For example, he washed cars, picked lettuce in the Imperial Valley, and served as a bouncer at a Santa Monica pier.

Here was a seemingly mentally competent adult recommending that we force a largely minority population to go out in the fields and pick lettuce and cotton.

Proposition 187 doesn't matter to the illegal workers picking lettuce in Fresno and oranges near San Diego.

"You're a mess," he said, picking noodles and wilted lettuce out of my hair.

"The impression she was giving me was that I didn't write about someone picking lettuce in the field."

Had his great-grandfather not decided to come to California and pick lettuce, might he have grown up in such a place?

"I was down in the garden picking lettuce, and it looked to me as though the plane missed the Wheelers' chimney by inches."

In one widely remarked-upon incident, he insisted to a union group that none of them would be willing to pick lettuce for fifty dollars an hour.

In 1985, his parents left their children with grandparents and worked illegally in California picking lettuce.

Visitors will go into the fields to pick tomatoes, lettuce, squash and herbs, to eat on the spot or take home.