The Fir Traders’ Homecoming : Family Who Left Valley for Oregon Returns Each Year to Sell Trees

They are sojourners in Southern California, a hard-working Oregon family that ventures south each Christmas season to the heart of the San Fernando Valley to market their region’s prime holiday export: the perfect, triangular, gap-free, Northwest-grown Christmas tree.

Verdant-limbed Douglas, noble and grand firs. And for those with European tastes, Nordman, Frasier and balsam breeds.

But for the five-member Price family, the two-month mission to the land of the palm tree is a bittersweet trip. The children, ages 25 to 31, often look forward to a few weeks away from their provincial home in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, for the neon lights of Los Angeles.

For parents Jack and Valerie, however, the packing chore early each November is often a wistful time--facing the prospect of leaving behind the rolling farmland and crisp northwest Oregon air for a traffic-clogged, smog-laden city often rated the nation’s worst for polluted atmosphere.

But after 25 years of growing and selling Christmas trees, they also find that they love their work as well as the opportunity to be reacquainted with old customers, many of whom have become friends.

“Every Christmas, we get to shake hands and shoot the breeze with people we only get to see once a year,” said 67-year-old Jack Price. “Many of our regulars bring us gifts and invite us over to their homes for dinner. So for us, this time is a real homecoming.”

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Indeed, for Jack and Valerie, the 10 weeks spent at their Oregon Family Christmas Tree lot on the corner of Winnetka Avenue and Victory Boulevard is an annual visit to their roots.

Back in 1970, the Prices lived in Canoga Park, where Jack worked as an insurance broker, having begun a family of youngsters, then ages 1, 5 and 7. Himself raised on a Wyoming ranch, Price began to get nervous even way back then about the quality-of-life issues that concern many of today’s Los Angeles residents.

Gridlock traffic. Indifferent newcomers whose faces changed faster than the corner traffic light. And worst of all, yellowish smog so thick that on some days you couldn’t even see the Santa Susana Mountains to the north.

“Then my son came home from school one day with a note saying the kids couldn’t have recreation outside anymore because the smog was so bad,” Price recalled.

“That did it.”

So Jack and Valerie became western pioneers, making a move that hordes of others would follow more than a decade later: They were Californians who picked up stakes and moved north to Oregon in search of a simpler life.

They bought a 49-acre riverfront ranch in the middle of a forest--beginning a Green Acres existence where this young couple from the big city gladly hefted pitchforks and learned to raise horses, cattle and pigs.

The next year, friends from the Canoga Park Elk’s Lodge--assuming Jack was now a bona fide Paul Bunyan--asked him to bring down a load of Oregon Christmas trees to sell in a fund-raising event. So in 1971, Jack brought a semitruck load of Douglas firs to sell to his old neighbors.

“The Elks guys’ help consisted of walking by and saying, ‘How’s it going, Jack?’ ” recalled the gray-haired Price, who resembles a beardless Santa. But he so enjoyed the experience that Price returned to the San Fernando Valley the next year to sell Christmas trees on his own.

More than two decades later, the Prices are still selling trees. But how things have changed.

For one, costs have gone up. The $12 top price in 1971 has risen to $180 today for a redwood-size tree suitable for a Hollywood mogul’s home. And the Prices now deliver 47 semitruck loads of trees for sale--many raised on their own farm.

For busy weekends, they’ve hired 80 employees to sell trees, and it still isn’t enough.

But there have been bad years, like the Christmas after the 1994 earthquake when people were in no mood to buy trees and, Price recalled, “we lost our shirts.”

It takes the family several weeks to create the three-acre Christmas village on the Woodland Hills site they’ve occupied the last 12 years. So they arrive in early November and don’t leave until well past New Year’s, in effect becoming Valleyites again for one-sixth of each year.

During that time they live on the lot. Often laboring 18-hour days, Jack and Valerie are too tired to go anywhere, other than to see a friend for dinner.

Her hands and knees caked with dirt from dragging trees, Valerie says she’s amazed at how much more expensive food is here--even a gallon of milk can cost two dollars less back home.

“For awhile, it’s tolerable,” Jack said of his Valley stay. “But I like the leisurely pace of Oregon. I like being able to get out in real country within 10 minutes of the city. You can’t do that here.”

At 31, son Jack Jr. says he’s too old to hit the Hollywood club scene on the annual visit, as he once did. Now he stays in his trailer and watches television.

“Every year you look forward to coming down here,” he said. “But as soon as you get here, you’re ready to leave.”

At 25, Lora Price is the heretic of the family: She’s the only one who comes to Southern California during the off-season. “I like to get out of the Oregon rain every now and then,” she said. “And Hollywood is glamorous and it’s fun.

“Still, I wouldn’t want to live here.”

Come the new year, after two months of selling trees, the family begins to feel the “January heat” of the Valley and longs for the good old natural feeling of the Northwest.

It’s strange, Jack Price says, but sometimes back in Beaverton, there’s a bit of a letdown after the comparatively frenetic pace of Southern California.

He notices that men’s clothes for sale are all a drab brown and black back home, and, just for a moment, he thinks he might begin to miss his old Valley life, like having that urge to pick up a cigarette years after quitting smoking.

But Price has an antidote: his wall at home of autographed pictures of Hollywood celebrities who over the years became customers and friends, including one of actor John Wayne.

“I look up at the Duke,” Price says, “and I don’t feel so far away.”