To the migrant workers picking cherries at the Lester Southwell farm between Omena and Peshawbestown, Michigan, July 20, 1969 was just another muggy day made bearable only by the proximity of the chilly waters of Omena Bay across Michigan 22 from their labor camp.
They were picking black cherries after they had gotten done with the napoleons (light red) sweets, and toward the end of the season in August, would move on to the tarts, or sour cherries favored
by pie makers all over the world.Today was special.
Not only were they picking their favorite cherries, large lumpy syrupy blacks, but the kids and teenagers in the camp had rigged a black and white television they had bought at one of those garage sales that seemed to sprout each Friday and Saturday along the Suttons Bay to Traverse City route where local residents knew migrants passed on their weekend runs for food and other household necessities.
They had paid $10 for the set and rigged it with aluminum foil and wire clothes hangers to acquire a somewhat discernible image of nearby television broadcasters, most notably the Traverse City CBS affiliate Channel 9-10.
The kids would watch cartoons and sitcoms during the day that the teens and adults were out in the orchards with their ladders and pails. and in the evenings, the young adults watched the prime-time comedy shows.
But today, July 20, we knew that man was set to land on the moon. That day, the moon waxed near three-quarters and reflected off the clear waters off Omena Bay as it merged with Grand Traverse Bay to the south. The night was clear and cool, hovering in the high 60s.
As we kids gathered around the set, Walter Cronkite narrated play-by-play as the astronauts made ready their descent toward the lunar surface. We were all enthralled at the prospect of a man landing on the moon.
Outside, the adult males stood in a small circle around their cars parked in front of their respective cabins and talked adult talk about how much their families picked today, what was coming tomorrow, and where they would travel at the end of the cherry season when the sour cherries had been plucked clean. These were the days before the tree-shaking automatic machines replaced agricultural labor. It had been a good year.
Then, as Cronkite and CBS switched to the NASA transmission from the lunar surface as Neil Armstrong (just a blurry, bouncy, bouncing image on the set), pronounced his famous words, "This is just one small...." Cronkite had to cut in and translate the staticky slurs pronounced some 250,000 miles away and finish the sentence.
We burst out in shouts and screams and ran out of the small cabin in celebration to the amazement of the adults gathered in front of the camp.
"Que tienen?" my father asked.
"La luna!" we replied. "El hombre llego a la luna!"
"The men looked up at the moon, bright and distant, in the sky.
To some of them, who had never finished elementary school and some who had spent their entire lives without getting a chance to get near one, our claims must have seemed ludicrous.
"Tan locos," they said turning back to a subject that really mattered.
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