Pickled Packers

"Lay off the booze. If anybody makes any trouble, I'm going to knock the hell out of him. And if you think I can't do it, I'll start right now."

Small, scrappy Milton A. Kottinger was talking tough because he was in a tough spot. His California Conserving Co. had big Army orders, but tomatoes were rotting in his cannery for lack of packers.

Kottinger went to San Francisco Municipal Judge George B. Harris. Together they worked out a plan whereby men sentenced for minor offenses, usually involving alcohol, were paroled to Kottinger for work in field or cannery at standard pay--in somewhat the same way that Los Angeles Municipal Judge Edwin L. Jefferson and Henry Kaiser cooperated to rehabilitate drunks in the Kaiser shipyard (TIME, Nov. 2).

Kottinger housed his jailbirds and stew bums in a makeshift dormitory--christened the "fraternity house"--kept them in line with a combination of cajolery, dutch-uncle talk and fists. Said he: "Once in a while someone would get cockeyed and start raising hell. 'Who the hell do you think you are?', a guy says to me. I hit him. He was bloodied up a little, so I washed his face. Then I gave him four bits and told him to get the hell out. It made an impression on the rest of the guys."

Upshot: Kottinger's onetime pickled packers pitched in and packed a tomato crop unequaled in California this year.

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