One Archives | Applebox Belles: The Women of Lake Country’s Packinghouses

Doris Gleed, 1930s

Doris Gleed rides her bicycle past the Okanagan Centre packinghouse.

Ivy Fallow

Ivy Malpass was born in 1907 in Armstrong, BC. As a teenager, she went to work as a summer girl at the East Kelowna packinghouse. Here Ivy met […]

Ikue Kitagawara

Ikue Kitagawara at 19 years old, Nagano-ken, Japan, 1917

Ikue Kobayashi, 1956

Ikue Kobayashi was just nineteen years old when she moved to Okanagan Centre with her new husband. For the first few years, Ikue worked for the Okanagan Valley […]

Nora Carter, 1936

Nora Carter at the Okanagan Centre packinghouse, age fourteen.

Inez Patterson Kenney

Inez Patterson Kenney Photo montage. Narrated by Bill Kenney, December 12th, 2015 Inez Patterson was born in 1917 in Manitoba. After moving first to Burnaby, BC, her family […]

Jimmie Price Kobayashi Medvedeff

Jimmie Price Kobayashi Medvedeff Interview October 28th, 2015 Eleanor ‘Jimmie’ Price traveled from Red Deer, Alberta in 1947 to work as a ‘Summer Girl’. She was twenty years […]

Bea Smorden Taiji

Bea Smorden Taiji Interview September 29th, 2015 Bea Smorden Taiji was born in Slocan Park, BC in 1930, the daughter of a Doukhobor family. Bea began coming to […]

Dorothea Allison, 1912

My job at present is apple-packing. I rush over the cooking washing etc in the morning — have one of the pickers in to dinner, wash up and […]

Bernice Gunn, 2007

Bernice Gunn demonstrates apple packing.

Bernice Gunn, 1956

Bernice Gunn packed at the Winoka Cooperative Exchange packinghouse in Okanagan Centre for thirty five years until its closure in 1974. Bernice mentored many of the younger belles, […]

Packing in the orchard

Robert Allison packing apples in his orchard in Oyama, 1925.