Harvesting Dreams

The annual fruit pick at Orcutt Ranch Park is often billed as a glimpse of the San Fernando Valley’s agricultural past. But it is also a window into the Valley’s present--and future.

Last weekend, as has been the custom on the weekend following the Fourth of July for more than a decade, the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department invited the public to harvest Valencia oranges and white grapefruit from the park’s orchards.

The trees were planted by Mary and William Warren Orcutt, who bought the property they called Rancho Sombre del Roble, or “ranch shaded by the oak,” in 1917. A member of Stanford University’s first graduating class and a vice president of Union Oil, William Orcutt is considered one of the fathers of modern geology. His accomplishments included retrieving the bones of an ancient ground sloth from La Brea tar pits.

Mary Logan Orcutt entertained guests in the ranch’s gardens as a 1932 Olympic hostess. A civic-minded philanthropist, she lobbied none other than President Herbert Hoover to change her community’s name from Owensmouth to Canoga Park and helped found the Guadalupe community center on Hart Street. (The Orcutt Ranch itself is in a portion of Canoga Park renamed West Hills in 1986, 14 years after Mary Orcutt died at the age of 99.)

In 1966, the city parks department bought the Orcutts’ adobe house and 24 acres of gardens and oak trees--one estimated to be 700 years old. Visitors may tour the grounds, at 23600 Roscoe Blvd., any day of the week free of charge and pretend they live in an era when Westsiders like the Orcutts bought vacation homes in the Valley. And on that one weekend, they may pick oranges and grapefruits, reliving the days when citrus was king.

As head of the Canoga Park Citrus Assn., William Orcutt surrounded his house with orange and grapefruit trees. He was not alone. In 1950, orange groves still covered more than 200,000 acres in Los Angeles County. Advertisements and postcards featured picture-perfect orchards with white blossoms and sun-kissed fruit, helping sell the orange as the symbol of the good life--and Southern California as the place to find it. Within five years, developers were plowing under citrus trees in the West Valley and planting shopping centers and subdivisions.

Last weekend, visitors to Orcutt Ranch Park left their subdivisions behind for a bit of time travel. The 60-year-old trees produce sweet, juicy fruit, and some enthusiasts return year after year, bringing stepladders or renting eight-foot-long fruit pickers from park rangers for $1.

Sunday’s crowd spanned multiple generations. A grandmother helped a grandson wield an unwieldy fruit picker twice his size. Sisters took turns climbing a ladder or holding a basket below, yellow orbs of grapefruit passing hand to hand. A canopy of green shaded young and old. The air was perfumed with citrus, the hushed silence of the grove broken only by the rustle of paper grocery sacks and the soft medley of languages.

That mix of languages--clustered conversations in Korean, Hebrew, Hindi--made the weekend as much a part of the Valley’s present as its past.

A Canoga Park family who’d emigrated from Korea gathered at one tree, a Granada Hills family from Israel circled another. Three sisters dressed in salwaar kameez, the flowing tunic and pants favored by Indian women, maneuvered a single fruit picker; they live in Sylmar, and the oldest, their mother confided with pride, is a student at UCLA. Stretching ever higher into the verdant foliage, hunting for the ball of gold, they were reaching for the American dream as surely as were the Orcutts before them, as surely as Valley newcomers will next year and the year after that.