During the summer, the railroad’s problems with the depression became increasingly evident. Train crews began setting out surplus Pacific Fruit Express cars on any convenient side track for storage. Almost every station with a little-used side track was put to use, and there were hundreds of cars to store. The cars were spotted in sets of five coupled together, with a space of a car length or two between sets. The side track at Shoshone got its share. A day or two after the cars were set out, we discovered that it was great sport to climb to the top of the first car, walk along the catwalks on top of the set, climb down, and go on to the nest set and repeat the process until we got tired of climbing. The first car of one of these sets, however, had water dripping from the drain under the ice bunker at one end of the car. When we had climbed to the top of the car, we opened the cover to the ice bunker, and, sure enough, there were several hundred pounds of ice that had still not melted. We didn’t need ice. There was plenty of ice in the icehouse at Shoshone. But what intrigued us was the strong smell of bananas.
We climbed down and went to the main door of the car. It was sealed with a metal seal and a red tag. We broke the seal, climbed into the car, and, to our delight, found bananas scattered all over the floor. Most of them were green, but there was also a big pile of overripe ones near the door, the source of the aroma we had noticed. Overjoyed by our discovery, we ran home, got some bushel baskets, went back, and gathered up every ripe and green banana we could find. Some of them had slipped down between the floorboards . Those boards were braced a few inches above the main floor of the car to allow the cool air from the ice bunkers to circulate. We raised the boards and salvaged every last useable banana, nearly two and a half bushels in all.
Proudly we carried them home. For once in our lives we were going to have all the bananas we wanted. We were going to gorge on bananas. We might even get sick on bananas. When we showed Mother what we had found, her eyes lit up with pleasure. But then here thrifty European upbringing took over.

“You may each have one banana. Then you must put the rest down in the cellar. You may each have one banana every day until they are gone.” There was no use arguing; we did as we were told, regretting that we hadn’t eaten two or three bananas while we were still in the PFE car.