Teague Dynasty Built on Lemons and Politics : Santa Paula: The line began in 1893, with the arrival of C.C. Teague, a Yankee from Maine who became a pioneering rancher. His son, Charles McKevett Teague, was a U.S. congressman.
In the shadow of the hillside mansion built by his great-grandfather lives woodworker Chuck Teague.
The descendant of one of Ventura County’s best-known families--a Santa Paula dynasty built on lemon ranching and Republican politics--is raising his twin 4-year-old daughters in a modest, one-story fixer-upper.
“Hey, Chuck,” jibe Teague’s friends, “why don’t you own one of those big houses up on the hill?”
“I say, ‘Well, I’d prefer to own a small house,’ ” he replies. Then he jokes, “I like living in a house I have to do my own work on. And I’d rather not do any traveling, either.”
Fact is, Chuck and Laura Teague bought their little two-bedroom house when Ventura County’s housing market peaked in 1988, then saw the recession crush their plans to fix and resell it.
However people see him, Chuck Teague is--like many who live in his blue-collar neighborhood just off Harvard Boulevard--decidedly down-to-earth.
He used to blush when people raved over the deeds of his great-grandfather, pioneering citrus rancher Charles Collins (C.C.) Teague. Or when they told him what a great neighbor and congressman Santa Paula had in his grandfather, U.S. Rep. Charles McKevett Teague.
Now, he tries to meet each compliment with grateful thanks, but cannot shake his bashful modesty.
“Gosh, it’s like anybody when your ancestors are well thought-of. . . . Sure it’s something to be proud of,” says the 34-year-old Teague in the family’s tidy living room, which is decorated with vintage citrus labels and a few sticks of well-preserved antique furniture.
He walks into the bright little kitchen. Soon, supper will be ready for Chuck, Laura and their sweet, rambunctious 4-year-old twins, Caitlyn and Alison.
“I’ve always felt very fortunate to have had the ancestors I had and do have,” Chuck continues, stirring a fragrant, sizzling pan of chicken teriyaki. “But at the same time, it’s kind of embarrassing in a way.”
The Teagues, like the descendants of the Camarillo and McGrath families, stand among a handful of true dynasties that have shaped Ventura County.
Their line began in 1893, with the arrival of C.C. Teague, a Yankee from Maine.
At 20, C.C. Teague came with his family to work in Santa Paula’s lemon groves. His career spanned six decades, a period during which he helped modernize the citrus industry and built the Limoneira Co. into one of the largest lemon producers in the world.
C.C. Teague’s son, Charles McKevett Teague, held a seat in Congress for nearly 20 years, strengthening the county’s Republican Party on a steady diet of folksy campaigning and grass-roots service.
And today, C.C. Teague’s grandson (and Chuck Teague’s father), Alan Teague, 57, straddles the twin streams of his family’s legacy--as board chairman of the Limoneira Co. and past mayor of Santa Paula.
ALAN MIRRORS THE COUNTY
Alan Teague is, like his sons, his father and his aunt and uncle, a passionate community volunteer. And he is head of a clan that has--for the depth of its roots, spread its branches far and thin.
About 33 Teagues in all--nuclear families, divorcees and elderly widows--are scattered across the state and the country in pursuit or the fulfillment of their own lives and dreams. When they come together, it’s usually a few at a time for the occasional family barbecue, holiday feast or weekend visit.
“We are not a huge family in that sense,” says Alan Teague, who still lives in Santa Paula, like his son, Chuck, and his family; his ex-wife, Betsey; and his aunt, Alfrida. “But we still keep our ties. It’s informal and friendly.”
Anchored, yet changing, the Teagues mirror the old Ventura County and the new.
And despite the family’s holdings--they own a substantial share of stock in the 4,000-acre Limoneira Co. and Alan Teague is a busy real estate speculator--the Teagues insist they are not among the super rich.
“If that wealth’s out there, just send me the check,” joked Alan Teague. “I’ll spend it.”
Alan Teague learned the citrus business from the ground up, graduating from sweat labor to bookkeeping and, ultimately, administration of the Teague-McKevett ranch.
As his job title rose, his political stock was rising too. Weaned on summertime clerical work in his father’s congressional office, Teague won a City Council seat in 1966. Four years later, at age 32, he was named mayor.
Meanwhile, he was giving up to 40 local stump speeches a month for his father’s reelection bid while Charles McKevett Teague was busy in Washington.
When his father died Jan. 1, 1974, friends and political allies turned immediately to Alan, pressing him to run in March, 1974, for the empty congressional seat. But he declined, instead offering support to a good friend, Robert Lagomarsino, who ran and won.
“I just couldn’t see taking my kids back there” to Washington, Alan Teague said. “We had some pretty fun things going on right here in Santa Paula. I liked horseback riding and farming. It just didn’t seem the thing to do.”
When his uncle, Milton, died in July, 1986, Alan Teague took over the 400 acres of Teague and McKevett family ranches. Last year, they were merged into the Limoneira Co.
Meanwhile, Alan and Betsey, who were divorced in 1980, were raising their sons, Chuck and Alex, on the hard work and responsibility that have shaped the Teague line.
“They got nothing on a silver platter,” he said. “Both boys worked. I think I helped them both out a little bit. But there were never big gifts and lavish cars. We’re just regular people.”
As teen-agers, Chuck and Alex Teague labored among lemon and avocado trees, hoeing weeds, pruning branches and digging irrigation trenches for minimum wage.
Before them, hauling rocks and muscling lemon bins onto trucks, Alan Teague had done the same kind of work for his uncle, Milton. Milton was schooled at the feet of his own father, C.C. Teague.
And C.C.--with whom it all began--had earned his first wages in the citrus groves, scrambling up windbreak trees to prune them for a dollar a day.
C.C. CLIMBED TO THE TOP
Born in Caribou, Maine, in 1873, Charles Collins Teague moved to Ventura County with his parents in 1893 to invest in a 40-acre lemon ranch with his great-uncle, Wallace Hardison. Santa Paula was a dusty little town with wooden sidewalks then, in a county of fewer than 14,000 people.
Savvy young Charles worked his way up at Hardison’s Limoneira Ranch, becoming vice president in 1898 at age 25 and director just a year later.
He seized on the notion that quality control could improve the then-unscientific process of growing lemons.
Better lemons meant bigger profits. And C.C. Teague’s pursuit of a better lemon revolutionized the business. He worked to improve the old-fashioned lemon washers and the frost-fighting smudge pots and pushed to unite stand-alone ranches into marketing cooperatives.
By his death in 1950, C.C. Teague had helped form and lead the California Fruit Growers Exchange, known today as Sunkist, and left an indelible mark on the industry.
His son, Milton, grew up to take the reins of the Limoneira Co., later succeeding C.C. as Sunkist’s board chairman.
Until his death in 1986, Milton Teague loved citrus ranching, said his widow, Alfrida Poco Teague. “He wanted to be a farmer,” she said. “He was happy doing what he wanted to do.”
She met him in law classes at Stanford in the 1920s. They married and moved soon thereafter onto a modest little citrus ranch at Santa Paula’s western edge, eventually expanding their individual holdings to 140 acres.
Now 90, Alfrida--still possessed of a firm grip and a sharp wit--lives in the same house, which is surrounded by her lemon trees and tastefully decorated with antiques and family photos.
Her life, says Alan Teague, has been a busy whirl of volunteerism: She was the first woman to serve as foreman of a county grand jury and was a Camarillo State Hospital board member and Stanford University trustee.
But Alfrida Teague talks of herself very reluctantly. She speaks fondly of her three daughters--Maiya, Lorea and Andrea, who long ago left Santa Paula to be with their husbands--and very modestly of her own 10 years of work as a Ventura County family counselor.
Asked to describe the Teague family way for younger folk who are raising children, Alfrida Teague quietly demurs. “Oh, I couldn’t presume to,” she says. “Just tell the simple truth.”
CHARLES RELISHED THE LAW
Truth is, the most famous Teague of all had to be C.C.’s son, Charles McKevett Teague.
The Stanford-trained lawyer raised his children in an Ojai farmhouse with a strong sense of family and community, recalls his daughter.
“I don’t remember being told we were better than everybody else, just equals,” said Judy Kenyon, 55, now a veterinarian’s assistant in Sebastopol. “All the people that worked for us swam in the pool with us. It wasn’t that segregated, to my mind. We played with the gardener’s daughter.”
Relish for the law pushed Charles into Ventura County politics. In time, he was named president of the county Republican Assembly. And in 1954 he won election in the 13th Congressional District.
As a congressman, he helped find funding to build Lake Casitas and the west county’s 95-mile water supply system and later served on the House Ethics Committee.
And he endeared himself to his family.
Even with three sets of grandchildren roughhousing around his house at holiday time, the congressman maintained his cool and his gentle humor, recalled grandson Chuck.
“I never saw him get angry,” Chuck said. “He was a very kind, very nice man. He liked to tease to get a laugh.”
Teasing has almost become tradition.
Alan loved giving his kids nicknames. Chuck was dubbed Underdog for his favorite cartoon hero, while strong-headed Alex was known as The Head or McHead.
And Chuck and Laura Teague have fallen into the same affectionate routine: Caitlyn, who was a fussbudget baby, sometimes goes by “Budger.” And Chuck sometimes chucks Alison under the chin with a playful “Hey, Goop,” for the goopy eye she suffered during a brief infant infection.
“I don’t like that name!” protests Alison, wriggling in her father’s lap. “Oh, you don’t?” he answers in mock surprise.
Springtime sunset tinges the decades-old citrus labels on Chuck Teague’s living room wall, and memories of his Santa Paula youth emerge in bursts of sensation:
Long horseback rides into the hills from his father’s ranch. A strong scent of lemon blossoms cutting the rank tang of fertilizer. Nights so quiet that he could hear trains passing through Santa Paula to stop at each lemon packinghouse.
Now, though, new homes are taking over some of Santa Paula’s lemon groves, acre by acre, he said. Businesses are moving in. The town has ballooned from the fruit-and-oil hamlet of his great-grandfather’s day to a city of 25,000.
While his brother, Alex, left town to pursue the family business in a lemon cooperative of his own, Chuck still finds the soil of Santa Paula rich enough for the deep roots that keep him close to home.
Laura Teague says she cherishes the family she joined by marrying Chuck seven years ago. And she loves the fact that all their daughters’ grandparents live close by.
“It’s not just Chuck and I and Caitlyn and Alison,” says Laura, a veterinary assistant. “I appreciate that: that our family is in the county history and that our family can learn from the past.”
While Chuck and Laura Teague ready their supper, Alison runs outside to play with Caitlyn and neighborhood pals at dusk, shouting and skittering down the sidewalk astride big plastic tricycles.
“I think I started to learn really in high school that the big city was not for me and that this is someplace special,” Chuck said. “It’s a good thing to know I’m fourth-generation here. It’s kind of novel.”
Once, it made him squirm. But Chuck Teague has made his peace with the semi-public life that comes with being a Teague.
He recalls riding with his younger brother in county parades, perched on the back seat of an open convertible beside their grandfather, the congressman.
“You’d do the wave thing,” he says. “I used to hate that, oh, God. But my brother loved it.”
Just two years ago, as grand marshal, Alan Teague took his tiny twin granddaughters along for another open convertible ride in the Ventura County parade.
“Caitlyn wanted no part of it,” Laura recalls. “And Alison sat up and waved. The grandpa thing was repeating totally.”