Jimmie Price Kobayashi Medvedeff

Jimmie Price Kobayashi Medvedeff

Interview October 28th, 2015

Eleanor ‘Jimmie’ Price traveled from Red Deer, Alberta in 1947 to work as a ‘Summer Girl’. She was twenty years old when she arrived in Okanagan Centre.

Headshot of Jimmie Medvedeff thinking back and telling her story.

Jimmie Medvedeff: I never did sort, but I packed, oh, for two or three years I guess. And it wasn’t hard work, actually. It, the boxes were heavy of course. They were forty-four, forty-four pounds, something like that. They weren’t fifty pounds. But you had to take them off your buggy and put them on the skid.

Jimmie motions with her hands where her packing box was in front of her. With her left hand she reaches towards the location of her paper, and reaches with her right hand towards the apples.

But our boxes, our packing trays or whatever we called them, were sloped like this. And your paper was here, and you reached the apple there, and they were just a convenient height.

I stamped and then I packed. And Bernice Gunn, who was an excellent packer, taught me how to wrap.

Black and white headshot photo of Bernice Gunn, 1956. Jimmie demonstrates holding an apple and folding the paper around it.

And you threw it [an apple] in your hand and you folded all the corners in. And I remember Les, Mrs. Harrop, who was the head lady on the floor.

Jimmie demonstrates just swishing paper around an apple.

A lot of packers would just take the apple, throw it there, and go swish [sound] with the paper but Bernice did it properly and she was still the fastest.

Joyce Gunn, who stayed on and lived here.

Black and white photo of Joyce Bell Gunn, 1947.

She married Jack Gunn.

Headshot of Jimmie talking.

But Jean her sister, twin sister, and I were coming out here. They had been before and they worked at the Coldstream [packinghouse]. So I was coming out with them. And Jean and I were to come by train. And their dad put us on the train in Red Deer which we rode to Calgary. And we got off the train.

Jimmie motions away with her right hand.

And we walked out of Calgary to, I think it was called the Coach Road it went to Banff anyway, and we started hitchhiking.

Mischievous expression as she talks.

And I had always seen the mountains ‘cause I had lived in Leslieville in Alberta. And those mountains, I mean they were so, you know, they were just so beautiful, and from the distance. And here we were on this road, and this beautiful robin-egg blue convertible came along and picked us up.

Jimmie looks up and to her left as she remembers, then smiles at the interviewer.

And we rode in to the mountains.

She motions outward with both hands.

And then he said, ‘You are not going to hitchhike across.’ I guess it was called The Big Bend, the road at that time. ‘You’re not going to hitchhike. You’re going to go on the train.’

Jimmie mimics a stern face.

So we did, and Ivan Hunter met us and took us up to that camp on Camp Road. And, uh, Joyce and the other girls came all the way on the train. They didn’t [hitchhike]. I remember coming out of Sicamous we were hitchhiking out of Sicamous and this little coupe picked us up, and there were two fellows in it. And Jean got in, and I had to sit on this fellow’s knee, and his chin kept poking me in the back. (laughter)

Jimmie points to her chin and moves it as if poking someone.

I remember that. And I remember Jean and I – I have a picture or had a picture, of Jean and I sitting in the ditch eating our lunch. And of course we were supposed to be on the train as far as the parents were concerned.

Mischievous look.

But, uh, we had a lot of fun in those days. And the packinghouse dances, of which there were every fall.

Black and white formal headshot of Jimmie, age twenty. Followed by a black and white photo of the Okanagan Centre packinghouse from the lake in 1950, then a group photo of the packinghouse staff, 1947.