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and their children. They bought a nice home near that of Butch's parents, who were getting old. Butch went to work for the Mississippi Power Company as an engineer in the Gulfport plant. He and Alice were very happy in Mississippi City. But tragedy struck a year or two later - Butch had a bad fall at the plant, aggravated an old back injury, and passed away. I was away at the time and did not learn of his death for months. Alice sold their house and moved to her native city, New Orleans. She went back to her teaching profession and reared a fine family.
I left Frisco when I was offered a job weighing and inspecting celery for the Transcontinental Freight Bureau, moving to Terminus, in the San Joaquin Valley. Terminus was a little town at the end of the Western Pacific line. The railroad provided a caboose which served as living quarters for four inspectors. For a while Bing Wong prepared our meals, and served us in his grocery store. Then old Mac's wife left him. Mac was the freight agent there. He invited us to eat in his home if we did the cooking. We accepted, then flipped a coin to see who cooked the first meal. I lost - then made the mistake of cooking veal rounds in a creole gravy, which I served with a tossed salad and rice. My mother had taught me the art of cooking, so I wound up cooking until both the celery shipping season and the green asparagus shipping season were over. After the asparagus season was over, I was offered a transfer to southern California to weigh and inspect oranges but accepted instead a foreman's job on a nearby celery farm with the Robert T. Cochran Company of New York and San Francisco. My living quarters was an elaborate houseboat. After hiring a Japanese crew, I began preparing a seed bed large enough to provide plants for two hundred acres of celery. I found the Japanese to be morally and physically clean - good workers but inclined to loaf a little when not watched. Fugi Kawa was my best man and served me well as irrigation boss and advisor.
One day I rigged up a hand-line, baiting the hook with fresh shrimp rolled up in a piece of cheesecloth, and threw it overboard off the stern of the houseboat and left for a tour of the fields. I must have been gone for an hour. When I returned, I had a thirty-pound striped bass! He had put up a fight and got entangled in the line. When I pulled him in he was barely alive. I carried the fish up to
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the kitchen and asked the cook, a wife of one of the men I had hired, if she would prepare it. That night I had a delicious broiled filet and the Japs had boiled fish with rice and raw strips with soybean sauce.
Frankly, I had never been proud of the job I did for Cochran. I had always been a conscientious employee and had always done
an excellecnt job at anything I tried. But I really allowed my
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weaknesses to overcome my moral strength in Terminus. Probably, the very reason I was hired by Mr. Bensberg, Robert T. Cochran's field man, was because I had done them a favor. I met Bensberg during the green-asparagus shipping season. He had signed most of the growers to a contract at a certain price but when the market price went up his growers were selling at the higher price and jumping their contracts. Bensberg asked me to call upon them during the next weekend and try to get them to honor their contracts. It was a difficult task but I rented a motor-launch and invited a young minister and his wife to accompany my girl friend and me on the voyage around the islands.
We left early one Saturday morning and did manage to visit all the growers, make friends, and ask that they continue to honor their contract with Robert T. Cochran Company. Everywhere we went the ritual was the same. Most of the growers were Italian and would issue a gracious greeting and an invitation to visit the wine cellar and sample their delicious wines. By the time we visited the fifth and last grower we were all feeling that delightful glow when familiarity takes over. And the situation did not improve when we departed from our last call, as our host presented us with one gallon of his very best wine. When the green-asparagus began flooding the shipping sheds again, Bensberg was overjoyed but never did understand how I managed to turn the tide in Cochran's favor. I suppose that is why he made me a foreman of the celery farm despite the fact that he knew I had little agricultural experience. All the planting was completed when I was forced to leave because my mother, sister, two brothers and my old pal Milton Pradat had left Mississippi City for California with the intention of bringing me back with them. I arranged to have my girlfriend drive me to Stockton
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