Working on Wednesday: Victory Vacations Program

In response to an urgent call for students to help harvest crops in danger of being lost because of a lack of farm workers due to the war effort in 1942, Junior participated in the Sacramento Y.M.C.A.'s Victory Vacations Program at their Emergency Harvest Camp in Courtland, California, for which he was given the certificate below.*

[From my personal collection]

I wasn't able to find a newspaper story about his camp at Courtland but here's the Oakland Tribune's feature on their Y.M.C.A.'s harvest camp in Loomis.

[Oakland Tribune, June 22, 1942, page 13. Copyright © 2016 Newspapers.com]

In 1943 the U.S. Office of Education began a national Victory Farm Volunteer Program which was still active five years later. As the poster suggests, even some girls were allowed to join.

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[Be a Victory Farm Volunteer in the U.S. Crop Corps.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.]

*As far as I know, this is the only volunteer harvest work Junior did. I know that he was a Y.M.C.A. camp counselor during this period and due to his semi-rural upbringing, he would have been more familiar with farm work than most city kids.

© 2016 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.