Imperial (134 page)

But in the summer of 1904 fancy lemons are going for between fifty cents and a dollar, standard lemons for fifty cents—in 1950 lemons will be two and a half cents per pound; now back to 1904: grapefruits for ninety cents to a dollar, fancy Valencias for two dollars; and at the beginning of that year, the USDA pomologist G. Harold Powell has come west for the first time. He writes his wife:
For two days we travelled across New Mexico, Arizona, and California and saw not a farm comparable to the eastern farms.
He’s going to do something about that.

Mr. Powell is now remembered primarily as a citrus man. His experiments will prove that mechanical injury in cutting, packing and sorting cause most of the decay which growers had previously blamed on misfortunes of transit. (Typical California news from 1905: Eighteen carloads of lemons and oranges arrive in Boston, but with a thirty-percent spoilage rate.) Watch this, gentlemen! Two boxes packed with carefully handled oranges, then opened a few days later, exhibit mold damage in only one point one percent of the contents. Two other boxes whose fruit bears “tiny clipper cuts and stem punctures” present an astounding sixty-three-percent damage ratio. The citrus growers praise Powell, banquet him, invite him to dance with their daughters; he’s saved them millions. And they have millions to save, millions to spend; disliking the Southern Pacific’s freight charges, they even consider financing another transcontinental railroad, assessing themselves ten dollars for each acre they own. Oh, my, what big men! They’re almost Imperial men.

One can tell from Powell’s letters home that not only does he sincerely care about helping the industry, he also loves the citrus vistas of the Inland Empire. From Whittier, where
the dark green foliage and the flaming yellow fruit of the orange groves made a striking picture,
to “the El Cajon lemon district,” to Santa Paula near Fullerton, which he calls
the finest lemon Ranch in California, 300 acres under the most perfect cultivation,
he yields up as much enthusiasm as a ripe navel orange does juice. (His character flaw: silence about the queen of all citrus—grapefruit.) By 1909, on his second trip to California, he’s become a bigshot, writing home to Gertrude less about the loveliness of the orange groves than about his expenses, speeches and meetings, as well as (for he was a straightforward husband) a forthcoming rendezvous with his mistress, the sweet-as-citrus-honey Miss Pennington; all the same, new orange vistas do still engage his fancy from time to time. I wonder what he would have made of Imperial? Well, let’s read his letter to Gertrude about just that. In April he travels from Yuma to Laguna Dam by mule team, remarking on the dust, which is more impressive even than that of Los Angeles itself, where everyone wears “mixed grey goods” because the dust makes clothes grey anyhow. Now what? In that year Imperial takes particular pride in her butter, poultry, livestock, wool, cotton, miscellaneous fruits and vegetables, and not least in her cantaloupes. More than two hundred and seven thousand acres have been irrigated! On hot light-choked evenings, I’ve sometimes stood where Powell did, gazing across the Colorado into the pebbly ridges of Imperial’s Bard Subdistrict; and sometimes I can smell the freshness of the fields. To Powell, I assume, Imperial looks drier.
I guess we all feel sorry for ’em.
Returning to the barracks in Yuma, he sleeps outdoors in a cot, then rides the very early morning train to Los Angeles.
It was a delightful experience, pretty strenuous but worth while.
That is all he has to say—no mention at all of the Imperial Valley!

But the very next month, an issue of the
Desert Farmer
advises us that
in the future Imperial Valley must be considered one of the orange sections of Southern California.

In about 1910, California holds six point six million bearing and nonbearing orange trees, nine hundred and forty-one thousand lemon trees and forty-three and a half thousand grapefruit trees. The Inland Empire’s orange groves run from Yucaipa and Redlands all the way west to Corona.

Five years later, in December, the Imperial Valley’s first shipment of citrus, which happen to be grapefruits, departs L. F. Farnsworth’s ranch, which lies not far from the city of Imperial. (Coachella won’t start any grapefruit orchards until 1925.) In 1920, the valley’s first organization of grapefruit growers charters itself. In 1922 the largest grapefruit orchard is a respectable sixty acres. The following year, forty thousand new grapefuit trees enter the valley. Then Imperial grapefruits start winning prizes.

But this chapter isn’t about grapefruits at all; please excuse me for letting them grow in. It’s about oranges. Come to think of it, in the era of
The Largest Irrigated District in the World,
who has time to peel oranges anymore? It’s more efficient to drink orange juice.

What is orange juice, actually? In 1960, in the Mirror Building in Los Angeles, I overhear a man differentiating between fresh orange juice, frozen fresh orange juice, single-strength frozen orange juice, and reconstituted orange juice, none of which qualify as chilled orange juice. What about orange juice diluted with sugar water? R. J. Smith of Sunnyland Citrus cuts the Gordian Knot:
Well, it could be called ambrosia I suppose and I don’t think we have any classification for it here.

ORANGES AND SNOW

How did we progress from
the flaming yellow fruit of the orange groves
to
it could be called ambrosia I suppose?

In 1914, the merest year after Mulholland completes the Los Angeles aqueduct, San Fernando grows lush with citrus and other fruits even as the Owens Valley does the opposite. Welcome to San Fernando Rey Brand, whose label sports two vaqueros riding toward an old red-tiled hacienda, with palm trees and flowering prickly pears all around. Indeed, such is San Fernando’s success that she almost steals the Citrus Experiment Station away from Riverside—the foiling of which act Riverside celebrates with church bells.

On the frontis of a 1925 number of the
California Cultivator,
we find the legend “Oranges and Snow,” and a full-page picture of citrus groves under cloudy mountains. That’s the year that the Riverside district ships out twenty-five hundred and forty-one cars of citrus fruit! I can’t help believing in people.
²⁵³

In 1930, the young protagonist of an Upton Sinclair novel (he wants to get into pictures) gazes out from the freight train he’s hopped into Southern California and sees
orange trees—whole groves of them in blosssom, with ripe golden fruit, and an incredibly sweet odor . . . It was the greatest hour of Danny Dane’s lifetime . . .

Southern California keeps on dreaming her citrus dreams right into the Hitler years. We grant that Florida is number one, but the gainful whirling of our Ministry of Capital’s prayer wheels may prevent her from being so forever. Regardless, we’ve created the greatest hour of Danny Dane’s lifetime: Oranges used to be so scarce that we employed them to decorate our Christmas trees
(we really looked forward to our holidays, so we could have our one orange at Christmas that came from the far-away and golden state of California);
now oranges are everywhere. Isn’t that a victory? The exoticism of yellow- or orange-glowing groves which once enraptured G. Harold Powell—indeed, citrus fruits are more exotic than I ever imagined, for they originated in the Malaysian Archipelago and the jungles of mainland Asia
²⁵⁴
—has now been subsumed in workaday monoculture, because I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life and we need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by. At the end of the 1935 season, California proudly counts up the
greatest volume of citrus ever exported.
In 1939 I see a white two-horse wagon loaded high with flats of oranges, and many pickers, their majority white-clad, stationed at various heights on heterogeneous ladders, gathering in the golden globes of Riverside, with Mount Rubidoux beyond. Somewhere around the same time I see a young brunette tilting a number-eight-size Sunkist crate toward her with one blurred white-gloved hand, while with the other she reaches into the conveyer belt, picking out number-eight-size oranges, which in the photograph are nearly as white as the part in her hair.

In 1936, when the Paxton Junior lid-nailing machine for orange boxes is in vogue, the Fontana Citrus Association in San Bernardino County shows off its new grapefruit-packing plant, and the San Fernando Lemon Company builds a large new storage building in Van Nuys, although an eighty-acre improved grapefruit ranch in the oasis district of Riverside gets sold. Thank God for the scarcity of Puerto Rican grapefruit!
It is probable that California summer grapefruit will find a ready market in the East this year . . .

Now, if we could only take those oranges and that snow and can them both! Well, by golly, on 22 April 1950 this newsflash comes in:
Those little six-ounces of frozen concentrated orange juice are shaking the citrus industry to its very foundations ...
²⁵⁵
Concentrate is very popular, all right; as we say in that decade, it’s
taking
off to new levels;
all the same, we’ve failed to solve the difficulties of our own success, because there are awfully many oranges in California and Florida; now they’re talking about putting in orange groves in Texas and even Mexico.

Just in time, J. A. Finley of the Orange Products Company, Ontario, San Bernardino County, comes to the rescue. He explains that what’s required is simply an attitude alteration:
Actually, the orange industry is not faced with overproduction; rather, it’s a case of underconsumption.

“WE HAVE A LEEWAY OF 11.3 BRIX”

Speaking of ambrosia, Michael F. Arlotto of Arlo’s Citrus, Incorporated, testifies that
there has been considerable adulteration in the orange juice that has been sold in the State of California.
In other words, if you taste this beverage, you’ll realize that
WATER IS HERE
. Well, there’s agrarian democracy for you: Each juice processor can set his own standard of purity; moreover (I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life), he can save up to forty cents per gallon by adding sugar, water and the like, thereby decreasing the orange-juice content to sixty or seventy percent.
The consumer is being cheated,
he affirms, but
it’s very hard to tell the difference. It is very palatable, a very acceptable product can be made.

Did we decide what orange juice might be? Disregard the United States orange-juice standards of 16 June 1959. With the proposed new California standards, Arlotto says,
we have a leeway of 11.3 Brix on the orange juice.

Brix, by the way, measures fruit-sugar solids. Do you care? In the Mirror Building, several entities care surprisingly—to wit, the Polar Chilled Products Company, Glacier Groves (whose head office is in Cincinnati and whose spokesman objects to more specific standards), Necco Sales, Glenco Citrus Products, Sunnyland Citrus, Golden Citrus, Daisy-Fresh Products (which insists that no orange-juice adulteration whatsoever plagues California), Minute Maid Corporation, and I almost forgot Erb and Company—well, who wouldn’t forget Erb and Company? Five “major plants”—we’re not told which ones—now make ninety percent of all chilled orange juice in California; we can be pretty sure that they’re represented at this hearing. The largest concern excretes four million gallons per year of California orange juice into our mouths. Minute Maid might be my guess. Then there’s Erb and Company, from whom we’ll hardly hear, but I perceive several other orange-juice jackals snarling over that spilled ten percent which now seems in peril of sinking into the sand of California’s moneyscape. I catch whispers of anxiety from certain retrograde types that small juice companies might get regulated out of the market.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
Well, there’s still a niche for penny-ante freeholders: Dairymen often still “process” the previously bottled orange juice of the Big Five; I guess that means that they pour it into smaller bottles.

Once upon a time, there used to be orange juice price wars, just as California used to suffer from water wars in those unenlightened days before the All-American Canal. Mr. Arlotto remembers how he once got threatened by a competitor
that if I tried to break into the Bakersfield area he would cut the price to where there would be no profit and he said, “If you want to go into there, go ahead.”
Thank God that the Big Five are here to save us from that chaos!
He made a success through his own efforts. He sold out at a fancy price.

Marx and Lenin inform us that capitalism tends to concentrate itself into rival monopolies. When any monopoly wins, we find ourselves that much closer to socialism. In the United States of 1960, we’re not quite there yet; but in place of orange juice wars between Stockton and Bakersfield we have orange juice mega-conflicts between California and Florida.

Florida’s orange production cost is one-third that of California’s, in part due to lower labor costs. (In 2004, a Holtville farmer will tell me that most of the real cost on lemons and grapefruit is labor.) That’s not all. Arlotto complains that in Florida you can’t legally put sugar in orange juice, while in California you simply have to, in order to
make a good palatable product.
He wants to know how we can protect ourselves from Florida. This question, the most urgent of our time, can be answered only by a citrus man who’s never been cheated out of a hundred cents in his life. For my own part, I feel competent merely to address a more basic issue: The reason we simply must add sugar to California orange juice (which, by the way, our new standards will require to be twenty percent fresh juice minimum; the rest may be concentrate) is that Imperial’s supposed eternal growing season has failed us! I could pretend that the California orange-juice problem has to do with flavanones, flavones and anthocyanins, but Mr. Arlotto tells it as it is:
In the chilled juice business in California at times we have to use fruit that is low in solids and it by necessity has to be beefed up to a higher fruit solids through the use of concentrate.
Why’s that? Well, here’s the kicker:
It is not always possible at that time of year to buy fruit on a solids basis.