Apple Battling circa 1977

     What does a flat broke All-But-Dissertation Ph.D. student do for a living in northwestern Connecticut in 1977? I saw an add for apple-pickers in the Danbury newspaper. Ever since I had read the ethnology Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, I was curious about apple picking and orchards. So I drove my rusted Volkswagon Beetle down to Blue Jay Orchards in Bethel, Connecticut and applied for a job. What I didn't know was that the advertisement was merely one of the requirements that permitted the orchard owner to sponsor the real picking crew from Jamaica for the season. Labor has been a problem for New England farm owners for as long as they've been growing rocks, and especially difficult since World War II. No one wants to pick apples if they can find other work.
     The farm's owner was obligated to give anyone who applied a try. Most lasted a day. I was in luck. The owner, Bob Josephy saw my name and asked if I was Croswell Bowen's daughter. Turned out, he'd known dad in New York of the thirties and forties, when Josephy was a noted book designer. He created a job for me, stacking boxes of apples onto pallets, and removing excess leaves from them. With my interest in the languages of the Caribbean, I was delighted to work with the Jamaicans, listening to them sing hymns form their pyramidal ladders high in the trees. They competed with each other to pick the most, of course. I also became friends with the crusty farm manager, and invited him to dinner at Hidden Hollow in Sherman. Josephy seemed shocked at this, and invited me to dinner at his house. A year or so earlier, he and his wife had separated, and she lived at the Heritage Village retirement community nearby. We had a good chat, and he made a subtle pass at me. He liked women in general. I worked at the orchard until the first hard frost shut things down.
     I can think of one reason why I didn't pepper him with questions about my father. I didn't know what to ask. Josephy died in 1993. Fortunately for my curiosity, the year before he died, Josephy completed his autobiography, Taking Part, A Twentieth Century Life. Taking Part gives me some insight into the thinking of my father's circle.
    It's odd that Josephy was shocked at my friendship with his farm manager, as he was very involved in the labor movement in the thirties. That's what I'd ask him about Dad. I can't, so Josephy's experiences are just a hint at Dad's. Both men came from privileged backgrounds. After a military boarding school, Josephy chose not to go to college, but went to work for the publisher, Knopf. After a decade, he became a freelance book designer. His experiences led him to help organize the workers in the book designing and publishing industry. He states that after the Crash, Americans of all classes thought there needed to be a change in the unfettered capitalism of the day. Some of those most dedicated to improving the lot of workers were members of the American Communist Party, and Josephy joined. The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 was a turning point for him as he was a committed anti-facist. He left the Party, and indeed, the Guild he helped organized did not survive.
     Josephy's ties to Dad included mutual friends like Malcolm Cowley and Matthew Josephson. Josephy's second wife was Martha McCleery, who had been married to Bill McCleery, Dad's editor at the freethinking newspaper, PM. The breakup of friendships over politics is a theme that runs through Taking Part. That resonates with my childish eavesdropping at my parent's and their friends cocktail parties. If in my youth, Vietnam caused ruptures between some fathers and sons, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and then the witch-hunting red scares of the Cold War must have broken up scores of friendships. And of course, then as now, accusations of communism and socialism were lobbed about with results that destroyed careers as well. Belatedly, thanks to Josephy's book, I'm getting a sense of those times.