David Johnson, inventor to ride in parade Boyceville to celebrate the 70th year of the pickle picker
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David (Johnson) Forest pictured in his senior class photo. David is a member of Boyceville High School’s Class of 1955. —photo submitted
BOYCEVILLE — After spending a significant portion of his childhood summers harvesting cucumbers by hand, Boyceville High School senior, David Johnson invented a pickle picker and his dad designed it. The year was 1955. Johnson’s invention made harvesting cucumbers much easier and his picker was purchased or rented by many local families who grew cucumbers as a side gig.
“Why not lay in the shade and pick pickles? It’s better than bending over to pick!,” said Johnson, who is 88 years old, when asked what inspired him to invent the picker.
Johnson’s family grew plenty of cucumbers on their farm near Boyceville while he was growing up. One year they put in five acres and he remembers picking cucumbers all day with his brother Ernie.
He was familiar with the hard work of growing and harvesting large amounts of cucumbers. The stumbling through tangles of cucumber vines and trying not to step on the crop; the lugging around of heavy gunny sacks; the hot sun; the constant bending over…it’s a lot. But with his invention, pickers could skip the stumbling, the lugging, the sun and the bending.
Johnson’s picker had a canopy rigged up over two platforms that were mounted onto a frame. The frame had one wheel in the front and two in the back which were self propelled by a small gas engine. There was no need to steer the picker because the front wheel ran in a cultivator trench that the farmer made earlier in the season while weeding the field. When they came to the end of a row one person would get off the picker and use a handle located on the front to turn it around.
The front wheel drove the unit along at a very slow pace while the rear wheels rolled on the outside of two rows of cucumbers. People who were harvesting cucumbers laid down on the platforms and would be suspended directly above the vines. They could then move across the vines harvesting and placing cucumbers in a tray that was mounted underneath the machine.
Johnson’s dad, Walter, did the design work for the picker. Walter worked for Hedlund Manufacturing in Boyceville for 35 years. Hedlund Manufacturing made farm equipment like barn cleaners, hay hoists and silage chippers. Because of his employment there, Walter had access to Hedlund Manufacturing’s work space and equipment. Johnson said that at Hedlund’s they could fabricate most anything including making bearings and extending axles, things you couldn’t do in a standard farmer’s garage. Using parts from a 1932 Ford, Johnson and his dad built the first pickle picker.
“My dad could make anything work,” said Johnson.
WALT JOHNSON (left) and David Forest on the prototype of the E-Z Pic from 1955. —photo submitted
Their prototype went on to be manufactured by Hedlund Manufacturing starting in the late 1950s under the name Pic-Kar. Before they started manufacturing them, some modifications were made to Johnson’s invention. Mainly they added a conveyor belt that transported the cucumbers into a gunny sack, this replaced Johnson’s under the unit tray design. According to a pickle industry newsletter, about 250 Pic-Kars were sold in Wisconsin in 1963.
In the late 1960s Johnson’s dad invented a picker called the E-Z Pic which was similar to the Pic-Kar but was a single row unit for one person. The E-Z Pic had a foot operated clutch that allowed the picker to stop and go as needed. His model could also be used for transplanting, weeding and harvesting other vegetables.
Gedney
In the 1960s Boyceville became known as the Cucumber Capital of Wisconsin and started holding the Cucumber Festival around that time. There were cucumber patches all over the countryside and even in town. Many local teenagers funded their post secondary education with money earned by harvesting cucumbers. After harvesting them by the gunny sack they hauled them into town where they were put through a sorter at the Gedney receiving station. The Gedneys were a big part of the pickle business.
Mathias Anderson Gedney started his own pickle company in Minneapolis in 1880 after working for a number of years in the pickle business, according to the Minnesota Historical Society website. Gedney founded the M.A. Gedney Pickling Co along with two of his sons and they opened their first factory in 1881 in Minneapolis. As they found more and more local growers, two more of Gedney’s sons joined the business and they built more factories and receiving stations in Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin.
Expanded railway service caused many of the factories outside of Minnesota to close in the 1950s but many receiving stations remained open. In 1958, the Chaska, MN pickle factory was expanded and all pickle processing was moved to that location, according to the Minnesota Historical Society website. The Chaska plant closed in 2019 and most Gedney pickles are now grown and produced outside of Minnesota.
A FLYER promoting the “E-Z Pic”, a solo rider with Walt’s patented foot clutch. This flyer tells the story of their original machine. —photo submitted
Large cucumber farms now use mechanical methods for harvest. Machines that look like combines pull up the vines and harvest the crop just once. Hand picked cucumbers are harvested generally every other day for several weeks. Johnson said he doesn’t think the mechanically harvested pickles are as good.
Johnson has a newspaper clipping from the May 22, 1994 edition of the Leader-Telegram. The article was about the Cucumber Festival which was scheduled for the following August. According to the story, the M.A. Gedney Co. built a cucumber receiving station in Boyceville in 1914. In 1965 the Boyceville station had its biggest year ever when local growers harvested 30,000 bushels of cucumbers, equivalent to about 1.2 million pounds.
Johnson isn’t sure exactly what year the Boyceville location closed. Certainly by 1994 because the newspaper clipping states that “the rickety station on Main Street has since been razed”. The article also mentions the Pickle-dillies, a band that got its start in Boyceville and later became known as The Memories and a popular vodka and pickle juice drink that was featured at local bars.
To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the pickle picker, Johnson will be riding in the Pickle Fest parade in a convertible decked out with banners printed with a photo of him and his dad in their pickle picker prototype. He will be joined by other members of the class of 1955 who will be riding in golf carts.
After high school Johnson spent four years in the U.S. Navy and then worked for IBM for 30 years. He retired in 1992 and currently lives in LeRoy, MN.
