How My Mother Paid for College
Working to pay for college tuition is not a new story, but earning that money through the painstaking process of collecting pecans might be. Melinda Dillion, community engagement coordinator for the Giving Grove program at Kansas City Community Gardens, shares in this guest blog post the incredible story of how her mother paid for college through pecan sales. If you enjoy this blog, consider subscribing to The Serving, Giving Grove’s quarterly newsletter.
Contributed by: Melinda Dillion, Giving Grove Community Engagement Coordinator at Kansas City Community Gardens
Melinda’s mother and uncle in the pecan grove.
Here’s where the story begins…
My mother grew up in northeast Oklahoma, where pecan trees grow wild. She was the fifth child of a family of nine and the first person in her family to go to college. It may seem nuts to pay for college tuition in pecan sales, but that is precisely what she did.
My mother’s aunt, Shorty (because she was short), and uncle Granny (because he was slow) had land that the Neosho River flowed through. It was rich with groves of hard shell pecans. The native hardshell pecan grows well by creeks and rivers in this part of Oklahoma. When rains flood the land, the creeks rise and carry the pecans downstream. The nuts plant themselves near the streams (or even on dry land if it was a big flood), creating massive nut groves. These trees take 25 years to produce but will live to be over 100 years old. Once they produce, they feed lots of people, squirrels, and birds. (If you haven’t tried these nuts, you are missing out. They are oily nuts with a richer flavor than the paper shell pecan.)
Spring rains and silkworms…
The biggest problem with pecan trees is too much rain in the spring. It washes off the pollen, preventing the blossoms from developing into nuts. Silkworms are also a nuisance. To control these pests, people often wrapped a cloth around an iron pole, dipping the cloth into creosote (a tar oil that forms when burning off wood containing lots of sap, like pine or cedar, and used for fueling fires or for farm equipment). Then they would light the creosote-dipped cloth on fire and stick the flame in the silkworm nests of the pecan or mulberry trees. (*Interesting Fact* Silkworms really like mulberry trees. In fact, people raised mulberry tree farms just to harvest the silk.)
Photo credit: Jonas Janner Hamann Bugwood.org
Photo credit: Brad Haire Bugwood.org
It takes a lot of nuts to pay for college…
Shorty and Granny allowed folks to pick pecans on their property as long as they gave half the harvest to Shorty and Granny. The pickers used a sledgehammer wrapped with pieces of old tire (so as not to bruise the tree). They would climb the trees with the hammer to knock the pecans free and a ground crew collected the nuts as they fell.
My mom was a scrap picker, meaning that she came in after the pecan pickers got what they wanted and she picked the rest off the ground. When she was 18, she picked pecans in the fall to pay for the spring tuition. Tuition plus books ran $250-$300 per semester. She could sell the harvest to a retailer in Chetopa, KS, for $0.25/lb in-shell (now they sell at $2.50-$4.00/lb). They shipped the nuts to a factory that shelled and packaged them. One pound of pecans equals about 2-3 cups shelled. If tuition and books were $300, she had to pick and sell 1,200 lbs of pecans each semester. One pound is around 250-300 pecans, so that’s at least 300,000 pecans each semester, each nut picked one at a time.
The trees still provide even today…
Sixty-five years later, these trees are still alive and producing. However, the market for pecans is not the same today. Back then, as an individual pecan picker, you could sell small harvests easily - there were many buyers. Now the market is primarily for the larger commercial growers. The pecans are harvested with machines that shake the trees and vacuum up the nuts. But my family continues to gather nuts and either sell what they pick, give the harvest away to neighbors, or enjoy them.
It’s a real act of love to harvest these nuts for neighbors and family. Usually, it is cold and wet. You have to crawl on your knees to pick up the pecans. Your fingers freeze because it’s hard to pick with gloves. There are often pop-up nutcrackers in this part of Oklahoma where you can take your nuts to get cracked. But we always crack them ourselves - another tedious practice, but at least we can do it sitting by my family’s toasty wood stove.
At age 79, my mom still gathers hundreds of pounds of pecans a year and stores sacks of them in her deep freeze. Her favorite way to eat them? Pecan pie.
Photo credit: Brad Haire Bugwood.org