“Lambert Greendyke’s experience has taught him it is always darkest just before dawn, and now that the sun is beginning to shine on his business, this Hollander is wearing a happy smile,” effused the writer of a feature article in a Portage, Michigan, newspaper. In an accompanying photo, Greendyke in coveralls and high rubber boots posed proudly between robust rows of celery plants. The year was 1926, five years after Greendyke had quit his job at a nearby paper mill, plowed his savings into four-and-a-half acres of “muck lands,” and moved his large family from a house in the city to a one-room wooden shack. His ambition was to market premium celery that would fetch high prices and gain renown as “the best.” For a short while, he appeared to have succeeded.
Kalamazoo celery was a common ingredient in many a bowl of soup and pot of stew. Cookbooks included recipes for fried celery, creamed celery, and celery sauce for boiled fowl. One Samuel J. Dunkley, a local entrepreneur, started a company that turned the vegetable into everything from salad dressing to patent medicine. Celery extract was alleged to “prevent nervousness, headaches, sleeplessness, and general depression.” Celery was employed as a diuretic and as an agent in cough drops. And celery tonic bitters were marketed as an aphrodisiac.
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“My father worked in the paper mill during the First World War,” says Bob Greendyke. “Then the war ended and we got into a depression. The paper mill got real slack. He was working only two, three days a week. That’s when he bought the muck land in 1922. He built a little wooden barn about 14 by 20 feet, and that’s where we lived.”
After planting, there was plenty more work to be done, from weeding to fertilizing. Originally farmers could rely on manure from local stables, but later they required shipments by the boxcar from the Chicago stockyards. In the event of a spring frost, long sheets of parchment paper (produced, incidentally, in nearby Parchment, Michigan) had to be placed over all the young stalks to prevent their being damaged by the cold. After the celery had reached a certain height came the muscle-building task of “placing the board”: miles of heavy two-by-fours were lined up on their edges along both sides of each celery row in order to shade it, a process that blanched the stalks while promoting flavor and crispness.
“I wish you could see it,” says Bob Greendyke. “You don’t know what a perfect box of celery is. There wouldn’t be one speck of dirt, not one piece of root on that celery.”
The Greendyke kids traded some of their celery for groceries at the local store. Kids throughout the county hawked celery on street corners. One 1938 travel guide noted: “Try to drive in or out of Kalamazoo without having great bunches of celery offered you every block or so.”
