FIVE FAMILIES

Meet Arlie and Ivy Hollowell -husband, wife and partners. The time was 1932; the place, rural Texas. He was a dashing young farmer; she was a demure, teen-age farm girl. They met, they married and they went to work -same as their parents had done, same as their son would do. When they married, they got a farm, a team of mules and each other. Their life since then has been spent in manual labor.

They wake up long before dawn and spend full days in the hot Texas sun, side by side, bending and stooping and lifting and hauling and sweating. When a truckload of produce is ready, they bundle it and take it to market to be sold. On market days, they get up early to arrange their products in the most appealing way they know how, so that people who come to the Farmers Market will notice them. After 14 hours of selling their vegetables, Arlie and Ivy are too tired to drive home -so they cozy up in the back of their pickup between the next day’s cantaloupes and sweet potatoes -and they go to sleep. When the weather is cold, they drape a tarp over the top of the truck and pull an electric heater into their makeshift home.

By city-slick standards, the Hollowells’ lives have been hard. But look at them. Their eyes are bright, their skin is clear and their smiles are genuine.

Their lives have changed -some -in the past 50-plus years. Back in 1958, they traded their mule team for a tractor. In 1962, they became grandparents, and in 1968, Arlie had a heart attack and his son and daughter-in-law “officially” began running the farm. But today, as in 1932, they’re in the fields, working continually and stopping only to bring produce to the market.

One of Ivy’s prized possessions is a worn but carefully kept cardboard photo album. Within are photographs taken on a sunny summer day during the late Thirties. The pictures are of Arlie, Ivy, their then-preteen son, Arlie’s uncle and several neighbor women who happened to need work that day. All that morning, the group had crawled on their hands and knees through rows of turnips on the Hollowells’ farm, pulling vegetables and tying them into bundles. When the photos were taken, the group was washing the turnips in the farm’s pond. Ivy and a few others were in waist-high water, rinsing the vegetables. Arlie and the rest had formed a relay system of retrieving the vegetables from the water and neatly stacking them on the truck.

Not all farmers went through this ritual, but Arlie and Ivy wouldn’t sell less-than-perfect produce. The sun was blistering; their joints and lower backs were throbbing from the morning’s work; the water was swarming with mosquitos. But in every photo in Ivy’s album, the Hollo-wells are smiling-just as they are in our photo.

The Hollowells epitomize family-oriented farm living. Here we introduce you to the Hollowells and four other farm families who proudly sell their products at the Dallas Farmers Market.

Before the market was built in Dallas, farmers used to back their pickups onto Pearl Street and sell their produce from their trucks. As a child, Doris used to help her father sell his corn that way. 1 One day, a young man named J.W. Cassels bought the entire load of corn just so he could talk to redheaded, freckle-faced Doris. He courted her for four years at the makeshift market, and they married in 1936. They bought a farm in Grand Prairie shortly after that and raised two sons with Doris working at a bank and selling produce at the market and J.W. taking care of the land. Though times have been hard, some of the Cassels’ closest friendships were made at the market. That’s why -even though neither son pursued farming and even though the Cassels sold their farm and moved to a ranch in East Texas this year -Doris and J.W are still planting crops so they’ll have an excuse to work at the market. To them, it’s a part of life.

For five months each year, Virginia Sides lives at the Dallas Farmers Market. Sometime around the last week in May, the family’s camper trailer is parked in one of the market’s stalls and becomes home for Virginia. 1 Her son, Ronny, gets up around 1 o’clock every morning to deliver a load of produce to the market from the Sides’ farm in Edgewood. He generally makes it to the market by 3:30 a.m., has breakfast with his mother, helps until about noon, then drives back to the farm to help his father, Winford, in the fields until 10 p.m. Ronny’s wife, Brenda, holds up the business end of the family farm. She fills orders from grocers and wholesalers, answers the phone and keeps an eye on her toddling son, who is constantly by her side. When winter hits Edgewood, the Sides don’t breathe a sigh of relief. Ronny lays Sheetrock, Virginia waits tables and Winford tends to the family’s cattle so that they all can make ends meet.

Farming isn’t a full-time endeavor for the Buckingham family -but it’s necessary. Jerry and Beth Buckingham (she’s the one on the far right who looks like she could be a sister to her two daughters pictured beside her) both grew up in Chico. They met there, married there and have raised their three daughters there. Now, in order to give their daughters a chance to venture out of Chico and pursue college careers, the Buck-inghams are raising watermelons to raise tuition money. The family decided to plant the melons on some land they owned outside Chico. Beth takes care of the farming during the week, but on the weekends, when it’s time to go to market, the business is a family affair. 1 Beth says the girls (the youngest isn’t pictured) gripe about the work sometimes because they’re bored, and they occasionally feel a little snubbed by customers. But they’ll work and go to college – then they’ll remember those “boring days at the market,” and maybe the memories will be sweeter.

Six days before Sandy Sanchez turned 23, she received an early birthday greeting: a 9-pound, 5-ounce bundle of farm boy she named Thomas Allen. Six months later, she and her infant son left her husband and moved in with her mother and stepfather. While living with her parents, she sold her mother’s produce at the market 16 hours a day and tried to raise a son. Thomas, who usually entertained himself in a playpen by his mother’s stall, was dubbed “T” by market workers. 1 Whenever Sandy could grab a few minutes, she would sit down in a nearby cafe to cool off. One day, while taking such a respite, she met a truck driver who hauled produce from Colorado to Dallas. They married in October and moved to Kilgore. T stayed behind, and that same month, his grandparents adopted him. Sandy visits them almost every week; she often stays with them two or three days at a time. Who says country/western songwriters make up their lyrics?