Orange Packer Bids Farewell to an Era, Yields Way to Industry
Stepping into the Yorba Orange Growers Assn. packinghouse in Anaheim is like being transported to the 1940s, when Orange County could boast of being citrus royalty.
The machinery that moves the oranges down conveyor belts to waiting human hands looks like some mad pinball machine.
Except for “rots,” not much is thrown away here. A 1946 Ford pickup--once used to run errands--languishes in a nearby warehouse as it has for nearly half a century; outside, the replacement 1955 Chevy that broke down last year sits in the dust.
People spent their working lives in the dusty packinghouse; their parents spent their lives working here. The hallways are decked with black-and-white snapshots of people’s sisters, aunts, mothers and grandmothers.
“We don’t like change,” said worker Jo Anne Gomez, 50. “We’re happy here in our own little world.”
Come June, change will kick down the door at Yorba Growers. That’s when the packinghouse will close to make way for an industrial park, leaving the county with only one orange packer.
Even as the final rinds are swept away at Yorba, there is no end in sight for the surviving Villa Park Orchards Assn. in Orange, whose managers ensured a healthier future by bringing computer technology and global marketing into the fruit packing industry. There, the conveyor belts sweep the oranges past equipment that photographs the fruit and sends it down narrow paths based on an instant computer analysis of its quality.
Automated machines grab a dozen oranges at once with plunger-like fingers and cram them into boxes that will go as far as Hong Kong and Malaysia.
The two packinghouses had remarkably similar beginnings but followed markedly different trajectories that say as much about the individual companies as they do about the long, gradual decline of the citrus industry in Orange County.
Both began in the first half of the 20th century and stayed in their homes for decades. Both are made up of rancher cooperatives and have succeeded at forging strong generational chains within their employee ranks.
Jo Anne Gomez, a 25-year Yorba employee, replaced her sister as office manager at the plant. Her aunt worked here. Her mother packed oranges until she died at 82. An old picture adorning the main office shows Gomez’s mother and aunt posing inside the plant beside other workers. A portrait of two oranges painted by a brother-in-law hangs on another wall.
Such long-timers as Jaime Gutierrez, who has worked at the plant for 20 years, readily admit they haven’t inquired about the going wages “in the world outside,” even though relatives tell them they could make more elsewhere.
“I’ve always been comfortable here,” Gutierrez said.
The people who run Yorba have long fostered the happy stasis at the plant, which was founded in 1935. Although plants elsewhere have become automated, packing, sorting and grading has always been done by hand here. Modern equipment was rarely purchased.
The plant, at 1500 N. Lakeview St., puts out about 700,000 cartons of oranges a year, an unspectacular number compared with Villa Park, but enough to make a meager profit, officials say.
“We’ve been a small house that relies more on reputation than on volume,” said Larry Kraemer, 66, Yorba president and scion of one of the county’s founding families.
Last April, the company payroll was done by computer for the first time. The manager, Larry Topham, said he had a hard time selling the office managers on the computers.
Sticking to small volume exacted a price.
“In this day and age of efficiency and unit costs, you have to have high volume,” Topham said. If it wasn’t so, the farmers who make up the cooperative might not be selling to a developer for a fetching price.
To keep overhead costs low for the co-op growers, employees sold candy boxes at the door to buy office equipment.
For all its modernity, the 88-year-old Villa Park Orchards Assn. also is a place of devoted longtime employees.
Connie Guillen, 67, followed her sister to Villa Park when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still getting his presidential toes wet, packing by hand in 1949. Like many a packer, she learned the tricks of the trade from family.
Brad Leichtfuss, 37, the co-op’s vice president, started working at Villa Park as a 14-year-old, cleaning and doing manual labor just like everyone else.
But directing this packing house of grandmothers and grandchildren, husbands and wives toiling through the generations was a more aggressive corporation that sheltered its future from the county’s foundering citrus industry.
In 1964, the association cracked 1 million cartons for the first time. In the 1980s, production rose to 3 million cartons of oranges, said manager Patti Ortegon. In the 1990s, it routinely reaches 4 million, she said.
The reason? Leichtfuss said Villa Park executives have been taking marketing trips to places like Southeast Asia, have bought out other packinghouses, brokered deals with growers across the state and purchased state-of-the-art equipment.
“We’ve followed the crops instead of relying on local growers,’ Ortegon said. “We’ve also expanded our acreage to have the money to buy updated equipment. Modernization has been very important.”
While Yorba has had about 50 employees, Villa Park has about 250.
Even for Villa Park, these are not good citrus times, maybe the worst in a long time, said Leichtfuss.
For reasons that are hard to pinpoint, the orbs that put the county on the map are small and sour this year, people in the citrus industry say. They’re juice-worthy, but not much for simple eating.
Orange County has virtually become a nonsupplier. In 1940, the county had more than 66,000 acres of orange groves; it now has fewer than 200, according to agriculture commissioner figures.
It’s not that agriculture is disappearing from Orange County, said Deputy Agriculture Commissioner John Ellis. It’s just that its nature is changing.
The industrial parks, amusement park expansions, community colleges and other developments that have crowded out many crop lands and orchards need to be prettified. And for the last 30 years, ornamental horticulture has been the greatest moneymaker in Orange County agriculture. In that sense at least, agriculture is booming--a $300-million industry in the county.
That’s little consolation for people like Jo Anne Gomez, who grew up as a child romping around the Yorba Orange Growers plant, when groves of oranges were everywhere.
“I haven’t decided what I’m going to do,” Gomez said. “I haven’t been in the real world in a long time.”
