Living And Working On The Land Is Fabric Of Clyde Clarke’s Life
Clyde Clark knows about making pickles, the value of loyalty, and the good that peanuts can do for his soil.
At 86, Clark and his wife, Elaine, live within sight of his childhood playground: the cliffs under the former Riblet Mansion. After a lifetime of hard work - mostly farming and in the pickle business - Clark admits that he’s discovered the ability to procrastinate. He’s going to get around to thinning his irises - one of these days.
The Clark family came to the Valley in 1918. His father moved the family, four children then and one more to come, onto 10 acres south of the Hutton Settlement.
“He decided to come here and do something easier than wheat farming,” Clark said. Truck farming was his dad’s choice, and easier it wasn’t. At least not to seven-year-old Clyde.
“I learned about stoop labor,” he said. “They called it stoop labor because you had to bend over to pick everything.”
One of the crops raised by the Clark clan was cucumbers. The cukes were bound for the Wilson Pickle Factory, then located on Trent Avenue, just east of the Keefe Bridge.
“I worked for the Wilson Pickle Factory before I was old enough to work,” Clark said.
Work was the fabric of life for Clark. He shakes his head over today’s child labor laws. To him, those laws steal a child’s best chance in life: learning to work.
“Five year olds and six year olds in those days could go to work and pick strawberries and make money. You can’t do that today,” Clark said. “It’s a sad case.”
By the time Clark was a teenager, his father had converted to a dairy farm. With the barn to keep clean and his own cow to milk morning and night, Clark couldn’t turn out for sports at West Valley High School.
“Six o’clock every evening, you know. A cow has to be milked at the same time every day. I lived through it,” he said.
Work at the pickle factory continued. Sometimes that meant hefting 100-pound bags of salt or sugar.
“It was wet, sloppy, hard work. You had your hands in pickle brine all the time.”
On a dare one day, teenage Clark stacked up 300 pounds of salt and carried it off the truck.
Then came the Depression. And although Wilson didn’t have the money to have a crop of cucumbers planted, the Clarks planted for him anyway. Wilson never forgot that loyalty.
After World War II, Clark had other chances, but he stuck with the Wilson Pickle Company. Again, the loyalty paid off. Fred Wilson took him on as a partner. Clark eventually inherited the factory and 32 acres, after Wilson died.
The pickle business was a tough one. Clark’s outfit had big competition: Nalley in Tacoma and Steinfeld in Portland.
Finally in 1966, he realized he had to expand or quit.
“I realized that at my age I didn’t want to move down into the (Columbia) Basin and start over,” he said. He was 55.
He liquidated the business, and for 20 years worked as custodian for the Millwood Presbyterian Church. “Best job I ever had in my life,” he said.
In recent years, the Clarks have traveled to every continent, enjoyed grandchildren and kept an eye out for their neighbors. The garden, while small according to Clark’s standards, is larger than most suburban gardens today.
“I’ve got everything here,” he said. Corn, broccoli, cantaloupes, raspberries, rutabagas, turnips, carrots, beets. And peanuts. The plants don’t usually bear nuts, but he plows them under for the nitrogen they return to the soil.
“There’s a secret to farming, you know,” he said, standing among the cantalope vines. “Some people are so meticulous. But the best way to do it is to add some fertilizer to the soil and stir it up real good. Then put your seeds in the ground and they’ll grow. Course, you got to talk to the seeds. You say ‘OK, buddies, you’re on your own. Grow!’ And they do.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo