Pickers

Fewer and fewer Poles want to work as strawberry pickers.

Salinas is the heart of Steinbeck country — and the fertile ground for some of his best-known classics, like East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath. The economic depression faced by the hard-working farmhands and fruit pickers he wrote about ended in the 1930's… but the now predominantly-Latino town of 150-thousand remains a struggling agricultural community. On a small side street, one of the town's three libraries bears Steinbeck's name. Outside the building, a statue of the Nobel Prize-winning author has a piece of rain-soaked cardboard dangling from its neck. It reads, 'Please do not close my library.'