Harvesting Long Island Potatoes

Man, I was buying a 50 pound sack of potatoes today at the Country Stand on Scuttle Hole Road. You can keep potatoes in a dark place at 40-45 degrees, say a cellar, and they will last a long time. So for sixteen bucks it's a bargain. It got me thinking that as late as the 1980's I use to see black migrant workers from the south picking potatoes in the fields. What they actually did was place these potatoes in a sack. The farmer's tractor would pull the potatoes out of the earth and deposit them on the ground. Backbreaking work. The migrant workers were housed in labor camps such as Sack's where the Bridgehampton National Bank is today. Usually on Saturday nights after these men were paid, they would drink at Pickney's or another bar on the Turnpike. Man, if one was driving from Sag Harbor to Bridgehampton on a Saturday night in the 60's you would have to be careful. Men stumbling along the side of the road, etc. More than one passed out on the railroad tracks and were run over by a train. Fights and knifings were common. Most housing were slums and at least one pig farm was on the turnpike where the GFSF museum is today. The local fire department burned down many of these shacks. Oddly a lot of people living in these shacks drove Cadillacs. Blacks rarely drank in a couple of white bars on the turnpike, such as Gordons, as well as you would never see a white man in Pickney's, although I knew a couple of cops who would once in a while, just to piss off the blacks. Today all but a few of the potato farms are gone, and what are left employ mostly Latinos in their grading houses. A down and out friend of mine took a job for a week in a local grading house around 1975, and said the conditions were the worse he'd ever seen. Old black men drinking bottles of booze for lunch, etc. just to cope with that shit.

50 cents an hour for this shit?