Tomato Farmer’s Roots Deep in Heritage, Soil : Harry Davidian Lives for Family, Armenian Culture and His Farm

Harry Davidian was feeling his age. He stretched his arms out ahead, then placed his hands behind his neck, which recently had been aching a lot. Here he was, 57 and once again waiting on the weather so he could plant this year’s tomato crop.

Davidian’s wife, Laura, watched his restlessness sympathetically. “He loves challenges. That’s why he can’t retire.”

Davidian nodded. “Ambition,” he declared in his gravelly voice, “it’s got to be in you. I got so much ambition. I wish I could go back 30 years. I’d love to start over again.”

Not that anything would be very different. As far as Harry Davidian is concerned, life’s thrills can pretty much all be found farming tomatoes here in this flat, fertile community 20 minutes northeast of Visalia against the Sierra foothills.

Cutler--it’s where family and friends are, where a man can hold on to his heritage, where a man still earns respect because of his values and ethics.

Largest Shipper

Davidian started out after World War II by planting tomatoes on just one of his father’s 20 acres and became, in the 1960s, the world’s largest shipper of vine-ripened tomatoes (for a single crop season). Sixteen years ago he formed a partnership with local auto dealer George Zarounian, a partnership that outgrew financial need but nevertheless continues, merely on the basis of friendship. Then they backed two men, Bert Cutino and Ted Balestreri, who wanted to open a restaurant in the Carmel-Monterey area, and ended up with a relationship that has the four owning three-quarters of the real estate on Monterey’s Cannery Row, including the Sardine Factory Restaurant and the Monterey Plaza Hotel now under construction.

Harry Davidian would like to see himself as typical of the farmers in this area. But during an economic period that most farmers liken to the worst of the ‘30s Depression, the mere fact that he’s survived makes Davidian atypical. Indeed, where there were 35 tomato growers in the Cutler-Orosi area 10 years ago, only six are still in business today.

Even in better economic times, however, Davidian would still stand out. Everything is a passion, to be done with pride: growing a fine tomato, endless dancing at Armenian Kef nights, giving each of his three daughters big weddings, being there with money and support for other Armenian farmers, holding the traditional Armenian ground-breaking ceremony before building his wife the house of her dreams in 1976.

Always at his side, in true Armenian tradition, is Davidian’s wife of 36 years, Laura: unfailingly supportive, willing to work alongside him--picking tomatoes, packing them and later running the Z & D packing shed, where she developed a quality pack that kept Zedco tomatoes on top of a highly competitive market--yet at the same time taking care of the house, raising the children and cooking for her husband and all the growers who came by the packing shed.

It’s the manner of the man. Laura Balakian Davidian accepts it; his three daughters still do; just about everyone who meets Harry Davidian instinctively senses what he’s always believed and probably what’s driven him:

“I’m the boss at all times.”

-- -- --

Harry Davidian is one of those people about whom stories are told. Except he tells them best himself. Like how it came about that he dropped out of school at age 14.

“My father was a farmer, but he was working in . . . (other people’s) fields. So since seventh, eighth grade, I’d been taking care of the farm and going to school at the same time. One day I’m in high school and I run into Amos Margosian.

‘This Is Useless’

“He said: ‘This is useless. Why don’t we quit school? We got a lot of work to do at home.’ I thought he had a point, so I just leaped out the window--it was band class--and walked home. . . . The teacher had a kind of funny expression on his face.”

The favorite story among people who know Davidian, however, is the time he and Margosian decided to grow cauliflower together and went to rent some ground. The man with the best 20 acres for their needs was an Oklahoman who, in the course of conversation, claimed to be the fastest runner in his home state. Davidian by virtue of being a farmer is a gambler. He’s also into the Las Vegas scene, loves to play poker and back then--this was the fall of 1957--he saw a chance for some free land.

“I tell the guy--Amos isn’t there at the time--that my partner is the fastest runner in these parts. It was the other guy’s idea, but we agree to have a race. I forget the actual figures, say $200 per acre for 20 acres, which would be $4,000, or if Amos wins, nothing.”

“I go get Amos. He says he hasn’t run for a while. But he wins the race.

“I used Amos on a couple of different bets.” Laughter at the memory. “I took him around like a horse.”

-- -- --

It was the first day of planting this year’s tomato crop and Harry Davidian was primed. He’d been up since 5:30 a.m., going to breakfast--coffee and a cigar--at the Packing House Restaurant in Orosi, where he and the other farmers had agreed that after a week of rain and several days of drying out, the ground should indeed be ready. And now, as his wife watched with their 2 1/2-year-old grandson at one end of the field, Harry Davidian strode the acreage.

Just ahead of him, moving slowly down a plot, was an automatic planter on which eight women sat side by side. Each quickly slid individual plants down the shoot and into the ground, which would then be injected with pesticide pellets and fertilizer. Following the planter, a line of straw-hatted men checked that each plant had been stuck firmly into the ground. A few rows over, small groups of laborers worked assembly-line fashion, placing white protective caps over each plant in the rows already completed.

For 37 years the Davidians have been doing work such as this, varying the schedule by a few days or a few weeks depending on the weather. These first few weeks, they fear early frost, and on cold nights, smudge pots will be lit. Later, after the plants grow larger, they will fear heavy rain or intense heat.

But, with some luck, this will be a good year. For the first few days after the initial planting, each plant is in a miniature greenhouse. Then holes are punched in the protective caps to let a little air in. Later the caps will be removed and the plants staked. Once they reach four feet, they’re topped off. This makes for a fuller plant and a better size and quality of tomato, Davidian believes. Around June 1, only the ripe tomatoes will be picked. Those not ripe yet will be left on the vine. During a period of seven weeks, each of 520,000 plants on the 120 acres will have been picked every other day--or at least 30 times.

The Cutler Holdouts

Davidian and the other Cutler growers are holdouts. Not for them the new technique of bush growing, where tomatoes are not staked, are picked en masse, then gassed with a ripening and color agent. Bush tomatoes cost about $800 an acre for a yield of about 1,000 boxes. With stake tomatoes, expect 2 1/2 times the yield--about 2,500 boxes per acre--but at more than triple the cost, $3,400. Davidian, on the hard and practical side, contends you need a lot of acreage to make bush tomatoes pay. And he’d have to change his entire packing line, his storage area.

But push him and the truth comes out. “I just believe that consumers and restaurants need a certain amount of vine-ripened tomatoes.”

Why?

“The taste, the flavor. With the artificial ripening, the tomatoes have a woody taste. It’s like eating a green watermelon.”

Through June and July every year, the Davidians don’t vacation. They don’t go out to dinner. Harry Davidian scarcely goes to sleep and when he does, he says, he resents it. During a peak period, he’ll oversee picking, grading, packing and shipping 25,000 to 35,000 32-pound boxes a day. When the always volatile tomato market is slow, he might decide to cold-storage up to 125,000 boxes--a $1-million decision made, say people who work with him, without a flinch.

Says Davidian, “Give me tomato season and I feel alive.”

-- -- --

It was noon at the California Farm Equipment Show in Tulare a few weeks ago and Becky Davidian, 22, sat on a bleacher near the booth run by Triple X, the social group started by a group of Armenian football players at Fresno State in the 1920s when they were prohibited from joining any other fraternity. Her father is a longtime member, but he hadn’t arrived yet. Instead, she’d run into her uncle and godfather who were at the barbecue end of the shish-kebab sandwich assembly line.

Like her older sisters, Janice Davidian Tellian, 35, and Phyllis Davidian Borba, 32, Becky Davidian had worked in the Z & D packing shed while growing up and, like them, had returned home to live after graduating from Fresno State University. She’s working as a loan officer with Visalia Production Credit Assn.

But that will probably end with her marriage in October to Craig Ainley, a senior at Fresno State and an outfielder with prospects of being drafted by the San Diego Padres. Ainley is not Armenian and Becky will be married in his church, Presbyterian, instead of Armenian Apostolic.

The subject had come up the day before as the Davidians sat in the super-sized living room of the ranch-style home designed for them by their former son-in-law, Michael Tellian. From the outside, surrounded by vineyards, it’s a dramatic house. Inside, designer-decorated, it’s also dramatic--but comfortable: three bedrooms, a complete second kitchen for canning, cooking fish and storing food; a living room that also serves as a family room where 50 can come for Christmas and not be crowded.

But just looking around this house reminded them, marrying an Armenian--so important in the old days--is no longer a certainty.

As far as he was concerned, it was sort of a natural evolution, reflected Harry Davidian. When he was growing up, after all, there was a lot of discrimination against Armenians, especially toward the age group 10 years his senior. He had some older friends who bombed a swimming pool where they weren’t allowed, he said. As a result, Armenians stuck together. “We were constantly trying to prove that we were as good as anybody else. And if we saw an Armenian who was maybe a little out of line, we’d get to them and try to straighten them out.”

Sense of Being Armenian

His generation also had a sense of what being Armenian was all about, the horrors of being driven out of Armenia by the Turks in 1915. Families separated, literally running for their lives--his parents had settled in the Yettem area near Cutler, hers in Selma.

But as mutual needs and history bonds people together, “this generation--my daughter’s--doesn’t have that same need,” said Davidian.

A grin. “God gave me Alan Borba.”

Borba is the husband of Davidian’s middle daughter, Phyllis. His Portuguese family are farmers in the Tulare area. He and Phyllis, who’s studying to be a travel agent, have been married nine years and have a 2 1/2-year-old son, Chad, who the Davidians see as the next great hope for carrying on the family’s farming tradition. Already Chad, who lives on the ranch, can drive a tractor. There’s also Janice Tellian’s two sons, Justin and Jared, and daughter Gina. But, as Laura Davidian points out: “they don’t get the same chance. They live in town.”

Davidian is training Borba, a former high school teacher, to replace him--though it’s not actually certain when that will be. He sighed. Retirement, getting older--it had been on his mind a lot lately. “Retirement to me is work. I like to go till I can’t go no more.”

Wife Still Helps Out

His wife, however, retired from the packing operation three years ago. “During the season, though, I go help him out. After all, I don’t have anything else to do.”

They have also taken nine cruises, Laura Davidian added, almost as an afterthought. In 1983, they bought a second home in Three Rivers, an hour’s drive away at the base of Sequoia National Park. She would like to spend more time in Monterey. They’ve the perfect excuse, after all, with all their business interests there. In fact, the partnership, Restaurants Central, just purchased 29 Wendy’s franchises.

But Davidian shrugged at the notion. “We go there maybe every two months. We stay at the Hyatt. When the hotel is built, we’ll stay there. We eat good. But I find myself useless. I never found a place I like other than this farm.”

Grapes, Citrus Trees

The farm. It’s 420 acres, 160 of which are leased. Tomatoes are only grown on the leased portion. On the other acreage, Davidian has grapes and citrus trees.

Considering his success, you’d expect him to have more acreage. But the fact that he doesn’t may be one of the reasons he’s still around, said Alan Borba of his father-in-law. “There are no big mortgages. Harry’s had his share of mistakes, but there’s always been the right kind of managing.”

“And the good will of God,” interrupted Davidian, surged with new energy now that his son-in-law had entered the room and the subject had turned to farming. “I know I’ve walked away from many good moves, but I’ve also missed the bad moves. I’ve never gone into getting mortgaged up to here to buy a lot of property. If I’d put all my money into farming, I’d be like the others.”

Nothing, though, comes without hard work--not even to the couple’s daughters, all of whom need the income from their paying jobs because they’re not seeing anything from their folks.

No Silver Platters

“The girls will get it, but not now,” Mrs. Davidian said. “We worked for it. We’re not going to hand it to them on a silver platter. They should know what it’s like to work, to be as broke as the rest of us.”

They’ve been broke sure enough, Davidian added. Especially in 1953 when the sugar beet blight came and everything was lost. Things were so bad that Davidian’s father came over and built 10 rabbit hutches. They bred rabbits, eventually 800 of them. “That left us struggling for three or four years,” Davidian said. But that was also the time when Davidian solidified the business philosophy that, he says, got him where he is today.

“The very first thing is honesty. You can never look for excuses. I always paid my way or if I couldn’t, I’d go tell my creditors and explain. During 1953 and ‘54, when things were so bad, I visited everybody I owed money to and explained why and told them I’d pay as soon as I could. I didn’t look for a way out.

“Another thing is, I got a lot of faith in God. No, I don’t go to church that much. My church is everyday living. If you hurt me $5, I don’t get mad. Someday God will give it back to me. I really believe that, and a lot of people owe me money.

Keys to Success

“But faith and honesty, that’s the key to my success.”

Davidian laughed, slightly embarrassed as he said this, what with his son-in-law and several office workers overhearing. “But you want an answer and the answer is yes, I think I’m very much a success because only I know what my goals were and that in achieving them I’ve not changed my thinking from age 20 until today.”

His goals? “To be a farmer, a good farmer. To make money, to help other people. To be something special, someone who stands out.”