Sneak Previews of Forthcoming Books : L.A.’s Orange Groves

‘It was sheer magic--the rows of upturned earth, freshly cultivated or irrigated, even the lingering smells of the blackened smudge pots.’

ALTHOUGH THE urbanization of South Pasadena drove the orange groves eastward, the part of town where we lived had many remnant trees, and beyond nearby Garfield Avenue the groves still held sway for many miles. My father liked to take long drives about the countryside when Southern California was still a paradise of small towns islanded among the groves. Autos were uncommon on the few narrow roads; people were friendly and trusting. Sundays were given to these drives, calling on growers he had come to know. He liked them; they respected him. When he visited the packing houses of the cooperative he managed, he was welcomed for both his practical background in fruit farming and his scientific authority gained at Cornell and in the field in other states before California.

On those Sunday visits, I tagged along after my father and the grower as they trudged down the long rows. I loved prowling the dense groves, secure in the aura of my father’s approval and authority. It was sheer magic--the long rows of upturned earth, freshly cultivated or irrigated, the ground cover of mallow and mustard, even the lingering smells of fumigant and the blackened smudge pots. In the winter of 1913 the Great Freeze blackened the sky over the entire Orange Empire, causing darkness at noon.

The orange was omnipresent in our lives. We always returned from those Sunday drives with a box of navels tied on the car’s trunk rack. Among things we boys collected--baseball-player cards, cigarette-package silks, cigar bands, stamps--were the lithographed labels on the ends of the orange and lemon crates. We sought to have one from each of the packing houses throughout the Southland, even to the remote citrus coves along the western base of the southern Sierra Nevada. The empty pine crates had multiple uses: bookshelves, storage of toys and the funny papers, skate coasters. The tissue wrappers made emergency toilet paper. The plated silver offered as Sunkist premiums formed our everyday settings. Nor did we go slow on eating and squeezing oranges and making lemonade in summer.

Copyright 1988 by Lawrence Clark Powell. Reprinted with permission of Capra Press, Santa Barbara.