. You know I'm going to get out of date here in a minute. But I mean, I guess probably somewhere in that era, in other words, because I can recall there were cigarettes eventually available, because the brands were Lucky Strike, Camels and Chesterfield, the three popular brands. And I do remember one thing when I think about my first experience that I had in attempting to buy a pack. I'm not sure just when that was but somewhere maybe around eh, let's see 1921. Must of been somewhere around 1932, '3, '4 maybe. The price of the cigarettes was fifteen cents a pack and you could buy two packs for a quarter, in comparison with whatever they are today, two dollars and a something, I guess, with tax.

JF:So then the farmers who made the wreaths got cash so they didn't have to barter as much then?

WC:No, it gave them additional cash money that they would not have had otherwise.

JF:What would they buy with that cash money?

WC:Whatever, I guess, was the popular thing in those days to buy for Christmas. I mean if you had little girls they would want a doll, you know. If you had little boys they might want a.... If you could get a-holt of that much money, I guess would want a little wagon. Eh these kind of things and of course back then they were real practical in the way that they did things at Christmas too. Because, you know, if they needed shoes they would get shoes they would get shoes. And if they needed something they couldn't make themselves then they, you know in the way of clothing, then they would buy those same kind of things. It didn't take as much clothing as it does today. I don't mean to say that in the frame that they didn't need to be warm, you know, when it was cold and these kind of things. But I guess what I'm saying what we would consider today to be dress clothing or formal clothing it just didn't take near as much of it because you were living in a rural area to begin with. And other than church on Sunday there weren't an awful lot of reasons for you to put on a suit or a necktie or anything of that kind. You know you could put your overalls and your chambray shirt on and your mackinaw if it was cold.

JF:I want to get back to you said you were more of a nuisance in the holly wreaths.

WC:Well, I guess, the reason that I'm saying that it is because thinking back I can remember some things that kind of stick with me and that it is there were people who worked for Dad in the packing house. That was another area where people were employed that wouldn't have been employed if they weren't working in the packing house packing wreaths. And there was an old gentleman by the name of Alf Brittinghan and another one by the name of John Perry Bunting who as I recall were as I recall two of the packers who I had a knack .... I had a knack, I guess, for just trying to irriate them, being that age. You know they're trying do do something and I'm around causing problems. And so when they'd finally, I guess, get about as much of my causing them a problem as they wanted, next thing you know of them would just grab me up. It was all in fun but they'd grab me up and stick me down in one of those holly boxes and the other one at the same time would kind of being laying across it so the lid couldn't come up and they'd just put a couple of tacks in each end until I made enough noise eventually that somebody would decide to let me out.

JF:You had firsthand experience in being in a holly crate.

WC:I sure did. I knew all about the holly boxes because I spent a little bit of time inside them.

JF:Did you ever make wreaths yourself?

WC:I tried. It's one of those things. If you eh..... I'm don't.... I'm not trying to say that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but we were a town family and most of the wreaths were made on farms.

JF:Okay, before the break you were talking about the people that worked in the packing house and you told me the story about Mr. Brittingham and Mr. Bunting packing you.

WC:Packing me in a holld box, yes.

JF:And you were talking about being in town you didn't really need to participate in the making of wreaths.

WC:Right. In other words most of the wreaths were made by farm families because it just lent itself to it. They usually....... Most of those farms had woodland on their own farms and the holly trees were a natural thing growing in those woods and so the whole family participated in gathering the holly and gathering the switches and doing the whole thing. As a so-called town person living in town, it didn't really lend itself to going out and doing the gathering of those things like it did for the people who were on the farms.

JF:Did you try once?

WC:Yes, but nevertheless it's something that you thought maybe was a little bit of a challenge and so I attempted it more than once. Not often enough because that's the whole secret of it . You got to do enough of it until you get good at it and I'm sure noone when they first started making them that their first wreaths were as good as they were after they had a lot more experience at it. But I just didn't make them long enough for my experience to really show up a whole lot because I didn't have much of it. And I can recall the very first wreath that I made. It looked pretty good on the face of it because I'd wrapped the wire, you know, I knew how to do it because I'd watched other people and I wrapped the wire around the holly and then sewed the berries on it and did the whole thing. And, of course, the test of a good size, well made wreath was just to take the hoop in the back like that and kind of do this.

JF:Shake it.

WC:Just shake it real vigorously. And when I took mine and shook it real vigorously I only had about three or four leaves of holly still left clinging to the hoop because there is a certain amount of art that comes with the experience of doing it that that wire has to be wrapped tightly enough. You know, if you allow it to loosen any then naturally when you shake the holly's all going to shake loose from the wire. So my wreath was really a pretty pitiful looking thing.

JF:You wouldn't have transported it?

WC:No, it wouldn't have transported and if it had transported it would not have sold. I'm sure of that.
JF:What featured the process from start to finsh in making one if you could?

WC:Of making a wreath?

JF:Yeah.

WC:Well, you take the hoop which was eh.... The hoop was formed by taking the sticks that I told you they gathered in the woods. And it's a flexible stick so you bring it together and then wrap the holly wire around where the two pieces come togther and so now you have a round hoop in the size that lends itself to that wreath. And then so now you're going to start making a wreath and you've got loose holly. That's leaf holly which is the holly with a little, you know, it's cut so there's that there's a little portion of the stem, you know, about an inch, because that's necessary in order to have something to bind it to the hoop with. And so you just reach down, pick up a sprig of holly, take the holly wire and wrap it around that particular sprig. Reach down and get another one, fit it on to it so it looks like its layered with holly leaves all the way around. The trick comes when you bring the end up to the beginning. Then you kind of have to fit a couple in there so that it has the proper look. And once you get all of that wrapped in there with holly wire the whole thing has got a good tight wreath with a good look to it. Then it's a process of spacing the berries, either natural or artifical berries, which would usually be I guess maybe four inches apart, between the clusters of berries on the wreath itself. That's pretty well it.

JF:So it's really a trick in hiding the wire?

WC:Yes, hiding the wire, hiding the hoop. In other words the way you're positioning the holly on it. When you end up with a wreath that's made properly you can't naturally see any hoop and you can't see any wire. You just got, simply got a wreath made of holly with the berries in place about every four or five inches apart all the way around the wreath. Then that would lend itself, if you chose to do it, to putting a red ribbon maybe at the top of it and hanging it on your front door.

JF:You said you reach down to get the holly. You reach down into what?

WC:Into a burlap bag probably or even..... Depending. In other words they gathered it in big, loose burlap bags. Because, you know, you don't want to bruise it. You know it is a leaf. Even though it's a tough leaf why you want to just keep it so it would look best when you put it on a wreath. So they gather it in big, loose burlap bags. And I think some people just brought, you know, into where they were going to make it, right into the kitchen or wherever. And then just, you know, it had a big, wide top to it and just reached down and picked the holly out of it. Some others probably took a basket or box of some kind and just simply took out maybe an amount that you're going to be using. You know for each one. If you got four people making it would be a little simpler for each one of them to have a container of holly. So everybody kind of had their own function. You know if you had a wife and three grown children and they're all..... Everybody sitting around in the evening making holly wreaths, then they probably share it sometimes, but maybe the husband who is the person who gathered the holly in most cases or did the major part of it and made the hoops, then he would logically fall to be the one who'd make sure that nobody's basket ran out of holly or that they didn't run out of wire. In other words so that you keep production going in good shape. You had one kind of foreman, you know, that's engineering this whole thing, you know, if you had several people making wreaths.

JF:Quite an assembly.

WC:Yes, it's kind of like an assembly line. You know, it was eh.... There weren't an awful lot of things, you know, there weren't anything to do back then. It was.... In addition to being a pastime that was going to generate a little income so that you could have maybe a few things for Christmas that you wouldn't have had otherwise. There weren't any movie theaters. There wasn't any television. And in a lot of cases, particularly farm families, most of them, you know, they didn't buy the daily newspaper or something, and so it was part of the family life. I mean, you know, you're sitting around making wreaths and, you know, they might sing part of the time or they might just have conversation about what happened maybe in school that day or something else. You know, but it was in a sense a little bit like a family gathering too while they were making wreaths.

JF:How long was the ...?

WC:The season?

JF:The season.

WC:Eh the holiday season. In other words I guess from, you know, trying to think back, I would guess they probably started shipping the wreaths sometime prior to Thanksgiving and ran on up through New Years. But the heavy season..... Because see that time of year as long as the holly remained on the tree, you know, it had all the shelf-life it ever needed. It could stay there for the next ten years. So you actually gathered your supplies based on the amount that was being asked for to be made. You know, whatever there were sales for that time. So if there were some sales for holly wreaths we'll say in the Thanksgiving area, just prior to and after that they'd make wreaths in the amounts that were needed to fill that holiday time. The major, naturally, holiday time for the wreaths was the Christmas season. And so that was heaviest, you know, for like two weeks prior to Christmas and directly after it.

JF:So the family would make the wreaths and pack them on the poles.

WC:Uh uh.

JF:Lay them on the poles?

WC:Well yeah, but my point is, they wouldn't..... Yeah, they'd make the wreaths and put them on the poles but only in the amounts that were needed. In other words, when they placed them on those poles then the very next day went into the packing house. In other words, it wasn't something that you stored or kept around.

JF:That's what I wondered.

WC:And usually the way that was done. When the wreaths were made, even though they had been making, actually making the wreaths in the kitchen where there was naturally some amount of heat, there would have to be to stay warm, but when the wreath was made, you know, even if they had a stick in there or a pole in there to put them on, as soon as that one pole got filled they'd set it out in the back porch or where there wasn't any heat because the wreaths kept better where it was cool.
JF:So when they were shipped from the packing house they shipped them in trains?

WC:They shipped them by train or truck. Not tractor-trailer because there wasn't tractor-trailers then. But they had what we call straight jobs. In other words, they had six-wheel or ten-wheel trucks. You know they could carry I guess probably forty or fifty or sixty of these crates. And, of course, if the crate contains twenty dozen let's say and it took fifty of them then you would be talking about a thousand dozen on a truck that carried fifty crates.

JF:Did a person get paid by the number of wreaths they made/
How did they get paid?

WC:No, they were paid each. So much for each wreath. It wasn't an awful lot of money back then because, in other words, I'm trying to think, but it just runs through my mind that the wreaths in the market at retail were probably eh..... Probably something in the range of thirty-five to fifty cents. And so the person on the farm who actually made the wreaths, I would suspect, probably got something in the maybe ten, fifteen cent range. Which doesn't seem to be an awful lot of money, but you're talking about a time when a good many people were working for a dollar and at the most a dollar and a half a day. I mean that was the wage scale. So seven, eight, ten dollars a week.

JF:And fifteen cents would buy a pouch of tobacco.

WC:Yes.

JF:That's not bad.

WC:No. It's really in a sense kind of relevant, you know, because there wasn't any money around very much back then. But what you needed to buy didn't cost very much, you know. Today there's more money around but whatever you're going to buy cost an awful lot. So, you know eh....

JF:And we don't have a barter system going.

WC:I don't know that it has anything really to do with holly wreaths, you know, and maybe we don't need to get it on this, but I can recall buying the first truck that we ever bought. I went into a feed and poultry business. This was in about 1940. It was 1940. And we bought a brand-new Chevrolet ton and a half truck with twelve ply tires, reinforced frame, two-speed rear with a radio and a heater in it in 1940 for six hundred and fifty dollars cash. You could buy a brand-new Chevrolet automobile at that same time for like six hundred dollars cash. But at that same time the truck driver who was driving the truck got twelve dollars a week, you know. And I had fellows who were working for me at twelve dollars a week with three or four kids, had a good place to live, had clothes for themselves and the kids. Sent the kids to school. They had a car. Fed them. In other words, the fact that it was twelve dollars a week didn't prevent them from doing the same thing that someone could do now if he's making four hundred a week, you know.

JF:I can see how people say money seemed to go further back then.

WC:I did go further. When I tell my kids about things were, Eve and I were married in 1940. So I gave her five dollars a week. That's what she had to run the house on. And when I tell that story to my children they say you mean to tell me you're going to completely run the house on five dollars a week, I said sure. What about food? I said that bought all the food, you know. What about other things, clothes. I said we didn't need an awful clothes, but when we did there was money aside for them. I said a treat, whenever a month maybe so we went to a movie and it cost fifteen cents for each one of us, you know. And I said if your mother took that five dollars a week she'd save a little money out of it each week. If she took that five dollars a week and went up to local country store, which was where we shopped, and had said I'm going to lay the five dollars on the counter and I want to spend it while I'm here, I said unless she had a wheel barrow or a wagon or something outside there would be no way that she could carry home five dollars worth on her own power. She couldn't. Today you can carry it home in one hand.

JF:What happened to the holly wreath industry in Delaware?

WC:It eventually, as the stawberries did, it eventually kind of ran its course. There's always reason for that. In other words, it was to some degree a perishable product. And as soon as technology came along that allowed you to extend that shelf-life of the holly wreath, in other words, they processed..... Of course, once they came with the artifical berry then that didn't have a..... That didn't have a tendency to... In other words, that would not spoil. Then eventually they came with a process of curing the leaves themselves. I say curing them, it was like a dip process where they took the leaves and dipped it so that it more or less had a coat of .... It had a coating on it that kept the eh.... That preserved the holly for quite sometime. And, of course, as time went on, I mean now you never see a wreath with any..... Most of the time ?????? We still do have people down locally who, you know, at that season of the year do it because there are some people that would like to buy a natural wreath. But ninety-eight percent of all the wreaths in the country that are sold are artifical wreaths. They're made from mademade fibers, you know. They're a wreath that you could hang up on the wall and if the sun didn't fade it out or something it could hang there for the next five years, you know. And a good many of those products that either go into it or the wreath itself are also made in other places, like Hong Kong and some of these kind of place where even though the fibers are long-lasting they still have cheap labor force which allows them to put the wreaths, you know, on the market at a price that's fairly reasonable.