FARMING: Gloom In Wenatchee

There was bustle but no joy in Wenatchee last week. October, the month of hard work and big money, was a sad month in the nation’s greatest apple country.

Wenatchee lies miles east of Seattle, past the snow-capped Cascade Mountains, whose passes are sheer rock faces and whose steep fir forests are gashed with crimson where scrub maple grows in the ravines. In these mountain passes the fall rains break and the woods are always wet. Wenatchee, 20 miles away, is a desert, valley, whose volcanic-ash topsoil was once barren of anything but scrub pine.

Now irrigation projects worth millions of dollars nourish endless acres of the finest apple trees in the U.S. In October the trees are dusty grey from spraying; the boughs are heavy with fruit; thousands of wooden poles prop up the limbs’ ripe red burden. Nowhere else does nature conspire, with volcanic ash, rainless summers and cold autumn nights, to produce apples of such deep and vivid color.

Last week, as in every October, Wenatchee’s streets were crowded with roving apple pickers. The “apple sheds”—where machines wash, scrub, dry and sort the fruit—ran full blast. Long lines of yellow refrigerator cars waited along the blue Columbia River; at night the switch engines, making up fruit trains, hammered their echoes off the high barren ridge across the river.

This was the year the apple growers expected to clean up. They nearly went broke in the ’30s, when they cut down 9,000 acres of trees they could no longer afford to spray, and went so terribly in the red that the average debt was $750 per acre. But by 1941 prices went up; the demand for Wenatchee’s luxury apples was brisk. That fall, when Shipper Reuben Benz wangled a freight reduction, the growers were riding so high that they gave him 3,100 silver dollars, trundled into a banquet room in a wheelbarrow.

Last year was even better—and this year promised to be paradise. But OPA, which reckons paradise in terms of consumers, stepped in with a price ceiling that throttled Wenatchee’s boom. Last week the growers had to sell their apples at $2.53 a 44-lb. box, could ask no premium for fancy quality and fancy wrappings. The growers, who always regarded apples as a gamble for high stakes, were in the sad fix of a man watching a casino raided just when the dice were getting hot.