Gotta be honest, I’m a Tropicana girl. I came of age in Florida, I went on my best dates at Tropicana Field, I spent a lot of time in Bradenton in my late 20s attempting to persuade the dude who became my husband that doing so would be in his best interest.

But if not for Sunkist, my life would have been very different. When I was in kindergarten, my mom got hired by them to do exporting paperwork.

She really liked the job. My mom’s work history, like a lot of other women her age, was punctuated by guys chasing her around the desk, or firing her when she wanted to take vacation (“fine! I’ll take it unpaid!”) after a year on the job, and so on. So she was excited in her mid-20s to get a job with a woman as her manager and work that did not involve a lot of schmoozing.

“My boss was great, an absolutely lovely lady from Cuba who learned English in New York. It was the weirdest accent I had ever heard and when I finally felt OK asking her about it—it was that weird!—she laughed and blamed the Bronx.”

As another example of how the workplace has changed, my mom was hired out of season for fruit exporting. “The first couple months were so boring. There was nothing to export and nothing to do. I couldn’t even practice typing because there was nothing to type. I pretty much just sat at my desk and waited for someone to give me anything to do. I begged my boss for work and she basically told me there wasn’t any but she needed to fill the position before the season began. But she did give me a file to memorize, which took me … oh, maybe a day? Then it was back to sitting and waiting. So then when the season kicked in, I rememorized that file and went on my merry way. I think they liked that didn’t have to babysit me.”

I guess her boss was impressed, because she kept trying to push her into a better job. “You have a degree! You shouldn’t be clerking, you should be in sales!” (I literally laughed when my mom said this, and my mom said, “Yeah, I had to break it to her that she didn’t know me very well and I didn’t do people. That was your dad’s job.”)

Mom said she learned a lot on the fly.  “That was the fun part of the job. I think they liked that they didn’t have to babysit me, and I liked figuring things out. I’d done exporting work before, but this was a lot more complicated. I got to deal with letters of credit, and the documentation for produce was way more complicated than the stuff I had done before. Plus, you know, you couldn’t be late on shipping or it wouldn’t exactly be FRESH fruit anymore.”

Sunkist exported a lot of material to Japan. One day, Mom got a call from a guy asking about “a change order for luby led.” After a few more exchanges, my mom figured out the guy wanted to increase an order for ruby red grapefruit. “Well, that was fine. We always liked to sell more!” It was supposed to all happen on paper, but “this guy was in a jam. So he called in changes and since the order wasn’t too far along—and wouldn’t overflow the boat—I just went ahead and handled the whole thing.”

It’s funny to hear that story because I’m pretty sure everything like that happens electronically—click a button, send an email; there probably isn’t some energetic 20-something waiting to spring in for an assist when the phone rings. My mom quit her job at Sunkist after about two years when we moved to Illinois, but she has said she probably would have retired from there if we had stayed. And she would have been just fine changing with the times—she probably would have even excelled at sales in an online format!