Victory Gardens Bloom in Peacetime : A Legacy of World Wars I and II, Community Vegetable Plots Thrive
Gene Slattery was in ninth grade at Canoga Park High School that fateful December 50 years ago when World War II broke out.
Only a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, wartime shortages loomed. Draft boards became alarmed at the malnourished condition of the men being inducted. And articles began appearing in Slattery’s school newspaper, bearing headlines like “Wanted--Boys and Girls for Farm Work” and “Victory Farm Volunteers.”
Slattery had no need to contemplate climbing onto the buses that began taking Los Angeles city kids up to Oxnard to pick tomatoes. He already lived on a farm--a chicken ranch in the middle of the Valley. The farmhouse is still standing at De Soto Avenue and Tulsa Street.
Slattery recalls: “I told my father my teacher said we kids could get extra school credit if we planted a Victory Garden. And my father said, ‘Good, let’s do that.’ The teacher gave our class a prepared spiel--from the War Production Board--and a mimeographed handout on what to plant.” Specified were corn, melons, peas, beans and carrots.
Slattery and his father added some rows of vegetables to their existing home garden. Then he began counting the days until he could enlist in the Navy two years later. Thus, in his modest way, Gene Slattery did what so many other Valley kids did during World War II--they did their bit for victory, first with rakes and hoes and then with ships and guns.
In today’s atmosphere of “Americans-can’t-get-it-together” gloominess, it may be heartening to recall that our non-farm dwelling parents and grandparents--almost overnight--began planting back yards, front yards, empty lots and city parks. This effort produced fully half the nation’s fresh fruit and vegetables in 1943--barely more than a year after Pearl Harbor. And figures stayed that high till the war was over. Commercial production went to the military and our allies. Transport capacity equivalent to 400,000 boxcars was freed for military use. The War Production Board referred to the 20 million Americans who maintained civilian home Victory Gardens as “The Third Front,” according to American City Magazine of February, 1944.
After the war, Gene Slattery became a math professor at Pierce College, a job from which he planned shortly to retire. He and his wife, Nancy, built a home in Calabasas where they installed large fruit and vegetable areas as well as horse facilities.
“I guess it was imprint training on Gene--the Victory Garden stuff--just like with our horses,” Nancy said. “Once you teach them the way, they never forget--if you get ‘em young enough.”
Slattery sees some other interesting connections between the Victory Garden era and today. “Store-bought food in those prewar days wasn’t that good. You were sort of stuck way out in the Valley. Even neighbors who didn’t have a chicken ranch like we did raised some of their own stuff.”
The Depression was still on in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. People had been making do since the Wall Street crash of 1929. More than a decade before that, during World War I, city dwellers had been home-growing vegetables. They called them “Liberty Gardens” in 1917, Slattery said.
Post-World War II prosperity wiped out the wartime food and transport shortages, and covered the Valley with supermarkets by the ‘50s. Victory Gardens became a memory. But the ‘70s’ “back-to-the-land movement,” which continued into the recession of the early ‘80s (remember that?) seems to have spawned a Victory Garden renaissance. There is even a public television show with that name, launched in 1975. The producers are still churning out new episodes for broadcast on KCET every Saturday at 11:30 a.m.
In the San Fernando Valley today, there is a thriving example of this “back to the future” Victory Gardening at Sepulveda Park, on Magnolia Boulevard between Hayvenhurst Avenue and Balboa Boulevard. Janet LaFrance, a city of Los Angeles Parks Department professional, is in charge. Last year, the project was mentioned in “A Day in the Park,” a Valley View feature. “Calls poured in,” she said. “I’ve never had such a waiting list--60 names.” (For information, call (818) 784-5180.)
“The city of L.A. told us to run this as an information center on front- and back-yard gardening, even raised-box gardening for condo dwellers. In January, we will begin giving lessons on how to prune your fruit trees. And we provide an ongoing composting demonstration.”
After a moment of something like second thoughts, LaFrance added: “Tell them if they come to our gardens, don’t bring a bag and keep your hands in your pockets.”
Further evidence of this trend in the Valley is the annual weekend of 20 gardening seminars conducted each October at Valley College by the Cooperative Agricultural Extension service of the University of California. Sherl Hopkins, extension’s community gardening program coordinator, says, “Back-yard gardening is becoming bigger every year. Our seminars are up 20% in attendance annually.” Another of his projects is the Children’s Gardening program. There are 50 sites throughout the county. The Valley’s is at Colfax Elementary School, at Colfax Avenue and Addison Street in North Hollywood.
Perhaps the most important legacy of the Victory Gardens movement is not just that it helped win the war. Or that Gene Slattery and others in the Valley have enjoyed, as he put it, “a lot of healthy home-grown food.” It is something that was discovered by the compilers of the National Victory Garden Institute annual report for 1946: “Community gardens everywhere have bred friendliness and wholesome community spirit that strengthens our democratic institutions.”
