Field Trip to the Tuna Factory

Field trips were a big deal that spanned several weeks.  Not the actual field trip, but the preparation.  First, there was anticipation of a day out in the real world.  Then came the parent permission form to be taken home, signed and the date added to the family calendar.  Then my mother would buy special blue lunch bags—not the regular brown ones, but a cool blue-green color that matched the bottom of most of the swimming pools I’d seen.

On the appointed day of the educational experience that was to rouse us from the comfort of Ivanhoe Elementary School, my mother would pack a special lunch for me.  It would contain a love note wishing me well.  The outside of the bag would be decorated with her simple drawings of sailboats or something related to the trip.  This trip was to the tuna factory in Long Beach.

I boarded the big yellow bus with my classmates and we each clutched our brown bag lunches—though, of course, mine was in an ocean blue bag.  We were driven through and over the freeways of Los Angeles that still amaze me, and down the coast.  At a large park we exited the bus and ate on dirty public picnic tables.  Soon after we re-boarded the bus and headed for the tuna factory.

I don’t remember what the special lunch was, nor the love note.  I only remember throwing up on the bus and suddenly becoming a pariah. My classmates screamed with revulsion.  I was immediately given a seat up in the front with the teachers.  And was told that I was “bus sick” and needed, from there and then on, to sit at the front of the bus.  If only Rosa Parks had had such a teacher.

The field trip was ruined for me.  I was humiliated, ashamed and embarrassed. Frankly, I did not care about the cans of tuna I saw going down steaming conveyor lines.  Now, in retrospect, I wonder what the heck Mrs. Berkheiser was thinking.  How was this to enlighten the children of Silverlake.  Maybe, forty years later, they would choose a healthy brand of dolphin free tuna.  But back in those days the only dolphin we knew of was Flipper—and the ones we saw at Sea World.  Tuna was a mayonnaisey staple that turned my stomach more than once. Had I even known about the dolphin connection, things would have been much different.

School buses became synonymous with barf and field trips lost their appeal.  To this day I wonder why school buses are the only form of public transport that don’t require seatbelts.  Now, as a teacher, I avoid field trips like the plague.