Growing up on a dairy farm in the 50’s and 60’s there was plenty of work to do of course, but in my spare time when I wasn’t hunting or fishing I would flip burgers, pump gas, or work at a couple of the local orchards.
At one of them, my job was to supply all the Ukrop’s stores in Richmond with good, fresh peaches in the summer on a scheduled route. We would ship extra, and whatever was leftover I would take to the wholesalers (Tony Lanasa, Loving’s, or Butch’s produce down by the farmers’ market), and head back once I unloaded everything. I would usually go to Lanasa’s first, because he was the closest. Tony was a good guy, a great big Italian fellow. I just liked him.
The owner would be frustrated when I got back, and he’d say, “You sold everything to Lanasa again? He throws me off his lot! He won’t buy anything from me. The last time I was there he took a bite of apple, spit it out, said it tasted like wet cardboard, threw the apple against the wall, splattered it, and walked off.”
I knew what the problem was, my boss was also an attorney. He tried to talk Tony into buying his fruit, and Tony was not the kind of guy you sold anything to. He bought from you if he wanted to, but you didn’t sell him anything. He was the master of his domain. If I showed up in a stake-bodied truck half-full of hot peaches, backed up to his loading dock, he knew why I was there, I didn’t have to tell him. Every time I remember stopping there, he took the whole load.
Tony was a good guy.
The orchard had a separate delivery route for fruit that was too soft to sell or had been culled due to blemishes. A black gentleman, “Joe”, delivered them to a winery in Petersburg, where they brought a nominal fee.
He came back one day and told me that he was hit by a gang of highwaymen on the way there, and the peaches had been stolen. I asked him what had happened, and he said, “I was going through Old Towne Petersburg, and I noticed that there was a group of about 20 kids following the truck. I thought it was just a chance happening. They were anywhere from 3 or 4 years old, up to about 12.” (90° hot, ripe peaches have an aroma that is out of this world, and apparently word around the winery spread fast)
Joe continued, “When I got to a stoplight, several of the oldest ones climbed up the side of the truck, and started backhanding fruit to the kids below. It was raining good, red, ripe peaches into the group on the sidewalk, and they were putting them into bags, skirts, hands, arms, and anything else they could find, and taking off with them”. I asked him if he jumped out to try to stop them, and he replied, “No, I was laughing so hard, it took me forever to get that old truck in gear and head out again.”
The winery indirectly blessed a whole lot of people that day, and Joe enjoyed taking off slowly at the lights. It was one of the owner’s favorite stories, how the kids would follow the peach truck and hit it at the stoplights.
Once when unloading fruit into the auger pit to be mashed up for wine, a bushel crate broke and went down the chute. Joe looked at the dock counter to see if he wanted him to climb down and retrieve it, but the manager shook his head. If the wine tasted a little oak-y that day, that was why. Everything went into the chute. Leaves, twigs, yellow jackets, hornets, etc. The alcohol purified everything, I’m sure.
The America I Knew 
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