A look back at Eckert’s apple picking in 1970

In 1964, Eckert’s launched an experiment. The company planted 25,000 dwarf apple trees, then hitched up wagons and rumbled people into its orchards to pick their fruit: beauties but also small, knobby, hail-pocked apples, some blushing on just one side. “People will pick things off a tree and think they’re beautiful,” Vernon Eckert explained. Odd apples that didn’t stand a chance at the supermarket went home in the bags of people like this bunch, piled into a wagon in October 1970. Pickers saved a dollar or so on a bushel, but that’s not why people drove, and still drive, to Calhoun County—or why, by 1977, dozens of U-pick farms had popped up, offering not just apples but also peaches and pumpkins and hand-pressed cider. There’s a faint old memory, like the wee pip of an apple, that we chase. A memory that’s all sky and rolling hills and horses. A memory of a time when there were 17,000 varieties of apples, not 4,000, with such names as Gloria Mundi, Old Fred, and Hollow Log. A time before superstores stocked with pyramids of shiny red apples. A time when an apple could come from anywhere, look like anything, and we could call it beautiful.