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“There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yes, this is a big pear. A golden bosc pear weighing in at over a pound. The folks at Scully Packing Co. near Kelseyville showed me around the other day as their harvest ground on. I worked nearly four seasons while in high school and college at what was then the Scotts Valley Fruit Exchange near Lakeport. I was surprised much had not changed in the physical side of things of a packing operation. Packers packed, fast as ever, but with cardboard boxes not wood. Forklift drivers still unloaded trucks from the fields and sorters still sorted. The sounds were as I remembered.
At Scotts Valley, there was a packer named Doris. To a 16 year-old (me), she seemed to be about 86, maybe 90. I’m sure she wasn’t, but she could pack a box of pears in under 45 seconds. No joke. She made a ton of money and probably took vacations to the Bahamas on her summer earnings. Doris was a star at the shed.
Pear puns I’ve heard in the newsroom and the public:
-That’s quite a pear you have, Kent .
-That’s a really small hand.
-What’s in the other hand?
-It’s pearfect
-That’s a really big pear.
-It looks like Mr.Potato Head!
-Do you have a matching pear?
-What was on the other side of the tree?
-Here a pear, there a pear, everywhere a pear pear.
The running joke at Scotts Valley in 1978 was “Why is a pear green?”
“Because it’s not ripe!”
Ayyyye
I can honestly tell you it’s the largest pear I’ve ever seen. The Guinness Book of World Records has an atago pear in Japan at record at 6 lb 8 oz.
-Kent Porter