CA Update - Bob Kuhn

Bob Kuhn retired from the hi tech Industry after having started in the power grid tube industry moving to the new semiconductor industry before the name Silicon Valley first evolved. He is now retired with his wife Sue in Calistoga Ca.

The Greatest Tomato Sandwich

WOODLAND, CA — Good grief! Any kid who grew up in Woodland during the war years knew exactly how to make a tomato sandwich — and it started with two slices of good old-fashioned soft white bread. The kind that doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

Each slice was lathered thick with homemade mayonnaise — the kind your mom whipped up herself. You’d slap the slices together, wrap the sandwich in wax paper or an old bread wrapper, then stuff it in your shirt pocket, where it could soak up the heat and moisture just right.

You’d toss in a little salt and pepper wrapped in paper, then hoof it or run to school, just in time to board the flatbed trucks waiting to haul you out to the tomato fields.

We’d ride out to the rows of big, red beefsteak tomatoes, get down on our hands and knees, and fill galvanized buckets with tomatoes until they were brimming. Then, bucket by bucket, we’d lug them to the end of the row and gently empty them into wooden lug boxes. Then back again, over and over, until the truck horn blew — the lunch signal.

When that horn sounded, it was a mad dash for the shade of the nearest trees, a race to get out of the 105-degree sun. You’d drop your sandwich down to claim your spot, then head back to the tomato rows to find the biggest, firmest beefsteak tomato you could.

If you didn’t have your own, you’d borrow a buddy’s pocket knife, slice open that tomato (still dusted with a bit of green powder), and carefully peel apart your soggy mayo-laden bread. Lay your slice just how you like it. Sprinkle on the salt and pepper, squish the whole mess together — and devour it.

Don’t worry about the tomato juice and mayo oozing down your hands. They were already filthy anyway.

And that, my friends, is how a 7th or 8th grader made a proper tomato sandwich.

For dessert? Take the leftover tomato, sprinkle it with the remaining salt and pepper, and eat around the core — saving it just long enough to chuck it at an unsuspecting classmate. That usually started one hell of a tomato fight — until the adult field hands came running, yelling at us in Spanish to knock it off.

At the end of the day, they’d count up the number of lug boxes each kid filled. Then we’d pile back onto the flatbed and head into town — carefully sneaking a few good throwing tomatoes in case the Dingle School trucks got close to our Beamer School trucks. Turf wars.

We did this twice a week in September and October. At the end of each week, we earned 10 cents in war stamps for every box we filled. That went into our stamp books, working toward an $18.75 war bond. Most kids averaged six boxes a day — not bad compared to the braceros, who could do 100 to 140 boxes. But then again, they didn’t screw around quite as much as we did.

That’s how we helped with the war effort — one tomato sandwich and one stamp at a time. Multiply that by 400 kids, and you’ve got a serious workforce that wasn’t otherwise available.

Oh — about that green powder on the tomatoes? We later learned it was either insecticide or fertilizer, dropped from Wegger’s crop-dusting plane. And our drinking water? Straight from the well. Everything sprayed on those fields eventually seeped into the water table.

Now, more than 80 years later, it’s hard not to notice that many of my classmates suffer from heart issues and cancer. Still, those tomato sandwiches?

They were amazing.

End of my story, Grasshopper.

~ Bob Kuhn