Editor’s note: We continue a series of stories adapted from the “Images & Recollections from Port Oneida” book series, based on oral histories by Tom Van Zoeren. Here’s another one about Ole Thoreson, based on information provided by his son Leonard, of Glen Arbor.

The Thoresons had the only commercial orchard in Port Oneida while Leonard was growing up during the 1920’s-‘40’s, with about 75 cherry trees. Leonard remembers them as quite a nuisance: “Well, you had to spray ‘em, and that was usually just about the same time as haying season. That was a job I hated. All we had was an old barrel sprayer. You’d sit there and pump that. You had to get pickers, too. That was a job, to get the pickers. Neighbors would come and pick — women and kids — whoever we could get.”

The cherries were taken to Lake Leelanau or to D.H Day’s Glen Haven Canning Company. “I remember my dad and I going up there to Day’s Cannery. I might have been eight years old, going up there. We picked cherries that day. We loaded ‘em in the back of the car, so it probably was 20 lugs, at the most. And we hauled ‘em up there. On the end of the building was a platform. You’d unload the cherries up there. Then they weighed them on the old beam scale. And then Dad took me in there and showed me the canning factory. I thought, Oh, man! It was so hot in there from that old boiler and all that steam and everything! The cans were running on the racks up there, rattling, clatter! Holy—I didn’t like that,” Leonard laughed

On the other hand, there could be drawbacks to other crops as well. “Shortly after my Dad bought the farm from his dad, a lot of people raised potatoes in them days. He was gonna make a big killing on ‘em. Well, that field south of the pigpen — the hills up in there? Just west of the Thoreson Road? Yup, it was all new land, just cleared recently. It was going to be his first crop of potatoes. In the fall of the year when he dug ‘em they were $2 a bushel. And Dad says — my dad told Grandpa John, ‘I want to sell them potatoes for $2 a bushel.’ Grandpa says, ‘No,’ he says, ‘you better hang onto them. They’ll be worth more money in the spring.’

“So when the spring came around, after handling the potatoes three or four times — sprouting ‘em and sorting ‘em — I don’t remember how many bushels he had; probably a hundred bushel that he was going to sell. They put ’em in sacks. He had sold ’em. Some buyer came in from Chicago and bought the potatoes. Dad was supposed to have ’em down at the dock on such a certain date and a ship would pick ’em up. The boat would take ’em down to Chicago. Well Dad says he could have got $2 a bushel for ’em in the fall — and in the spring he got 50 cents a bushel. He said he hauled ‘em down there and put them on the dock, and the last he knew they were still settin’ on the dock. The sprouts come right up through the sack. He said the last he heard they pushed them all over into the bay.”

One of Ole’s wintertime occupations was sorting the beans he had grown the preceding summer. “I remember, if it was storming, you couldn’t do a thing outside. After he got done doing chores, he’d take a bag of beans and carry them up to the house and sit there and sort beans all day. It was a little green bean. I don’t know what they called them.”

Ole would sit by the window and sort the beans with his bean sorter, which consisted of “a little box. You’d dump them in, and it had a belt on there. You pumped it with your foot and you’d pull some more beans up. You’d pick the bad ones out and you’d pump it again. The good beans would go down the chute into a sack. It was nice workmanship and had a nice finish on it. I wish I’d have kept it.”

Leonard remembers one bad storm when his dad finally exclaimed, “‘I’ve been settin’ here sortin’ beans for three days now, and this is the first time I’ve seen Millers’ barn (next door)!’ It was storming that bad — for three days. Oh, the wind used to blow up there in that place!”

In addition to peddling his beans door-to-door along with other products, Ole marketed them as “Uncle Ole’s Beans” at his brother’s Traverse City store. “They were good beans. People would come in the store and say, ‘Can I have some more of Uncle Ole’s Beans?’”