I always thought there were hundreds of us, but looking back forty-nine years I finally realize we only numbered about twenty. How could a kid make such a mistake?
All the way up until the early sixties Southern California was one of the leading citrus producers in the world. At that time nobody had any aspirations for controlling the weather, but the citrus growers had to protect their product from fog, dew, and freezing temperatures. One method was nothing more than a propellor mounted on a tall tower. It looked exactly like an old airplane engine and wouldn't surprise me if that's what it was. When the temperature dropped into the forties or high thirties the growers would turn on the propellors. Mounted on swivels with some kind of automatic drive, they'd slowly swing back and forth over the trees moving the air. That would keep the fog away and stop the dew from falling on the citrus.
Also at that time nobody had any concept of the Greenhouse Effect. What the growers did know was that when the temperature dropped into the low thirties or even into the twenties, if a layer of smoke was put over their groves, heat would be trapped. That heat would keep the citrus from freezing and the morning dew would not settle on the oranges, limes, lemons, and grapefruit.
To put that layer of smoke in place took smudge pots. Dirty, smelly things, they were nothing more than oil stoves with a large oil reservoir on the bottom, a combustion chamber above that, and a smoke stack with a vaned top that broke up the smoke and spread it out.
The reservoir held about five gallons of oil and had to be refilled several times a night. I don't know who did it the first time, but we kids were hired to do the second refueling. We started work at two a.m. and went through the entire grove refueling each smudge pot.
The citrus groves were laid out in rows with smudge pots in every third row. Looking down a row the pots were roughly seventy feet apart. There was usually one main dirt access road down the middle of the grove and an oil truck would drive up and down that road all night.
I only did it one year and the first night was the worst. There were two of us assigned to each row. We'd go to the access road, walk as far as necessary to get to the oil truck, fill our buckets, and then go back to our row and start filling smudge pots. Being the new kid I was sent to the far end to start there and the other kid, in his third year of work, started at the near end.
The buckets were the key. They held only about three gallons, which to a twelve year-old boy was plenty heavy. I had to walk probably two football fields to get to the end, pour oil into the last smudge pot, and then walk back up to the next one and - only got it about half full before my bucket was empty. So, walk all the way back up to the access road, refill my bucket, and then back down to finish filling the second one. Then to the third one - and my bucket was empty. As I walked back up the row I noticed that my companion was already on his sixth pot! Okay, I had a lot farther to walk, but how could he possibly have done that many?
When I asked him about it he just said, “Geez, didn't you listen to what they told us?” I had to admit I had missed some information somewhere along the line and he said, “As you're going along the line, just put about a gallon in each of them. Don't worry about filling them up.”
I found that, by trying to fill each one, I couldn't get down the line fast enough and had allowed two of them to run out of oil. That irritated the boss because he had to relight them and they were somewhat difficult to relight if they cooled down. Hot, they lit right back up, but cool, it took quite a bit of work to get them burning again.
On my third night I was paired with a new kid and got to take the shorter walk while he made the long trek to the end of the row. And, yes, I got to point out that he was stupid for trying to fill each pot, even though nobody had actually said anything to him about it before we started. I found that was a particular bit of good-natured cruelty all the newbies had to endure.
The good thing about smudging was that we got off at six and were allowed to miss our first two periods of school. We didn't have to go in until ten. The bad thing was that, night after night, we were out there for four hours carrying oil cans. During heavy cold snaps we might work fifteen days in a row and other times we might only work two or three nights a week.
The pay was pretty good for those days. I should mention that those were the times when the citrus growers used braceros from Mexico to pick their crops and there weren't a lot of the owners who really cared about employment laws. Smudging paid a straight ten bucks a night. There were no questions about minimum wage, social security, or withholding taxes. My first week I worked five nights and was shocked on payday when I received only forty-six dollars. “You let two pots go out,” was the explanation. They had charged me two dollars for each time the boss had to relight one of the smudge pots I let run out of oil.
Welcome to the working world, Max.
