Field of Jewels : Strawberries Flourish, Memories Linger Amid City Sounds
Pickers bend under the midday sun in rows and rows of strawberry plants that ripple in the wind. The eldest picks the fruit with gnarled, leathery hands. He says he is 70 and has done this all his life, mostly in Mexico. Time and a smile crease his face, and he wears a red plaid shirt.
This rural scene is in a city.
To the north, the pickers can see Cerritos College, which leases the 17-acre field to the strawberry grower. To the south, across 166th Street, and to the west, across Studebaker Road, their view is of the roofs of suburban homes. Freeways are near but can’t be seen; only their incessant sounds, carried on the wind, confirm their presence.
In the southeast corner of the field, a white wooden hut serves as a strawberry stand. A large strawberry is painted in red and green on one wall. In back of the stand is a windmill, presumably used when the field was a dairy farm. But now the vanes--those it still has--are rusty and have long ceased to turn.
A red sign beckons motorists: “Fresh Picked Strawberries. The Best in the West.”
The grower--Jesse Gamboa, owner of Cerritos Farms in Anaheim--is not around. Over the phone the day before, he had said that this is not a banner year, what with all the rain in March, the month the strawberry season usually peaks. A lot of plants were destroyed. But who can tell in this wide expanse of green, under which the red berries are everywhere?
The stand does a sporadic business. Noon hour and around 5 in the afternoon are busiest. “I’m here seven days a week, 9 to 6,” says Sandy Gamboa, the grower’s sister, who operates the stand. Trays of berries, still warm from their morning in the field, are displayed on the counter.
Cars pull into a parking lot next to the stand, and strawberry fanciers get out. Many have been coming to the patch for a decade.
“I bought a big basket a couple of weeks ago for my second-grade students,” says Linda Westphal, a teacher at Los Altos Grace Brethren School in Long Beach. “They made jam for Mother’s Day.”
A Bellflower resident, Jane Cocca, swears by the place: “I don’t care for strawberries in stores because they’re dry and flat. Here, when you bite into a strawberry, you’re getting a strawberry.”
The strawberry field is not likely to last forever. Cerritos College officials are studying possible development plans that would bring in more than the $19,700 a year they get from Cerritos Farms.
If the field is eventually plowed over for good, it will be a sad day for neighborhood youngsters, who have been known to cut through the wire fences to get at the strawberries.
“We’ve never found anyone in there,” says Sandy Gamboa. “But our customers tell us they see them breaking in. I guess kids do that all the time.”
It is not hard to imagine--the kids eating their fill and then picking up one last berry before leaving, as stealthily as they had arrived, only now with stained hands.
On some days, there are more than 50 men in the field picking the berries, most of which go to food-processing plants. But on this recent afternoon there is only a small crew picking for the stand, and now they have finished.
They collect their empty soda bottles and walk, still a bit bent over, down a dusty road to an old car with a smashed fender. They pile in and drive away, the old man smiling in the front seat.
