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Bernard Rocksvold (1965)

Jeez Carl, sorry to hear that. It only took 6 stiches to sew up my hand.

Theresa Eve (1964)

That beet knife looks dangerous!!!  Nothing like an injured hand.  I had surgery on my little finger. Not having my left hand for weeks was an adventure!   Garden and farm tools are dangerous.  Glad you all lived through that. 

Joann Damsen (Dahl) (1961)

Talking about Spreckels -My dad would go to speckels and get the beet pulp for our cattle.  Hated that with a passion, the smell of beet pulp was awful.  We also grew beets.

Mary Ann Lieberum (Crowley) (1965)

These posts bring back Woodland memories. My dad worked at Spreckels for many years as a bookeeper in the Payroll Dept. He took me and others on a tour once and I remember it didn't smell very good! I worked at Leitholds in high school, first at the fountain and then on the floor. I remember some of the stock was underground in a basement.

Frances Handley (Jones) (1964)

I remember the tour too! My mother was the executive secretary at Spreckels for 22 years. I am sure that many of you summer workers knew Sue Handley in the front office . I remember that we took my brother Buzz's Cub Scout den on a  Spreckels tour. The lab used to make liquid sugar samples which turned out to be what we called "glass candy". Pretty tasty as it was slightly browned as part of some test. Spreckals and Contadina were both iconic Woodland smells when they started cooking both the sugar and the tomato sauce. 
One of the prime uses for used beet pulp & juice is now a brine which is a component that is mixed up & put on streets & highways to to keep ice & snow melted during snow storms . Who knew? And it works !

Theresa Eve (1964)

Fran Handley thank you for that information about your Mother, Sue Handley who worked  in the main office at Spreckeles Sugar Beet  Company.  Here are the dresses your Mother made in 1955 out of the Sugar Beet Bags, all as a promote for the Yolo County Fair.  (Picture and history from Fran.)

Theresa Eve (1964)

In 1955 Clark Gable married Kathleen Spreckels.  They were married until his death 1960. 

Joel Childers (1966)

As the story goes, C&H forced Spreckels out of Hawaii through dirty politics. But his name remains at the Maui beach that is home to the International Windsurfing Championships. Wish I was there.

Theresa Eve (1964)

As written in the book, Yolo County Land of Changing Patterns,  at a cost of $2.5 Million Spreckels Sugar Plant opened July 1, 1937 in Woodland, with a three-day celebration.  The first Sugar Queen Contest was started. The first Sugar Queen was Lillian Bertha Wetzel, sister to John and Vern Wetzel, farmers of Yolo County. 

Richard S. Klenhard (1967)

SPRECKLES SUGAR comment:  Late 60's, I was asked by Skip Quinlan if I could 'fill-in' during one grave yard shift.  Sure why not I said not knowing what xperience I was going to obtain.  Well what a night - my position was on/at a conveyor belt separating the weeds from the beets before they traveled into a hot and steamy bath.  Y'all have been talking about the smell.  I am here to confirm that smell was rancid and real.  Good thing I did not have to return for  another shift.  

Theresa Eve (1964)

Joel you are right, Claus Spreckels started the sugar company in Hawaii, moving his company to California. Upon his death in 1908, his son Adolph Bernard Spreckels  (Jan. 5, 1857 - June 28, 1924) ran the Spreckels Sugar Compnay in California.   

Theresa Eve (1964)

Sugar Queen of 1962 with Attendants. 

Greg Kareofelas (1962)

Thanks everyone for adding to the Spreckels Story. Here is another piece. Still standing is the "Beet Transfer station". It is on Pedrick Road next to the RR Tracks. A Beet Truck would pull alongside and it would be tipped to dump the beets into a chute that led to the conveyor whence it could be loaded onto a RailRoad Car. These would be the ones that would come to the factory, where if you working that part of the plant you got to make sure the beets unloaded.

Tom Stewart (1969)

I was privileged to work for Sprekles Sugar a couple of seasons during my college years. I actually enjoyed working there. As a youth I played baseball for the Sugar Champs, sponsered by Spreckles and we won the championship. The Babe Ruth world series was hosted by Woodland during those years.

Theresa Eve (1964)

Tom, great pictures of your team, and you in the uniform.  What year was that.  Must have been 1960?

Greg Kareofelas (1962)

One more bit of Spreckels trivia. This is an Ad (from 1938)  from the company that built the Woodland Spreckels plant: storage silos factory, office and labs. It was quite the project, 

Tom Stewart (1969)

The pictures are from around 1966.

Howard Neal (1964)

Here is my humble addition to the Spreckels stories: I got a job at Spreckels in the summer of 1965 and spent most of my shifts as part of the "miscellaneous labor pool," which meant I was assigned to whatever was the least desirable duty during that shift. The scariest was when we were sent into one of those silos (See Greg's Spreckels photo above) to dig out the rock-solid sugar remaining at the bottom of the silo. We had to be lowered into the solo via a wood plank attached to a rope, i.e. a bosun's chair, from a small opening near the top of the silo, several stories above the sugar below. Of course, that wasn't the dirtiest duty, compared to cleaning out the area where the beet pulp was dried after the sugar was extracted. The dryer had to be cleaned twice each shift, due to the massive accumulation of dust and dirt. Whew! I lasted only one summer.

JoAnn Kergel (Wirth) (1965)

Does anyone remember the great sugar beet grab of about 1955-56?  The US government placed a quota on the number on sugar beet acres you could plant.  My Dad and several other farmers in the Yolo area didn't appreciate the quota so they kept doing what they aways did and planted however many acrea they had planted in the past. Had their entire crops confiscated.  I remember this so clearly because it derailed my father's ability to support the family with only 200 acres of farm land.  He started leasing land down the road and I learned how to drive a wheel engine so we could shuttle the tractors three miles down the road.  When our farm house burned to the ground in 1958 there was a lot of talk about how we could continue to manage to be farmers. There was a lawsuit filed againt the governments action but no money was ever paid to the farmers involved.  My Dad took a job at UC, Davs and farmed too.  Somehow we held on and my brother and I still own the 200 acres outside Yolo on country roads 96 & 15.  I do not think of sugar beets with fond memories.

Theresa Eve (1964)

Tom, thanks for the date 1966. Thought it had to be around then because the bleachers are metal where your team was pictured. Clarks Fields was totally rebuilt from the old wooden stadium around 1960.  Probably because of the Babe Ruth Leage Celebration.   JoAnn nice to hear your story from the farmers' view.  I can see you driving a tracker, not much you could not do.  That entire road was very much the main farmer lane.  Remember it so.  Howard, cannot believe you ever got down and dirty!  Good for you.  I worked on the tomato harverter, but I did not last long on that field job.  But I can say I did it, in the hot sun.  Picking off the dirt and smashed tomatoes as they came through on the belt.   

Greg Kareofelas (1962)

And Yes Howard, when they lowered us to the sugar pile in the silo, we were tethered to safety slings, so if the pile of sugar all of a sudden went out the the bottom holes, we were not also swept away. All of that for $1.97 an hour. The picks we used to break up the sugar were made of brass, iron could have sparked and caused the sugar dust to explode. I saw one of the brass picks at the flea market once, probably should have bought it for memories sake

Larry Michalak (1960)

I'm enjoying the Spreckels memories--especially the knife.  I worked at Spreckels in the summers and school breaks when I was in college in the early 1960s, mostly in the warehouse, bagging 5- and 10-pound bags of sugar ("nickels" and "dimes") on a machine they called the "merry go round," baling bags of sugar and loading boxcars.  I also worked in the flumes which carried the beets from the boxcars to the mill.  My dad, also named Larry Michalak, was president of the union local for many years.  He came to Woodland in the 1930s when they first opened the refinery, after working in the Spreckels refineries in Salinas and Manteca.  In Woodland he met and married my mother, California ("Cal") Flowers who was from a local family that lived on Main Street.  Dad worked at Spreckels for most of his adult life except for serving in the army in the Pacific in World War I from 1942 to 1945.  He was a sugar boiler, running a centrifuge on the "pan floor" to concentrate and "cut" the sugar from the hot liquid after they boiled the sugar out  of the beets.  In the summer it got super hot in that part of the refinery.  The part of the year when they were extracting sugar was called "campaign" when the refinery worked day and night.  We would alternate from day shift (8-5) to swing shift (4-midnight) to graveyard shift (midnight to 8 a.m.).  My brother Michael Michalak and my cousin Jack Mitchell also worked at Spreckels.  I remember fondly the annual Spreckels picnics at the Fair Grounds with barbecued steak.  I was sad when Spreckels closed.  

Becky Knight (Tobitt) (1961)

My Dad was also a grower for Spreckles, especially during WWII. He used both the wet and dry pulp to feed our sheep. I remember the stench of the wet pulp very well but Dad would eat it! I did try the dry pulp and it wasn't so bad, kind of like bran cereal!

Orval Hughes (1964)

I did several campaigns at Spreckles and so did my dad Orval Sr.  I did several jobs. I was a sample gatherer. I had about 10 or 12 stations and would get samples and test them. I worked at the drums and canves filters where the beet puld was in the beginning stagews of filtering out the sugar.  I became a fly killing expert!.  I also worked in the wharehouse doing various things for Mr. Williams (Joyce's dad)  The most interesting on was going in the silos.  Hot and scary.  Sugar dust is highly flamable so we wore socks and used aluminum shovels to break up the sugar to get it in the auger.  There was an old picture on the wall from an explosion.  Anyway all fun for a kid

Jack Martin Jr (1966)

I worked one summer at Spreckels.  Like Orv, I was a sample carrier.  I had to walk around to the various stations with my tray of small containers and collect at the top of every hour.  The good news was that it only took 15-20 minutes or so, and for the rest of the hour I could just sit and read a magazine.  The bad news, as Larry alluded to, was the hours.  It was 7 straight on day shift, then 2 days off.  Then 7 straight on swing and 2 off.  Then 7 straight on grave, 2 off.  The rotating shifts messed with my head and body, and the concept of a "weekend" disappeared into the mist.

On one occasion I reported to my supervisor that one of the samples was showing an abnormal reading, and he truly freaked.  I did too, as he seemed to think the entire place was about to blow.  But they pretty quickly got it under control.  Not much in the way of pay (don't recall the exact hourly, somebody said $ 1.97 per, sounds about right), and one summer was quite enough.