Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change

Mary Schapper

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Mary Schapper, 65, is no stranger to farm work or to gleaning. She grew up on a family farm near the small town of Cedar Rapids, Nebraska, where the family grew most of their own vegetables and raised chickens and a few pigs. Gleaning was a way of life for a farm family struggling to make ends meet. Berries, cherries, anything they found to supplement the food they grew and what they could barter for.

"To the day my Dad died," says Schapper, "he was out picking choke cherries at the side of the road. So, he was a gleaner from day number one until he was 94."

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Harvest

Their father worked in an ordinance plant in Grand Island, coming home only on weekends. So, the family rented out most of their land. Come harvest time, families in the area would get together to share the harvest. The Schapper girls, from the age or 12 or 13, hired out as cooks for the harvesters.

Typical Breakfast

The day started early for Schapper, who was out delivering newspapers before school. A typical breakfast was pie. The fruit for the pie was often bartered from neighbors in exchange for vegetables or for work.

Typical Dinner

The family was pretty well self-sufficient in terms of vegetables and eggs from their chickens, so potatoes and eggs were a common dinner. Wednesday was pork night, and on Sunday they usually ate one of their chickens.

Gleaning Corn

Money was tight, says Schapper, and from an early age, she and her siblings did what they could to help out. During corn harvest, that meant gleaning. "We'd always go out and pick up corn in the fields in the evenings," Schapper remembers. Neighbors let them go into the corn fields before they put the cows in it to graze. "We had an old car that we took the back seat out of," says Schapper, "so we just piled the corn in there." There were always a few ears that had been left on the ground. "We'd pick 'em up in 5-gallon cans, because that was about all we could carry. Then we'd go dump it in the car." On a good day, she recalls, "it'd come up to about the windows in the back." Several bushels. Then their father would drive the car to the grain elevator and get it weighed.

While the three older children were in the field gleaning the corn, they were on their own. Their father would drive the car to the edge of the field and leave them to it. "We were allowed to move the car forward in the field," she says, as they worked their way across acres of corn rows. Just 10 and 11 years old, the sisters were too small to drive the car alone, so one would steer while the other pushed on the gas. Once, remembers Schapper, the car just rocketed out of control. "We started really just zooming across the ridges in the corn field. My brother had to get out of the back seat and turn off the key. He was about 6 years old at the time. And he had enough common sense to do that." Schapper laughs at the memory.

De-Tasseling Corn

Schapper also de-tasseled corn in experimental plots during her high school years. That's how she earned the money for her first watch.

Food and Worker Safety

She says that the work farmworkers do by hand these days is not so different from the way farmers and farm families worked their fields in the past. But rules for worker safety were nonexistent back then.

Why Glean?

After 27 years as a nurse manager at Natividad Medical Center, Shapper will be managing the medical care center at Soledad prison. She decided to glean because, even working full-time, she could find a Saturday morning free, and "Why not?" She sees increasing need all around, even in her own neighborhood and among her co-workers.

Radio Stories

Mary Schapper's story "Runaway Car in the Cornfields" produced for radio

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