The Scent of Brine: Memories of Working at Peninsula Fruit Exchange in the 1980s

Editor’s Note: My friend Kris Hains looks back at her time working at Peninsula Fruit Exchange in the 1980s. My grandma, Stella Johnson, lived across the road at the time, on the corner of Peninsula Drive and Kroupa Road, and the scent of brine wafting over was an aroma like no other. Kris was right in the thick of it! Read on for her field notes about working at PFE. -jb

A little over six months ago, my parents made the decision to move from their home of 42 years and settle into a simpler life in assisted living. Emptying their home meant revisiting four decades worth of memories. Some expected, others completely forgotten.

One of the tucked away memories came rushing back when I uncovered several keepsakes from Peninsula Fruit Exchange. My stepfather, Joe Haines, was a teacher, and as was the case for many teachers, summer didn’t mean time off. When the school year wrapped, he put aside the textbooks and headed to work at Peninsula Fruit Exchange on the corner of Kroupa Road and Peninsula Drive.

My older sister and I were 17 and 15, respectively, when he married our mom in 1985. That first summer, he suggested we come work at the plant with him. I don’t think either of us had any idea what we were signing up for.

Prior to that experience, cherries were something that showed up at the Cherry Festival or in a can on a grocery store shelf. I had never thought about how they got there. Working at the plant provided an immediate education on the actual journey that a cherry took getting from farm to table.

They say smell is the strongest memory trigger, and in my case, it’s absolutely true. The scents from Peninsula Fruit Exchange have stayed with me all these years.

Brine. That smell lives rent-free in my head. The second I catch it, it’s like time travel. There I am, desperate to escape that smell that lived everywhere and left me thinking about the hot shower that awaited me at the end of my shift.

The shifts always felt long. The hourly wage in those days was $3.35 an hour. My shift ran from about 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The bright spot was the break that came every two and a half hours. I lived for those breaks. Or for a machinery breakdown. Anything to break the monotony.

The work was steady, physical, and tested me in ways I hadn’t expected. I quickly learned the sorting line was not for me. A moving conveyor belt with hundreds of thousands of cherries bouncing their way along triggered a kind of vertigo I couldn’t shake. It didn’t take long for me to be reassigned.

I spent a lot of time outside skimming the tanks, rain or shine. I would stand there and skim out sticks and leaves and any other stray things that didn’t belong. Between the tank water and the weather, it felt like I rarely had a completely dry shift. Nonetheless, I preferred that to standing inside watching cherries blur past in front of me.

Another job was loading empty cans onto a line where, one by one, they would be hand-placed under the heavy machinery where the proper amount of cherries and sugar would be dispensed, followed by a worker adding a lid.

It was repetitive work, but it also had its moments. Some of those moments man made.

I remember turning it into a game, watching to see if the Hi-Lo driver would notice I was about to run out of cans and bring me a new pallet in time. Sometimes he did. Sometimes not so much.

And then there were other moments when the rhythm would break. Those moments that snapped everyone back to attention.

It was easy to be lulled by the monotony and repetition. Nowhere was this truer than with the person responsible for placing cans under the filling machine. Fail to get that empty can in there quick enough and suddenly cherries would come pouring out with nowhere to go, except the floor. Why is the sound of cherries hitting cement suddenly louder than the machinery?

One of the weirdest memories I have from those summers involves cherry pie. Up until that point in my life, I didn’t like fruit pie. The texture always seemed too mushy to me, and I avoided it entirely.

But one day, while I was out skimming the tanks, I couldn’t stop thinking about cherry pie. It made no sense. I didn’t even eat pie.

And then, in a twist that still feels odd all these years later, someone brought a cherry pie into work that day.

So I tried it.

And it was good. Really good.

But I think the cherry on top, if you will, is definitely the people. Each summer brought a mix of locals and migrant workers, many of whom came back year after year.

I even had a small brush with celebrity, in a six degrees of separation kind of way. I worked alongside Dana Watson, brother of actor Barry Watson. At the time, it just felt like another summer job friendship, but it’s funny the details that stick with you decades later.

And beyond the work itself were all the lessons that it taught me. Seeing my stepfather teach all year and then come out and do this kind of physically demanding work during what could have been his break changed how I saw him. It gave me a deeper understanding of his work ethic in a way I don’t think I would have grasped otherwise.

It also gave me a new appreciation for the work behind something we often take for granted. Those cherries don’t just magically appear, and a slice of cherry pie will always find me thinking about the people behind it.

Perhaps that is what those summers really gave me. It turns out it wasn’t just a paycheck. It was perspective.