Apple picker still at the top of his game

By GEORGE HESSELBERG | Wisconsin State Journal

GAYS MILLS — Stan Smith’s hands, gloved for the first time in 20 years of plucking, devour an apple tree in minutes.

“Bruises fewer apples,” he said of the nubby cloth gloves, diving into a cluster of deep red Empires that quickly fall into a worn red canvas picking bag hung tummy-high from a strap around Smith’s narrow shoulders.

The russett-skinned Smith is the oldest of 15 pickers at Kickapoo Orchards, 134 acres planted with 46 varieties of apples and cherries. At 62, Smith is older than most of the apple trees that line these sunny hills along curvy Hwy. 171 east of Gays Mills.

He started work Thursday at 8 a.m. and would walk the rows in the Meyer family orchards until 6 p.m., hauling an apple-picking ladder — an 18-footer — to the taller trees, but mostly burrowing into a fruit-laden tree while standing on the apple-strewn ground.

This is the last week of good picking at most of the orchards in this area. The apple festival has come and gone, the weekly Crawford Independent has published its final apple poem (“Ruby globes that all will be harvested for love”).

It has been a good year to pick apples and to pick apple pickers, said Andy Meyer, 47, whose family has owned this 1914 vintage orchard since 1964. Though Smith has been a regular for the two- to three-month picking season for

20 years, it has not always been easy for Meyer to find people willing to endure the physical toll of pulling apples from branches. The failing economy has changed that.

“You can tell by the number of applications. Back in the 1990s, when the economy was really good, I was hiring anyone with a pulse,” said Meyer, taking a lunch break Thursday.

Of the 40 people he hired for the season at this orchard, 15 are pickers. The pickings are neither easy nor lucrative, but for Smith, these weeks of 10-hour days in good weather and bad, climbing ladders, hauling bags of apples, will provide for the upcoming winter.

Thursday he was picking one side while co-worker Tim Copus, 36, worked the other, of a row of Empires. After a few minutes on the ladder, looking as if he were a scruffy but intent trapeze artist, Smith started “bottoming” the trees, which means — according to legendary UW professor Frederic Cassidy’s apple-picking glossary, compiled from these very orchards in 1942 — picking everything he can reach from the ground.

Smith is the fastest picker here, too, though he admits that Copus (“I’ve been mentoring him”) may have caught up in speed.

Like most pickers, he is partial to big apples like Cortlands and Haralsons, particularly the Haralsons, which are big and grow in clusters. “You can get three or four in your hands at once,” and “the bigger the apple, the faster the bins fill up.”

The worst kind of apple for pickers is the Red Free. It is hard to pick cleanly, stubbornly sticks to the tree and has lots of spurs, which are the leaves and twig left on the stem that must be removed, making extra work. And McIntoshes are trouble because they bruise easily.

Smith grew up in nearby Readstown on a farm, then farmed himself, was married for 25 years and has a grown son and daughter. He gave up farming, worked as a roofer, and now lives in Bell Center (population 114). About his previous life as a farmer, he said, “Believe me, I don’t ever want to milk a cow again. I’d rather pick apples all year around.”

The key to making money as an apple picker is “to keep your hands moving.” Watching Smith, there is not a moment when his hands are not in motion, shuffling apples, moving branches, measuring by feel the fullness of his sack. On a great day, when the weather and the apple and the mood and the back muscles are all in line, he will pick 100 bushels.

A year ago, David Schmitz of Mount Zion wrote eloquently in the monthly Kickapoo Free Press of his short term discovering “the magic of apple-picking.”

“I found satisfaction in the direct correlation between my productivity and compensation. This honest and simple type of employment is hard to find these days. It’s real work.”

Schmitz also noticed: “No matter how many thousands of apples you pick in a day, you have to meet each one privately.”

Smith was direct and cheerful in trying to explain his attraction to the process of gathering those “ruby globes.”

“I just love picking apples,” he said.

He hopes to keep picking as long as his health will allow. It’s hard on the back, he said, and the hands can get cold. He has picked apples in the snow, but not this year. Though the orchard’s shop stays open until the day before Thanksgiving, the picking should be finished by the end of this week.

Of the 45,000 bushels of hand-picked apples that will leave Kickapoo Orchards this season, Smith will have picked more than 4,000 of them, filling his bushel bag more than 5,000 times and earning, for about three months work, $1 per bushel.

“The only thing wrong with apple-picking is the season is too short,” he said.