Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men, and he would have meant the same thing. -John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
I reached Cannery Row in Monterey in the chilly early morning light. The day before, I had spent many rather lonely hours in the rich person's fairytale-land of Carmel, only four miles away, but it seemed like a million.
I clutched my coffee, and as I walked down the quiet streets of Cannery Row, my nose immediately comprehended the old saying, Carmel-by-sea, Cannery-by-smell. Large former cannery buildings, barn-like and picturesque, towered over me, and the grey water lapped at one closed tourist-trap after another. I braced myself for another solitary day of exploring.
How wrong I turned out to be.
I met first with historian and tour guide Tim Thomas, a character of epic proportions -- funny, friendly, quirky -- with an encyclopedic knowledge and deep seeded love of the history of Cannery Row. As he led me from former cannery to former worker's shack to former whore house, the place came alive -- both the past and the present. Tourists began flooding the streets, and Tim greeted them with unself-conscious warmth.
Does that writing make sense? he asked one couple reading one of the many historical placards placed along the row. They looked up at him in befuddlement. I hope so, because I wrote it, he exclaimed, before we ambled off. As we talked in front of the Aquarium, once the site of the Hovden Cannery, a man came outside and ushered us in. Come on in, Tim, he smiled, before telling me, You've got the best tour guide there is.
Isn't Tim great? the equally affable Dennis Copeland, steward of the City of Monterey's historical collections, continued as he greeted me at the door of Ed Ricketts' Pacific Biological Lab, squeezed precariously between two giant former canneries. We entered the squat brown structure, a magical place of warmth and conviviality.
There, at the big front window, I stood in the same spot where legendary author John Steinbeck had stood decades ago, and watched as all different types of people, all with their own stories and idiosyncrasies, walked by. I felt happy to be among this mass of humanity that was currently calling Cannery Row home.
--
--
In 1896, a Japanese immigrant named Otosaburo Noda was working as a lumberjack for the Pacific Improvement Company. One day, while climbing a tree near Monterey Wharf, he looked into the harbor below. In the sparkling water he saw a carpet of abalone. Abalone, long a delicacy in Japan, was not popular with Americans, who had no idea how to cook these large marine snails. Noda wrote to the Japanese government to tell them of his find. Soon officials, abalone divers, and salmon fishermen from Chiba Prefecture in Japan came to work the fishery of Monterey.
In 1902, Noda, along with an American partner named Harry Malpas, founded the Monterey Fishing and Canning Company. And thus Cannery Row was born.
When the abalone divers from Chiba, known as ama, first began diving in Monterey Bay, they were shocked by the temperature of the water, which was around 15 degrees colder than the waters of Japan. Used to diving in nothing but a thin cotton outfit, they quickly learned to knit their own unique ensembles. According to Thomas: They'd take wool sweaters and tear them apart and knit this wool underwear, they'd put on a pair of that, sometimes two pairs, put on the big, heavy canvas suit, attach about 65 pounds of lead weights to their front and back, tie lead to their shoes, bolt on this helmet, then go down into the Monterey Bay.
That same year the Booth Cannery opened nearby. For the first decade of the twentieth century, it was salmon that made up the bulk of the canneries' output. But with the outbreak of War World I, the factories switched to canning Monterey sardines to feed troops all over the world. Many canneries sprang up all along the waterfront where they proceeded to can and process millions of rather unpleasant tasting Monterey sardines, many of which were reduced and sold as chicken feed and fertilizer. These included Hovden Food Products, Monterey Canning Company, Pacific Fish Company, Bayside Fish & Flour, San Xavier Canning Company, California Fisheries Co., and Pacific Packers/Great Western Sardine Co. What Thomas calls a multi-cultural stew of Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino, Sicilian and African Americans came to work the canneries and fisheries of Monterey Bay.
Photo: Hadley Meares
While men are usually given most of the credit for the success of Cannery Row, Thomas explains that the backbone of these fish factories were thousands of unsung women: Women had the harder of the jobs in the canneries, and they were paid about 15 cents an hour less than the men. Among the many jobs that women did was working the canning lines. Prior to WWII, you would never see a minority worker working the line, and you would NEVER see a man! That was considered to be women's work. At the height of the depression, if there were not enough white women to work the line, they shut them down! Even if there were men out on the street who said I'll do that...During the sardine season, August 1-Feb-15, they would work 10, 12, 15 hours a day, six days a we
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Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men, and he would have meant the same thing. -John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
