This week in history: Harvest of Shame airs on CBS

Edward R. Murrow’s documentary exposing the plight of migrant farm workers in America aired Nov. 25, 1960, the day after Thanksgiving. Harvest of Shame began in Belle Glade and followed migrant workers across the country as they followed the harvest.

Nine-year-old Jerome King, shown here in a still from the video, appeared in the 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame. King, still living western Palm Beach County, talked to The Palm Beach Post in 2003. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Tags: agriculture, television, This Week in History

Longtime store owner remembers West Palm Beach landmark

Frequent “Post Time” contributor Jim Anderson, nearly 83 and still working hard behind the counter at his downtown Anderson Hardware store, recently passed along this remembrance of “Sonny-Boy’s Fruit Company.”

“For many years, prior to the second world war, a landmark existed at the southeast corner of the intersection of Belvedere Road and South Dixie. It was an open-air market which featured fresh citrus and vegetables. During business hours, one could pull a vehicle right onto the property and ship for locally grown citrus, as well as purchase a fresh-squeezed glass of juice.

“The property was also a place where many of the newspaper home-delivery ‘boys’ received and rolled their morning papers, in the early hours, for distribution to nearby neighborhoods. All of the newspapers of that era made drops at Sonny-Boy’s, including The Palm Beach Post-Times, The Miami Herald, and on Sundays — the Miami Daily News.

“The carriers would arrive to find large bundles of newspapers — marked with route numbers — which would be rolled and covered with pieces of old newspapers, which had been cut into smaller shapes. The wrappers were then glued around the papers, put into large bags and ‘biked’ for delivery.

“Sonny-Boy’s disappeared before the mid-fifties, as the properties became more and more valuable. The Sonny-Boy’s corner became a bank (Security Exchange). Eventually, the southwestern corner of the intersection was (and is) occupied by The Palm Beach Post. Howard Johnson’s restaurant was on the north side of Belvedere — between Olive and Dixie, and the Mount Vernon Motor Lodge (now, Hotel Biba) was opposite.

“A block south of Belvedere (on Dixie) was the El Cid Bar. Another block south is Hall Hardware. The bar has changed several times, but Hall’s still operates.”

Update: Susan “Su” George, American history chair for the Okeechobee chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution, wrote recently with a possible answer to one of our enduring mysteries: the name origin for Ritta Island, at Lake Okeechobee: “My theory is that since no animal life was on the island (except) snakes and gators, the locals might have referred to it as ‘Critter Island’ (and) that got shortened to ‘Ritta.’”

Tags: agriculture, mysteries, place names, West Palm Beach

This week in history: Glades sugar industry is born

In early March of 1921, Frederick Edward Bryant and G. T. Anderson of the Florida Sugar and Food Products Company took out a series of full-page advertisements in The Palm Beach Post soliciting support for a sugar mill in Palm Beach County. The Canal Point mill opened in 1923. Florida Sugar later merged with the Southern Sugar Company, which was bought by the United States Sugar Corporation in 1931.

Tags: agriculture, Glades, This Week in History

1960 film on migratory farm labor still resonates

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking CBS documentary Harvest of Shame. Here are excerpts from a Nov. 18, 1990, Post article by former colleague Lisa Shuchman.

Few documentaries have unleashed such strong feelings in America as Harvest of Shame did in 1960.

“Never before in the dismal history of migratory farm labor in the United States has there been such widespread personal knowledge as there is today of the shocking conditions under which the migrants live and work,” The New York Times wrote in an editorial.

Shame began in Belle Glade and followed migrant workers on their trek to fields and orchards across the country.

Relying heavily on interviews with workers and their children, it focused attention on low wages, poor housing and grueling work that kept migrant families locked in a poverty cycle that contrasted sharply with the prosperity of their employers.

Shame was saluted by advocates for change and denounced by farmers and their lobbyists. U.S. Sen. Spessard Holland of Florida called it inaccurate and unfair.

Edward R. Murrow showed the life of people who work in what he called “the sweatshop of the soil.”

He concluded, “The people you have seen have the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables. They do not have the strength to influence legislation. Maybe we do.”

It was unusual for television to make such a direct appeal to the viewer.

“It was editorializing, but Murrow felt strongly about it,” Fred Friendly, the executive producer, said (in 1990; he died in 1998). “Not to have done it would have been an abdication of responsibility, and we were proud that we did it.”

Shame tells a broader story than that of the migrant farmworker of 1960, Friendly, said; it is really about all the disenfranchised in America.

“It was the first program about the homeless,” he said.

Jerome King of South Bay, shown here in a still from the video, appeared in the 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame by Edward R. Murrow. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

King, still living western Palm Beach County, talked to The Palm Beach Post in 2003 (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Murrow in 1954 (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Readers: Our Nov. 11 column said only two people with Florida connections ever made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Former colleague Tom Dubocq wrote to remind us of Christopher Wilder, who we missed because we were looking for mentions of Florida. Wilder, a builder and race car driver from Boynton Beach wanted in the murders of his fiancée and another woman, went on the list April 5, 1984, during an 8,000-mile cross-country trek in which he allegedly kidnapped 12 women and killed nine of them. On Friday, April 13, 1984, he fatally shot himself after wrestling over a gun with a New Hampshire state police officer. He was 8 miles from the Canadian border.

Tags: African Americans, agriculture, television

Twenty-seven died in 1963 bus crash near Belle Glade

Valesha Woodley of South Carolina wrote to us of her aunt, Ruthie Mae Woodley. On May 18, 1963, Ruthie — then 12 — was one of 42 farm workers jammed into a bus.

Minutes later, it was at the bottom of the Hillsboro Canal.

Ruthie Mae, who now lives in Georgia, scrambled out. But her mother and two brothers drowned.

In all, 27 bodies would be pulled from the dark water.

It’s believed to still be Florida’s greatest loss of life in one vehicle, greater than the 26 killed in 1980 when a Greyhound bus shot off Tampa Bay’s Sunshine Skyway bridge, sliced by a freighter.

The 1963 crash brought focus to farm workers, already considered among America’s most vulnerable and exploited.

About 6 a.m. at Belle Glade’s “Bean Ramp,” 42 bean pickers boarded the Poor Boy Slim’s bus to head down State Road 827, now Brown’s Farm Road. It was just 18 feet wide, with no guardrail.

The converted 1946 school bus has 32 passenger seats; no law then said how many could be crammed in.

An anxious pickup driver tried to pass. Slim — real name Edgar Lee Anderson — tried to slide right to let the truck through.

But as the truck passed, its rear bumper locked with the front of the bus and the joined vehicles slid 32 feet before they broke free.

The bus tumbled down the shoulder and splashed into the canal, 60 feet wide and 18 feet deep.

“Everybody was screaming and hollering on the side of the road,” retired Florida Highway Patrolman George Emerson recalled in 1993.

About 90 minutes after the crash, a tow truck pulled out the bus, 22 corpses still inside. A boat dragged the canal for the last five. The dead passengers ranged in age from 6 to 65.

Manslaughter charges against the truck’s driver, dragline foreman James Tulley Sconyers of South Bay, were dismissed, but he was convicted of illegal passing.

Families of seven victims filed suits but a jury ruled for Sconyers. “Slim” was charged with driving with a suspended license.

In 1983, Congress passed the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, which increased insurance required for vehicles carrying workers and made both crew leaders and farmers responsible in some cases.

A migrant woman prepares to get on a labor bus at the Belle Glade loading ramp in March 1977. Fourteen years earlier, 27 farm workers died when a similar migrant bus was traveling down an 18-foot wide road and slid into the Hillsboro Canal. (Special to the Palm Beach Post)