For many years back in the 60s & 70s, the sign welcoming you to my hometown identified it as “Iowa’s most exciting city”. It wasn’t.
I don’t know what a truck farm is, or what it has to do with my assertion that the name “The Garden State” was first applied to New Jersey centuries ago. I just tried to find a cite, and it seems to be of disputed origin, though Ben Franklin uses it in his autobiography.
I know, but OTOH it’s so hard to remember to pack a jacket when it’s 100 degrees outside and you’re only driving a few hours! (Yes, my sister did this last week, heh.)
A truck farm is a small family-run farm that grows produce (i.e. no livestock or dairy) for local sale & consumption. Said produce is taken by the farmer, usually in a pickup truck, to local restaurants, grocers and/or farmer’s markets. Some truck farmers also offer u-pick sales – basically, you show up at the farm, pick some quantity of corn, tomatoes, strawberries, or whatever and pay for however much you pick. Of course, the price will be lower than supermarket prices since you’re doing the work.
My two closest neighbors growing up in Iowa back in the 70s were truck farmers, a pair of old Norwegian bachelors straight out of Lake Wobegon. Their main crops were sweet corn, tomatoes, and strawberries, and they worked the farms mostly by hand, using ancient tractors mostly for planting & plowing the crops under at the end of the season.
Bing, you win then. I had assumed the nickname The Garden State originated because of truck farming, and that such farming was not economical before motor transport.
3waygeek, where are you getting your definition of truck farm? The one I know is a fruit or vegetable farm that exists specifically to service New York City markets and ships produce by road rather than rail. The term is, AFAIK, strictly a NY/NJ regionalism. I’ve lived in both Iowa and NY and never heard it used in Iowa.
Yep. I made that mistake.
Fortunately, it was in the 70s most of the time I was there.
People tend to overlook Milwaukee because we’re so close to Chicago (and don’t think we don’t have a massive inferiority complex about it). We’re bigger than D.C., Las Vegas, Portland, Sacramento, Miami, Minneapolis, St. Louis, New Orleans, Pittsburgh…
We’re not a bunch of fucking cheeseheads, unless it’s good fucking cheese. We make amazing beers and the most badass motorcycles in the world. Our restaurants are delicious and our music scene rocks. Our newspaper just took home the Pulitzer for local reporting two out of the last three years, for chri!
It’s entirely possible that they’re just visiting from some place a hell of a lot colder. Or also that they don’t know how to check a weather report.
There is the misconception that Austin is a funky weird little high-tech college town. It is not. Not anymore. So many non-funky, non-weird malcontents moved here that it is now just like the crappy places they all came from.
“Keep Austin Weird” is not so much a motto anymore. It’s more like a distant fantasy.
Nobody in America has ever heard of my birthplace, unless they’re big on helicopters or follow the lower divisions of English football.
Everyone in the world has heard of my adopted home town, mostly because of this guy.
An old girlfriend and her mom once asked me to settle a dispute between them based on their assumptions of my small hometown in Montana. One thought that we had to bring a cooler with us when went grocery shopping to put the refridgerated goods in because of the long drive back to our home. The other said that the baggers just knew to pack everything cold together and possibly put ice in the plastic bags.
I had to explain to them that although my town was small… I lived a half mile from a grocery store and 2 miles from a Kmart and a Shop-Ko.
This tends to be a summer problem, though. I doubt there are very many places in the US that are actually colder than San Francisco in the summer. It gets COLD when the summer fog rolls in. Oh, the freezing summer nights I shivered though at Candlestick. (The warmest months in San Francisco are actually September and October.)
…and, a quick google shows that my guess was spot on. (Although that link only shows large cities.)
What Lamar Mundane said about Boulder, I find, applies in some measure to Ames, home of Iowa State University.
As a longtime resident and current graduate student at ISU in a highly accomplished but somewhat low-status program - part of the English department at a strongly research- and science-oriented institution - I have realized that what was once thought of as a placid college town is really a company town that somehow manages to think of itself as a college town.
Ames is not a wealthy place like Boulder - in fact there’s less class consciousness here than most anyplace else I’ve been. But there is not a lot of room to be a slacker here. Everyone, of all ages, has a well ingrained Industrial Age work ethic. (I do not, for reasons I won’t get into here.)
ISU, which has all the keys to a good standard of living hereabouts, really is a corporate-minded university. With all the contributions it’s made to High Tech and Big Food - and the endowments it’s been gifted with in return - going to school here, in any discipline, is being part of a large, public, mostly benevolent company, but one which has its impersonal demands. Grad students who do not research teach as TAs, and teach hard and well, with near-industrial efficiency. But if you happen not to be able to deliver on that demand, you are an instant outsider. Sharing teaching (or research) experiences is the only acceptable common ground where you can socialize and get to know people. (It happened to me.)
So there’s not a lot of love for the slow and easy life. We are efficient to a fault. In our off hours, we prefer recreation to relaxation - biking, league softball, canoeing. We eat quickly. We even drink quickly. We are low-pressure folks, but only to one another, because we don’t want to mess up other people’s agendas. If you don’t have an agenda, we don’t quite know what to make of you.
We are, as the original settlers of central Iowa were, Nordic in character - even though we’re now somewhat ethnically diverse. As people of Nordic character, we are responsible for working like hell and keeping quiet about it. We are helpful folks, but you had better not need any help with that. That’s bedrock to us. That’s being human 101. Why didn’t you learn that in kindergarten?
So if you’re looking for a quiet college town, try Ames. It’s a very pleasant place. But the more you differ from us, the more alone you’re going to feel.
Well, I certainly learned something today (not that I’ve ever been to California).
Slightly off-topic, but before I moved to Seattle I assumed that it would be really cold there and have snowy, icy winters. I mean, come on! Look how far north it is!
I learned quickly.
I’d just kind of assumed that it was going to be like any other temperate area. Late September in Boston was still summer, so why wouldn’t it be the same in SF? Just in case, I packed a hoodie, figuring that I’d have no need to wear it. Besides, I have no recollection of seeing pictures of snow there, so it must be summer all the time, right?
Imagine my shock in discovering that we think of as normal weather patterns simply do not apply there.
Was it really 75 on Christmas Day this year?
I currently live in Portland, OR. People assume it’s an entire metro area full of hippies. Oh wait, it is.
I consider my hometown to be San Jose - lived there from age 8 to 33. I can’t think of anything as far as misconceptions… there isn’t really anything there to misconceive. Hmmm… since it’s called “Silicon Valley” and is home to most major computing-related companies, do outsiders assume the whole city is high-tech? It isn’t.
I got nuthin’.
I picture all of California as hot all the time, except Tahoe and San Diego (which I’m given to understand is 72 degrees every frikkin’ day).
Mark Twain said the coldest winter he ever saw was the summer in San Francisco.
Or, alternatively, that you can’t go through L.A. without getting shot at or caught in a riot. Or that earthquakes happen ALL THE TIME, and always cause massive property damage, crevices opening in the earth, etc. Or that you can’t breathe well or even see well because the smog hangs like smoke in the air.
Or that they can make a day-trip up to San Francisco.