Apple-box builder still a craftsman to the core

WENATCHEE — Sixty years ago, when Dave Johnson was 13, he nailed together wooden apple boxes in orchards overlooking Lake Chelan.

He was one of hundreds of people throughout Eastern Washington keeping apple growers supplied with boxes, usually made of lightweight pine.

Now, 48 years after the industry began switching from wooden to cardboard boxes, Johnson may be the last commercial wooden apple-box maker left in the Northwest, if not the nation.

At 73, Johnson thinks about retiring. But he doesn't want his craft to die. His lifetime has been one of keeping an obsolete item going. Sort of like someone custom-producing slide rules or Edsel cars.

Dave Johnson was the youngest of four boys when his family moved from Missoula, Mont., to Manson, Chelan County, in 1946.

In those days, many towns throughout Eastern Washington had mills producing box shook, finished boards for making boxes.

The boys got jobs in the box factory and the orchards. Apple boxes were nailed together by hand in the factories and, often, right in orchards. Growers had everyone in their families nailing boxes.

Making a box involved sliding eight or nine nails out of a nail stripper — a device that lined nails up in a row — and driving them with a tap followed by a single strike of a hatchet. A fast nailer could nail a 24-nail box together in less than a minute.

"That's the speed I eventually worked up to after many blood blisters caused by miss-strokes of the hatchet," Johnson says.

Pay averaged 2 cents a box, and he regularly built 800 boxes a day in the summers of 1948 and 1949, averaging $16 a day while family men made $1.50 an hour cutting boards for boxes at the box factory.

His record was 1,000 boxes a day.

Today, Johnson works in an old brick warehouse in Wenatchee. A plain sign on the front says, "Johnson Box."

Johnson still uses the nail stripper he bought about 58 years ago. He has stayed in business despite huge changes in packing fruit.

The switch from wood to cardboard apple boxes, which were cheaper, easier to handle and easier on the fruit, began taking hold in 1958, says Jim Loudon, a retired tree-fruit cooperative manager and assistant manager of the Washington Growers Clearing House Association in 1956.

But the biggest factor in the switch was that the industry was running out of white pine to make boxes, says Dick Bartram, retired Washington State University Extension agent.

From 1983 to 2003, Johnson supplied California vegetable producers with wood crate slats and preassembled crate end panels.

For the last three years, Johnson has made a few full-sized bushel apple boxes for an area fruit stand and gift shop.

Using a computer, he makes new copies of old apple-company logos to put on box ends.

But his main income has come from making specialty wood crates and boxes companies have used to sell smoked salmon, sausage, cheese and apples.

Safeway bought more than 40,000 specialty crates in 2004. He's now making 3,000 display crates for QFC grocery stores in Seattle.

He often thought he had driven his last nail: "For me, it was like each year could be my last. But overall the business has treated me well."