22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JULY 23-29, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com For a moment it seemed the Great Depression would ruin the new Eden. After the stock market crashed in 1929, the country tumbled into recession. Money was scarce, and jobs were too. The Hoover administration failed to handle the deterioration. As the 1930s rolled in, economic crisis threatened the coast, but the blow was again softened by the marine abundance of the California Current. Cheap tuna salad sandwiches, a fashion for sea snails, and the oily flesh of Sardinops sagax kept the worst of the Depression-era poverty away from the Pacific shore. California became a vision of hope, a promised land, for the many Dust Bowl migrants who traveled west in the 1930s, swelling the population of the Golden State. Once the practice of fish reduction was unleashed, Monterey became “an island of prosperity among a sea of depression,” per an account from the period. No one got rich fishing for sardines or working in the plants, but it was comfortable, at least set against the screaming poverty rattling the rest of the country. The way Steinbeck painted it in Cannery Row, economic hardship in Monterey was practically a lifestyle choice. There was none of the total, grinding, inescapable destitution of The Grapes of Wrath. If a jug of wine were beyond the resources of Steinbeck’s central characters, Mack and the Palace Flophouse boys, maybe some caper—gathering frogs for Doc or the like—would rustle up the requisite cash. If not, they could always bite the bullet and spend a day packing squid. That was to be avoided if at all possible, though. At the lowest point in the novel, when nothing seemed to be holding the spark of life, “Hughie and Jones sat for a while staring into space and then morosely they went over to the Hediondo Cannery and applied for jobs and got them.” The canneries would hire almost anyone, but the boats had always been, ethnically speaking, a closed shop. Monterey was dominated by Italian crews; maybe 10 percent were Japanese boats, and a few Spanish. The canneries made no such distinctions. There were men and women, Chinese and Japanese, Sicilian, Mexican, Spanish, Native American, Anglo-American immigrants, Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, anyone who needed a dollar. Many were the wives or daughters of fishermen. They felt they were taking part in the traditional division of fishing labor, though most stopped when they had kids or when they were able. Men worked the boats while women kept house and prepared the catch for “market.” Others just saw it as a steady job at a time when those were few on the ground. There was a sort of California circuit: pack sardines when they were running, August to February, then split, heading east for the fruit canneries in the Central Valley. The boats could come in any time, night or day. In Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night, a 1952 drama of lust, liberty, and fishing, a cannery steam whistle wakes up a young Peggy, played by Marilyn Monroe. She’s a worker at the (real) San Xavier Fish Packing Company. The bedside clock reads 4:30am. In reality, as in the film, the steam whistle blew a tune calling the workers in to pack the fish while they were fresh and firm. The cannery workers followed the same rhythms as the fishers, just on a slight lag, their work schedule dependent on the phase of the moon and the height of the swell on the ocean and the size of the schools in the bay. Each cannery screamed a different tune to summon each role in the plant as they were needed. Workers had 45 minutes to make it to work. No exceptions, no excuses. Women dropped everything at the call of the cannery, dinners left half cooked, laundry still soapy. If they were lucky, their husbands might watch the children, or an aunt or a neighbor. The sardines were fed into the mouth of a suction pump leading to the cannery floor. The pump was powerful enough that the fish shot out, completely descaled. Workers laid the fish belly-down on a conveyor belt (this is Monroe’s imagined role). The fish trundled along to an automatic cutter where the guillotine descended, removing head and tail. Once upon a time, this was a job for Chinese, Japanese and Spanish workers, long accustomed to fish butchery and ultra-sharp knives. But owners didn’t trust skilled labor in the plants. A strike by Japanese fish cutters over low wages confirmed owners’ suspicions. The role was automated as soon as possible. Gutters yanked out the viscera with gloved fingers. The guts were reserved, along with the heads and tails, all headed for the reduction ovens. Everyone worked as fast as possible, even when it was 3 or 4 in the morning and the packing floor was freezing. The plants were kept icy-cold to keep the fish fresh. Cold seawater from the bay sloshed in with the fish and pooled on the floor around the workers’ feet. Below their neat white nurse’s uniforms, the cannery workers wore knee-high rubber boots. A Monterey-based worker named Nancy Mangiapane once told an interviewer that “it got so cold you couldn’t go to the bathroom.” If you did, the cannery supervisors known as floor ladies timed your absence. The floor ladies kept everyone up to pace. They tended to be Sicilian. Family connections with canners and fishermen secured the (slightly) better paid jobs. On the flip side, racial discrimination closed off advancement for other cannery workers. Plant operators wanted only white employees in supervisory positions. Mexican and Native American workers got the grimmest jobs, cleaning floors and fish, hefting the heavy cases, and so on. The eviscerated sardines were washed of blood, brined, dried, and packed by size. Canners wanted them six or eight to the can. If the fish were running small, they were packed double-row, head-to-tail in two layers. The conveyors rolled on and the cans were sauced with tomato, mustard or salad oil, then sealed and “retorted,” steamcooked at pressure. All told, it took half an hour from pump to can, plus an hour-and-a-half in the retort. Shifts lasted as long as there were fish to pack. A 10- or 12-hour shift could start at 3am. Monroe’s character, Peggy, laughs at two of her colleagues falling asleep on the job, curled up on the sacks of fish meal. Girls started in the plant at 14 or 15 years old. The fish-gut smell clung. Workers heading home were known to have shot back at anyone who commented on the odor, “You know what you smell? You smell money.” It didn’t matter too much; the whole town smelled the same way. The clean, high smell of fresh fish mingled with the thicker fug of the reduction ovens. Locals joked that it was Carmel-by-the-Sea and Monterey-by-the-Smell. From Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State by Joseph Ogilvy, now available from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2026 by Joseph Ogilvy. All rights reserved. Sniff Test An excerpt of Tin Can Coast Chapter 10, ‘Monterey-by-the-Smell.’
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