Foothill Agrarian: Over the Horizon

Foothill Agrarian: Over the Horizon: Fundamentally, Flying Mule Sheep Company is in the business of turning sunlight, carbon dioxide, and rainwater into meat and fiber. Our shee...

Saturday, June 25, 1921. Peace feelers.

 

On this day in 1921, Prime Minister David Lloyd George sent an invitation to Eamon de Valera, putative president of the self declared Republic of Ireland, to discuss peace.  De Valera would accept the following day.

Oil production commenced in the Los Angeles Basin.

California 1940s, Burbank Residential Area in color [60fps, Remastered] ...

California 1935, Wilshire Blvd in color [60fps, Remastered] w/added sound

February 9, 1971. Satchel Page inducted, Apollo 14 returns, San Fernando hit by earthquake.

Satchel Page was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the first black player to receive that honor.

The Apollo 14 mission returned to Earth.

An earthquake killed 58 people in San Fernando, California.  It measured 6.5 of the Richter Sale.

December 30, 1940. The Freeway

 The Arroyo Seco Parkway, California's first freeway, opened.

I don't know what I think of this event.  It was no doubt necessary, but it also was an early sign that California was becoming congested.

It's hard to admire in any sense what California has become, and there's a lesson in that for everyone.

More on that here:

Today in World War II History—December 30, 1940

And on the war:

Day 487 December 30, 1940

California, 1918.

And note, there's always somebody who wears their mask improperly.

The Big Picture. American Indians, California. 1916.

May 29, 1920. Good Roads Week.

First East Bay Ship by Truck Tour, May 17-22, 1920, Robert W. Martland, Train Commander.  Copyright deposit, May 29, 1920.  Not juxtaposition next to railroad. . . a sign of things to come.  The five day tour, which included military and civilian trucks, was part of Good Roads Week.

Scenes from November 24, 1919

The Aerodrome: Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport...

The Aerodrome: Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport...:

Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport, Orange County, California

Let me start off by noting that I'm not really a John Wayne fan.

I'm not a John Wayne anti fan either.

As I've stated on one of our other blogs, I don't really get hero worship in regard to actors and actresses, or other entertainers.  I don't expect actors in particular to reflect the characters they portray in any fashion whatsoever.  Many, I'm sure, are the very antithesis of the characters they portray and as a general rule, actors and actresses (which I'll henceforth condense into "actors") are among the most screwed up demographic that exists.*  This doesn't apply to all of them, by any means, but as a demographic they're genuinely pushing the envelope on odd and I've sometimes wondered, indeed I'm convinced, that quite a few actors take up that occupation to compensate for not feeling real, and then go on to adopt the cause de jour to try to give meaning to lives that otherwise lack them.

Now, I'm not saying that any of that applies to John Wayne.  Wayne came up in the days of acting when a lot of early actors actually came into it through some other movie industry role.  In Wayne's case he was an actor in Hollywood from the start, following a (fairly rare at the time) college career in which he played football.

I frankly don't think that Wayne was the greatest actor in the world either, or although I also think that he was a better actor than his detractors would have it.  His greatest role was in the John Ford film The Searchers, in which he doesn't play to type at all.  His portrayals in the John Ford Cavalry Trilogy films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Cowboys are all also excellent.  His late film The Green Berets, in contrast, is horrifically bad and I don't even think Stagecoach, which is widely beloved and celebrated, is all that good.  So my views are mixed.

Just because Wayne played a military man in a host of films in which all the portrayals were heroic doesn't make him a military man.  When his time came, during World War Two, Wayne agonized over joining the service and didn't. His career was just taking off and he worried about serving wrecking that.  He made, in my view, the improper choice.**

I know that his defenders here will cite a football injury but I just don't believe it.  By the end of the Second World war American manpower was in such short supply that men were taken into the Army who were basically blind in one eye and had border line mental psychosis.  With Wayne's connections, even if he had an injury, he could have gotten in.

So with all of that, I just regard actor John Wayne as an actor.  He had some admirable qualities to be sure.  He was apparently personally courageous in confrontation and even waded into a group of Vietnam War protesters to quiet them when he was somewhere with Jimmy Stewart, whose son had just been killed in Vietnam.*** That took guts.

Anyhow, I think it's silly in the first place that Orange County renamed their airport after John Wayne in 1979.  I wouldn't have done that. 

Indeed, I think airports that are named after people, generally ought to be named after somebody of significance, and I don't place actors in that category.  It makes no more sense, in my view, for Orange County to have renamed their former military field after John Wayne (indeed, there's some ironies in that) than it would make for the Port of Port Arthur, Texas to rename that facility Janis Joplin Port.  Indeed, the latter example might make more sense as Janis Joplin was actually from Port Arthur.

Port Arthur, Texas.  Should it be renamed Port Janis Joplin?

Indeed, if there was a desire to name the airport after a movie industry figure with a real role in aviation, it would have been Howard Hughes Airport.****

But that's impossible to imagine.

Anyhow, I also think it's silly that the Los Angeles Times has started a debate over renaming it, which they recently did with this item by columnist Michale Hitzik:

Column: It’s time to take John Wayne’s name off the Orange County airport

Most people familiar with the life story of John Wayne are aware that the late movie star was a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger — after all, he was still making a movie glorifying America’s conduct of the Vietnam War (“The Green Berets,” 1968) well after the country had begun to get sick of the conflict.But the resurrection of a 1971 interview Wayne gave to Playboy magazine has underscored the sheer crudeness of the actor’s feelings about gay people, black people, Native Americans, young people and liberals.This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s impossible or immoral to enjoy westerns and war movies starring John Wayne; that’s a personal choice. But it certainly undermines any justification for his name and image to adorn a civic facility.

Okay, anyone familiar with John Wayne is likely already familiar with his 1971 interview with the pedophilic, pornographic smut magazine Playboy.   1971 was about the high water mark of the detestable Hugh Hefner's objectification of women, although we certainly haven't recovered from that, and part of its cover for barely disguised misogynistic pedophilia was to run serious interviews with people.  Next to Wayne's perhaps the most famous one came out a few years later when then Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was so unwise as to allow himself to be interviewed by the rag.

Wayne's interview became famous, or perhaps more accurately infamous, due questions asked of him in the rag regarding race and other matters.  Wayne didn't hold back on his views on various things in the magazine at all.  The columnist repeated some of them in his article, in order to make his point.  And indeed, Wayne made comments about homosexuals (Hitzik uses the term "Gay people", which isn't how I think they'd probably prefer to be referred to in this context), blacks and Indians.

We might note here from the onset that it's always baffled me why anyone cares what actors think about anything at all, and for that matter, any category of entertainer. Actors act.  They aren't those real people.  Who cares what they really think on any societal issue? And if people feel that's an excuse for excusing Wayne's comments, which I'm not going to do, I'll note that this extends out to every single topic that people ask actors to comment on. Whatever it is, if you are for it or against it, there's some actor you can get to comment on it, but why?

Anyhow, as we're opining on this, we'll take a look at Wayne's comments as well, although not in the order that Hitzik did, which probably wouldn't do them justice in context, and which isn't what made them initially controversial, which in fact they initially were.  More on that in a moment.

Usually, you only hear about his comments on blacks, which were:

WAYNE: With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people. 

PLAYBOY: Are you equipped to judge which blacks are irresponsible and which of their leaders inexperienced? 

WAYNE: It’s not my judgment. The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether the blacks are sufficiently equipped scholastically. But some blacks have tried to force the issue and enter college when they haven’t passed the tests and don’t have the requisite background. … But if they aren’t academically ready for that step, I don’t think they should be allowed in. Otherwise, the academic society is brought down to the lowest common denominator. … What good would it do to register anybody in a class of higher algebra or calculus if they haven’t learned to count? There has to be a standard. …I think the Hollywood studios are carrying their tokenism a little too far. There’s no doubt that 10 percent of the population is black, or colored, or whatever they want to call themselves; they certainly aren’t Caucasian. Anyway, I suppose there should be the same percentage of the colored race in films as in society. But it can’t always be that way. There isn’t necessarily going to be 10 percent of the grips or sound men who are black, because more than likely, 10 percent haven’t trained themselves for that type of work.

Wayne was out to lunch in his comments and most particularly in his "white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility". These came in 1971.  But they aren't unusual for the time.  Indeed, because they weren't unusual, blacks of the era reacted less than a person might suspect, much less, as they were used to such arguments being advanced.  Today the opposite is very much true, and no wonder.

They were clearly racist and a person who stated them held undoubtedly racist views.  No doubt about it. And the old line about educating them up until . . was as old as the sun.  Indeed, it dates back to slavery.  No doubt in 1971 the percentage of college educated blacks was lower than it is now, but the overall American population in general was less educated in 1971.  It wasn't until after World War Two that high school graduation became an absolute norm and college education became societaly common.  The comment was absurd.

It's usually pointed out that Wayne personally had good relationships with black actors of his era, but that's hardly a defense to this.  A person being personally nice to people he's biased against doesn't make him unbiased.  Wayne was living in the past with these arguments, which were never valid, but that's part of the point.  A lot of Americans of that era were and these views were surprisingly common.  That's not a defense, it's just a fact.  The politics of the early 1970s still reflected this.

Indeed, Wayne's interview is just two years prior to Lynrd Skinner releasing Sweet Home Alabama, which is a reaction to Neil Young's Southern Man.  Almost nobody considers this, but Sweet Home Alabama excuses the same sort of views, with the lyrics noting that they hadn't supported Wallace for Governor of Alabama but that a Southern Man didn't need Neil Young around.  That's very close to the same view, as what the Playboy interviewer was suggesting was the view that most Americans had but still had to argue, the time for waiting was over.

Put more bluntly, Sweet Home Alabama is also subtly racist.  Consider the lyrics:

Well I heard Mister Young sing about her

Well I heard old Neil put her down

Well, I hope Neil Young will remember

A southern man don't need him around anyhow

That's also a "we can take care of it" type of excuse, quite frankly.  But nobody gets too up and arms about the song and there's even been a movie in recent years that took its title from it.

Maybe they should.

Do these statements make Wayne a racist?  Yes, but in the very common society wide manner of the era.  That's not a defense to it, but it's also not a reason for the Los Angeles Times to reverse Orange County's 1979 decision.

It might have been a reason not to name the airport after Wayne in 1979, but a better reason not to name it after him is that he was an actor, and an actor with no connection to aviation.

Well, maybe the other things that Wayne said are.  Let's take a look at them, going next to his comments about Indians.

PLAYBOY: For years American Indians have played an important — if subordinate — role in your Westerns. Do you feel any empathy with them? 

WAYNE: I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. … 

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about the government grant for a university and cultural center that these Indians [then encamped on Alcatraz Island] have demanded as “reparations”? 

WAYNE: What happened between their forefathers and our forefathers is so far back — right, wrong or indifferent — that I don’t see why we owe them anything. I don’t know why the government should give them something that it wouldn’t give me. 

PLAYBOY: Do you think they’ve had the same advantages and opportunities that you’ve had? 

WAYNE: I’m not gonna give you one of those I-was-a-poor-boy-and-I-pulled-myself-upby-my-bootstraps stories, but I’ve gone without a meal or two in my life, and I still don’t expect the government to turn over any of its territory to me. Hard times aren’t something I can blame my fellow citizens for. Years ago, I didn’t have all the opportunities, either. But you can’t whine and bellyache ‘cause somebody else got a good break and you didn’t, like these Indians are. We’ll all be on a reservation soon if the socialists keep subsidizing groups like them with our tax money.

Shocking?

Yes, for sure.

Be that as it may, I still find plenty of people who, if you really know them, hold a basically similar view, and it was only in the 1960s that any other sort of view became widely held.

Indeed, the first time I heard it suggested that European Americans "stole" Indian lands was in the 1970s, when I was a kid and overheard it as part of a silent third party between my father and a colleague. The colleague mentioned that off hand.  This comment really surprised me at the time and I later asked my father if a theft had really happened.

He answered no, but his view was really more nuanced than that in that he regarded the pre 20th Century clash of cultures as inevitable, which is different from giving it virtue.  Plenty of people gave it virtue.  In my grade school library at the time I recall there was a book on Custer I read, written I think in the 1950s, that was practically a hagiography.  That sort of view had been extremely common into the 1960s and while there were those who swam against that current the entire time, it wasn't really until people like Mari Sandoz began to publish that there was any sort of wider reconsideration. By the 1960s the reconsideration had become widespread and was part of the era, and Indian activist movements developed and were in the news.

Wayne was still an active actor in the 1970s, to be sure.  Perhaps his most famous movie, The Cowboys, was yet to come, being released the year after this interview in 1972.  The interview obviously didn't impact his popularity much, if at all.  But here its important to remember that he was really an actor from the 40s and 50s who was the exception to the rule as he managed to age into later roles in the 60s and 70s.  By the late 60s his movies themselves, with the exception of The Cowboys, seemed to look back and Wayne was on record as hating some later Westerns, such as The Wild Bunch.  1971's movie, Big Jake, which I like, very much has that sense to it, amplified by the fact that it is itself a fin de siecle movie.  Coming after Peckinpah's violent masterpiece, the latter film seems to be from a much earlier era.

It isn't surprising, therefore, that Wayne's views were completely anachronistic.  Playboy likely knew that, and so Wayne was set up to look like a fool. Playboy itself is now a creepy anachronism and its only a matter of time until the Me Too era blows up all over it.  Unfortunately the creep who created it is dead and won't be round to take the brunt of the inevitably coming blows.

So Wayne also talked about homosexuals in his interview, which the Los Angeles Times refers to as "Gay people".  The term "gay" actually has, or at least had, a distinct meaning within the homosexual community and traditionally not all homosexuals have identified with it even if they identify as homosexual.  In this instance, therefore, the columnist himself shows himself to be insensitive an uninformed.

Wayne: Movies were once made for the whole family. Now, with the kind of junk the studios are cranking out. … I’m quite sure that within two or three years, Americans will be completely fed up with these perverted films. 

PLAYBOY: What kind of films do you consider perverted? 

WAYNE: Oh, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy — that kind of thing. Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies?

I've never seen Midnight Cowboy and I don't intend to.  Wayne isn't alone in his view that it was "perverted" however and there are still those who regard the film as debased.  It was an X Rated film at the time and won an Academy Award, the first film (and maybe the only film) in that category to win one.  It came just after Hollywood abandoned the Hayes Production Code which resulted in an explosion of movies pushing the limits on depictions which indeed did result in a downward descent in what was portrayed on the screen which really hasn't ended.  1966's Best Picture went to The Sound of Music, 1967's to A Man For All Seasons, 1968's to In the Heat Of the Night, 1969 to Oliver!, and then 1970's to Midnight Cowboy.  No matter what you think of any one of those films, the 1970 award reflects some sort of shift in what was being portrayed in film.  For somebody who started making films in the 1930s, the shift would have been obvious and titanic.  Indeed, very early in the early history of film the direction was going the opposite way.

The real shocker in this comment is the use of the slur "fags".  That's an epitaph and in insulting one, and it was at the time.  Now use of that term would destroy an actors career.  Coming in 1971, however, it didn't.  That probably says something about the times.

1971 was two years after the Stonebridge Riots in New York, but it was also a time of massive social unrest.  Homosexuality may have come a bit more out in the open with the riots, but it certainly wasn't open.  Indeed, that would take at least another twenty years.  Wayne's views were probably the societal norm at the time, including a norm that was held by many others who people would regard as very liberal.  Indeed, the accusation that somebody was a homosexual was libel per se in the law and was commonly used as a smear against figures of the right and left by their enemies. 

The Los Angeles Times has been met with all of these criticisms but is sticking to its guns.  It's noted that the civil rights "revolution" had been going on for years at the time that these statements were made, which is true.  But that they were going on is different from claiming they'd been completed.  In reality they'd been gong on to some degree since the Civil War, and yet it's probable that a review of the LA Times from various years would find shocking examples of views that we'd find absolutely appalling today.  I'd be curious, for example, what its view as on Asian immigration to California?  The Times itself has acknowledged that its view on Japanese internment during World War Two was "shameful".

The Times is correct that his view was in the nature of "reacting" to the developments of the Civil Rights Era.  They were, and they were wrong.  Indeed, we might go further and hold them to be reactionary.  But they were apparently not shocking enough to keep the airport from being named for him when it was in 1979.  And they weren't so shocking to people to keep them away from The Cowboys the following year and a handful of final big films he made in the next eight years prior to his death.

In something like this, it's always popular to say "we've come a long ways", when often we really haven't.  The airport has its own problems and the naming of it after an actor in the first place is probably among the very least of them.  If anything, the naming demonstrates the vapidness of California, which takes itself very seriously on everything but which strikes many elsewhere as constantly goofy.  Celebrating an actor through the naming of an airport is just part of that.  Renaming it would likely turn into an equally odd act if not a downright circus.  Maybe if nothing else, this serves to focus on that.

If it were to be renamed, perhaps it might be time to actually consider that the figures of actors are poorly presented for anything serious.  The Times columnist suggests naming the field after guitar figure Leo Fender.  I don't know anything about Mr. Fender, but his guitars are great.  Having said that, that doesn't have anything to do with aviation.

Lots of other aviation figures who played a role in California do, however.  The Lockheeds, Donald Douglas, Glenn Martin. . .



and even Howard Hughes.

_________________________________________________________________________________



*Anyone who follows actors and actresses biographies at all can't help not only to be appalled, but also note how often their personal lives grossly depart from the people they portray.  Actresses playing nuns don't live chaste lives personally, cowboy actors who play rugged frontier individualist might very well be the polar opposite, and so on.



Occasionally the opposite is the case, but so occasionally its' often a surprise when you lean of it.



**This is noted in the LA Times op ed I'll refer to below, FWIW.



***This is omitted in the LA Times article, but it was genuinely courageous.  That courage shows how people are often very mixed in their actual characters. When it was time to serve his country, Wayne didn't. But when a friend was under a type of assault, he intervened when he didn't have to.



Wayne struggled with certain deep personal convictions his entire life, it should be noted.  Exposed to Catholicism through director John Ford, he flirted with becoming Catholic his entire life, and ultimately did, but in his final illness.  Nonetheless, he was a frequent attendee at Mass for decades prior to that.



****Hughes, of course, was not only an early movie producer, but a giant for many years in the aviation industry.



Wayne did appear in a number of aviation related films, although I hardly think that qualifies you to have an airport named after you, and that's not in fact why it was.  He lived as an actor in the community that is just outside this airport.  Ironically, complaints from the community about the airport are constant.



Those Wayne films include the following, which I think is an inclusive list, but very well may not be.



Central Airport. (1933).


His role in this film was uncredited.  He played a co-pilot.  Until making this list, I'd never even heard of this 1933 film.



Flying Tigers (1942).



This film is famous, but in the bad category in my view.  It's about the famous American Volunteer Group of mercenary pilots that flew P40s, with the American government's blessing, in support of the Chinese Nationalist prior to the American entry into World War Two (after Pearl Harbor the unit was converted into an American Army Air Corps unit).



I'm surprised that its cartoonish portrayal of the Chinese and Japanese didn't make the LA Times op ed.  It's a typical World War Two film and is one of several in which, contrary to the myth, John Wayne's character dies.



Flying Leathernecks (1951).



This is a famous film, but I've never seen it.  It concerns a Marine Corps squadron at Guadalcanal.



I've often been surprised that Wayne's roles portraying military heroes carried on after World War Two, in which he did not serve. But in fact, most of those roles actually came after the war, and they started during the war.



Island In The Sky (1953).


Island in the sky is about a DC-3 that crashes in the Canadian wilds.  It's an excellent movie.



The High and The Mighty (1954)


The High and the Mighty was a groundbreaking film in that it was the first of a type, the on board air disaster type.  It follows the crew and the passengers that are on a plane that's failing as they crew struggles to bring the plane in safely  It's the first of its kind, and is very well done.



Wayne's aging makes an appearance here as he's cast as an aging co pilot, side lined because of his age, whose experience wars against the younger pilots education in his craft.


The Wings Of Eagles (1957)


This film is the biography of Naval aviator Frank "Sprig" Wead, an early figure in naval aviation who was severely injured in an aircraft accident.  I've seen part, but not all, of this film.



Jet Pilot (1957)


Jet Pilot is a terrible film that can only be explained by the Hollywood studio system of the time, which also explains the shear volume of the films that anyone actor made as well. In 1957 Wayne made, for example, three films.



This film was made the year after his greatest film, The Searchers, and only his being a captive of the studio could explain his being in this Cold War dog about improbable spy craft and a romance with a female Russian pilot.



The Longest Day (1962).



In this great World War Two film based on the book by Cornelius Ryan, Wayne plays airborne office Lt. Col. Jim Vandervoot.



This isn't really an aviation picture, but I've included it here as Vandervoot was a real person, of course, and a paratrooper.  To that extent, the film involved aviation.



This is a great film, but Wayne is far too old in the film for the role he occupies in it.

What about Fruit? Foods, Seasons, and our Memories, Part Two. A Hundred Years Ago.

Central Pacific Fast Fruit Train, 1886.

I just posted this item on vegetables and how seasonal they were.

Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Year...: The last garden I put in, 2017. Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago. The Last Fresh Vegetable Month I've touched ...

In that I noted that it was apparently the case that they were not transported by rail.*

Originally I planned on dealing with fruits and vegetables.  But I ended up limiting it to vegetables for the most part.

Let's start with the obvious.  Fruits native to higher latitudes are pretty limited, globally.

They aren't wholly absent.  Apples, for example, do grow pretty far north.

Oranges, however, do not.

Let's also add something that's generally not pondered, that being that where fruit grows today is the product of introduction.  Almost every fruit you can think of that we deal with commonly isn't grown today, even if that's just in your backyard, in the area from which it is originally from.

In our current era there's a big movement to be fearful of Genetically Modified Organisms, or GMOs. Truth be known, however,  in terms of plants, unless you are eating a highly local diet purely of what grows there naturally, you are eating GMOs.  They're GMOs that came about due to selection of characteristics, and that's farmer selection, not the natural selection that's a feature of evolution.  We don't recognize that as its been going on so long.

Apples we mentioned above.  Apples are interesting in that they're spread around the globe now and in a zillion varieties.  There are apple groves all over.  But apples are originally from Central Asia.  They've spread everywhere from there, thanks to humans, as we like apples.

Even the word "apple" is interesting in this context.  Apple is a cognate of the German word Apfel, and that word is one of the words we know to have been passed down from Indo European.  It's an ancient, ancient word.  It predates history.  We don't know, however, if the word referred to apples. The better guess is that it just referred to any kind of fruit.** The fruit early Indo Europeans were eating aren't well known today.  They could have included apples, but more likely were pears, which have a gigantic natural distribution.

The point is that everything we write about, or experience, is in some ways defined by the era.  This blog focuses on the 1890 to 1920 time frame, although it dabbles in everything else and every other era.  But when we're speaking of food in these recent posts, we're dealing with the early parts  of our own era, and going back about a century or so.***

If we go back further, we're dealing with a much different set of circumstances.  If, as an example, we're dealing with Bob CroMagnon in the year 10,000 BC, well we're dealing with highly local foods, rather obviously.  If we're dealing with the year 1774, however, and talking about the North American East Coast, we're already talking about a highly altered food landscape with lots and lots of foods being grown and consumed locally that weren't natural.

Put another way, when you or your predecessor go out in your backyard in the 42 deg North region in North America, and pick an apple or perhaps a pear, you are picking a non native, and frankly highly selectivised fruit.  Jonathon Apples weren't here when Columbus showed up. . . for that matter they weren't here when the Vikings showed up either.

Neither, of course, were a lot of other things you eat.

Diverting a bit, none of this is intended to pick on locavores.  Rather, it's to point out that even a less resource intensive or a more "natural", or agrarian, lifestyle still makes use of a lot of consumables that didn't originate here.****

Anyhow, as we've already dealt with, in the winter months in the upper half of North America, the fresh vegetable season ended in October.  And as I've also addressed, I know that fresh fruit was quite restricted during the winter months most places.  Indeed, a common memory for people my parents age was getting fruit for Christmas.  My mother recollected that for Christmas she normally got a book and some fruit, and she thought that a pretty good Christmas.  The 1964 Valdez Alaska tidal wave was so devastating as young people had gathered at the docks to get fruit from ships that came in, something they traditionally brought that time of year as a gift.

That resulted in the horrible loss of life, but in terms of what we're observing, there is no earthly way that young people today would gather at the docks to get oranges.

It just wouldn't happen.

I note all of this as its clear that transportation of fruit isn't what it now is, but that some of it did occur.  How much, I'm not sure. So little that it did make the gift of fruit a real gift, but enough so that in Montreal you could get it.

So clearly a closer look was in order.

In looking up this topic I ran across one fruit company advertisement from the 1910s or 1920s (I'm not sure which, but likely the 20s) depicting a young woman with a hitched up skirt, posing with an orange.*****  On the advertisement wast the logo of the Union Pacific Company.

And that reminded me of the Pacific Fruit Express.

All of which means I may have been partially in error.  Or maybe not.  Or maybe partially.  Or not at all.

It's one of those things I don't know, and which is surprisingly hard to learn about easily.  I'm sure it could be fleshed out, but not in an easy net sort of way.

The story, apparently, of the fast rail transportation of edible vegetation starts with oranges and California.  Oranges were grown early in California with the planting of orange groves at Catholic missions in the state early on.****** Commercial growing of oranges commenced in the state in the 1840s and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s was exploited almost immediately by fruit growers, who shipped iced fruit back east, which was at a bare minimum already well known as a method of preserving fish.  Coincidentally this same technological development coincided with the invention of the railroad refrigerator car, which we've dealt with elsewhere. As we've seen here already, the refrigerator car lead to the rise of the beef industry in a very rapid way, changing American's diets in that regard, and it lead to the rise of large scale breweries as well.

It also lead to the rail transportation of fruit.

By the 1870s, hybridization of oranges had lead to new varieties and oranges became sort of a national mania.

By the 1890s this had become such a big deal that t he state entered its "Orange Era".  The Santa Fe exploited citrus by introducing a large fleet of fast refrigerator cars to move citrus. This lead the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific to combine to create the Pacific Fruit Express in 1906, which grew to be the largest refrigerator rail car leasing entity in the world.^

Grapes being loaded into refrigerator car in 1923.  Predictably, this scene is from California.

Having refrigerator cars already, Armour, the meat packing company, soon entered into competition with Pacific Fruit Express.  The Sherman Anti Trust Act intervened, however, and Armour had to divest itself of its fruit shipping branch, which lead to the creation of the Fruit Growers Express in 1919.^^  It merged with Great Northern Railway into a new entity in 1923 designed specifically to compete with the Pacific Fruit Express, emerging as the Western Fruit Express.

Refrigerator car being loaded with strawberries, 1939.

So what this tells us is that by 1900 shipping fruit by rail was already a big deal and becoming a bigger deal.  If fruit was shipped this way, logic would hold that other produce also was, but it's exceedingly difficult to find any reference to it or photographs of it, which leaves doubt as to how common it was.  Seemingly not very, if it occurred at all.

But fruit was definitely being shipped in that fashion.

So why was it regarded as a treat?

I'm not really sure.  Some of that may have to do with economics of earlier times.  And some of it may be that we now live very much in the "cheap food" era.  If we go back a century or so, that wasn't the case and there were no governmental incentives or directives to keep food cheap, which now there is.  That's something that really was an offshoot of the Great Depression but more than that agricultural policies that came out of it and into full fruition during the 1950s.^^^

It's also, as we have seen, a byproduct of transportation.

We've clearly seen that in regard to the impact of railroads upon food, starting with our earlier look at refrigerator cars and meat and refrigerator cars and beer.  Now we've looked at in regard to refrigerator cars and fruit.  Railroads, during the time we're discussing, were the only fast way to move anything, but it's also the case that the time period we're discussing saw the onset of a major effort to improve roads and to create an interstate highway system.  That pioneering effort had started some time ago, but the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy really put it into focus.  Even something like the 1919 Air Derby, which we've also been reading about, did as well.  In 1919 the highways remained primitive most places, a recent Casper paper here reported on somebody's trip to Denver taking 16 hours by car, for example. But they were about to be very much improved.  As that occurred, the trucking industry would start to make its appearance, giving the railroads competition in everything. Once that was fully established, everything became to change in the produce world.

The first refrigerated truck trailers, cooled by ice, came in during the 1920s, so we're on the cusp of that now in terms of the focus of the blog.  The first mechanically cooled truck trailers, came in during the 1930s, and that's a huge deal.  Once that occurred, the ability to transport cooled vegetables really advanced.  Now, of course, this has developed to where trucks have replaced trains entirely, at least for the time being, shipping right to the grocery store.

What we didn't address, however, and need to, is reefer ships.  We don't think of refrigerated ships being part of this picture but they are.  By 1876 the mechanically cooled reefer ship had come about and had already taken a load of meat from Argentina to Europe.   By 1899 refrigerated ship deliveries of fruit to the United states were over 90,000 tons per year.  Prior to World War One the United Fruit Company had already introduced refrigerator ships, some also hauling passengers, to ship its produce globally.

*I also linked this in to our companion blog on railroads, in case my assumptions about rail transportation are in error, fwiw.

**FWIW, another long surviving word is "Bear".  That says something.  The Indo European word "apple" having survived so long due to people liking fruit and needing to eat.  Bear, on the other hand, is still around as bears are dangerous.

***I know that is popular to talk in terms of "modern" vs. "post modern". Well that's a load of crap.  When historians look back two centuries from now, 1890 is going to be part of the same era you are living in right now.  We'll deal with that some other time, but the whole post modern thing is the age old phenomenon of people defining any era they live in as the best of all times, or the worst of all times, or both at the same time.

****As an aide, just recently the Tribune ran an article on a fellow, and some of his disciples, who really, really eat local, and have for a long time.  The individual, dating back to the 1970s, pretty much wondered around the Red Desert making use of what's available there.

*****Early orange advertisements, or at least those of the 1910s and 1920s, are exceedingly strange which is why I haven't posted any of them here.  They seemed divided, basically, into three categories.

One of them featured Western scenes, such as cowboys, even though cowboys aren't noted for their orange consumption. The only example of such advertising I've seen in person is of that type, featuring a hard working cowboy, his cowboy pushed to the back of his head, admiring an orange.

Another type, however, featured young women.  Some just featured young women, but some featured young women in alluring poses.  More than a few featured young women who were barely dressed. All of this is really an unmistakable attempt to sell oranges based on something other than oranges, but why?

A third type featured Plains Indians, who are not noted for their orange consumption.  Of course, oranges aren't native to North America at all, so it'd be really unlikely that a Sioux warrior would pop up over a hill and observe an orange grove.  But that sort of depiction was common.

A hybrid type featured Indian women who had lost part of their clothing. That's odd in and of itself but semi nude women were common in advertising art prior to 1930 and therefore perhaps that's not as odd as it might seem.  It is odd, however.  It's sort of bizarrely imperialist in fact.

Attractive Indian women linger on, albeit barely, in advertising in two ways.  The Land O Lakes dairy entity, a cooperative, still features their very early advertising logo of an attractive, but at least fully clad, Indian woman, even though Indian women of the era depicted would have found any dairy product unusual.  The Navajo Trucking company still features its attractive stylized Indian woman on the doors of their trucks, in a very much post World War Two, pre 1960, type of illustration.  I'm particularly amazed that the latter logo, and indeed the company name, haven't changed.

******While California today is desperate to deny it, and while its fairly clear the problems in the state have eclipsed its rise and its in a state of continual decline of all sorts, California owes its existence to Catholic missionary endeavors.

It owes its modern existence in part to mining, which is rather obvious, and partially even to oil exploration, but overall, very much to agriculture.  In that sense, modern California is an example of the "tragedy of the Commons" written large.  It's still a major food producer, but its also built over and paved over its base industry to a shocking degree.

^Rail cars are often leased, rather than owned.

^^That year again, 1919.  It's amazing how important of year 1919 was in all sorts of ways.

^^^We're so used the there being certain Federal departments today, such as the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Education, that we tend to think they must have always existed.

The Department of Agriculture was actually created in 1860s, although some of its duties had bounced around in the Patent office prior to that.  The Department of the Interior, therefore, very much predates the Department of Agriculture in any form.  It didn't become a cabinet level department until 1889, almost the era that this post deals with.

That's significant for a lot of reasons, most of which we'll skip for the time being.  Worth nothing here, however, is that the Federal government became hugely interested in agriculture during the 1930s, due to the Great Depression.  Lots of programs sprang up at that time designed to deal with farm relief and environmental conditions that the 30s demanded.  Not all of those were successful by any means.

The Depression was followed by World War Two which created a massive strain on the county's food production.

And that was followed by the Cold War and the 1950s, which started a really odd era of "get big or get out" that was partially fueled by Cold War fears, partially fueled by the "cheap food" policy of the era, and partially fueled by apocalyptic food scenarios that the government feared. We still live in that era as its become institutionalized, although in terms of direct involvement, the Federal government has much reduce its activities.

September 6, 1919. End of the Trail for the Motor Transport Convoy

Fort Winfield Scott; Presidio and Fort Mason overlooking San Francisco Bay, September, 1919.

On this day in 1919, the Motor Transport crossed San Francisco Bay on two ferries, and then paraded at Lincoln Park.

Medals were awarded by the Lincoln Highway Association, the entity that had been boosting the highway for some time, and the command was received by Col. R. H. Noble, representing Lt. Gen. Hunter Liggett, commander of the Western Department.  Lunch was served at the convoy parked at the Presidio.

They did only 8 miles that day, but then they also crossed the bay, as noted, by ferry.

And so it was over.

Except for analyzing what had occurred.

On the same day, New York was celebrating Lafayette Day.

Myron T. Herrick (1854-1932), American ambassador to France from 1912-1914 and 1921-1929; Jean Jules Jusserand (1855-1932), French author and diplomat and French ambassador to the United States during World War I and Elise Richards Jusserand. They are attending the Lafayette Day celebration in front of City Hall, New York City on September 6, 1919

And the Gasoline Alley gang was getting ready to head out fishing.

Gasoline Alley cartoon for this day in 1919.  Note that they're altering their car, something that does in fact seem to be fairly common for that era.  Cars of the day had as much clearance as early pickup trucks and roads were fairly primitive.  Vehicles of the day, therefore, bore more of a resemblance to early Jeeps than cars of today do, and indeed more of a resemblance to them than some modern SUVs do.

September 5, 1919. Stockton to Oakland California, 76 miles in 9.25 hours. The 1st Division arrives home.

The Motor Transport Convoy pushed on to Oakland California on this day in 1919, putting them just across the San Francisco Bay from their objective.

 No bridges spanned the bay at the time.  They were feted upon their arrival.

The Gasoline Alley crowd was debating their vacation.

September 4, 1919. Sacramento to Stockton on the Motor Transport Convoy, 48 mile sin 7.25 hours.

General Pershing and officers of a composite regiment aboard U.S. transport Leviathan, Sept. 4, 1919

On this day in 1919, the Motor Transport Convoy, near the end of its destination, went 48 miles in 7.25 hours.

The Cadillac was about worn out.  And it seemed like the command was as well.

Maybe they needed a vacation, like the Gasoline Alley gang was contemplating.

Somebody who wasn't taking a vacation was President Wilson, who was touring the country promoting the Versailles Treaty.

September 3, 1919. Placerville to Sacramento on the Motor Transport Convoy. 52 miles in 8 hours. Wilson starts his tour.

On this day in 1919, the convoy went from Placerville to Sacramento, making 52 miles in 8 hours.  The roads were "perfect".

Indeed, the convoy received a heroes welcome, being showered with fruit along the way.  A Willys Overland salesman treated the company to dinner and a cabaret.  Willys was already specializing in vehicles that were designed for out of town use and, interestingly enough, they'd soon advertise, if they weren't already, that their vehicles were so easy to drive, that women could drive them without the help of men.

Also touring on this date, but by train, was President Wilson, who left on a cross country tour to promote the Versailles Treaty.

September 2, 1919. Meyers to Placerville on the Motor Transport Convoy. More Trouble on the Border. Storm brewing in the Gulf. The End of Summer.

On this day the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy resumed their travels towards the Bay with a trip from Meyers to Placerville.  Roads were improving.

Closer to home, Wyoming's oil fortunes were improving, while the situation on the border remained tense and violent.

The crisis on the border naturally got first place on a lot of newspapers, but the Lance Creek oil strikes were a big deal in Wyoming. The area still is a major petroleum province in the state.

Railroad bills were also big news, as Congress struggled with an industry that had proved problematic during the war. 

And the victorious Allies informed Germany that Austria was not to be admitted as a German state, now that the Austrian Empire had ceased to exist.  In fact, as we'll shortly see, this would be a provision of the treaty with Austria which was soon to be signed.

And school was starting up, which was an occasion for cartoons.

The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger made note of Labor Day being the unofficial American end of summer, with Tuesday, which September 2 was, being the end of the vacation season.

A cartoon of this type shows how long certain American traditions of modern life have been around, with an American vacationer (showing that vacations were common then), labeled as "Everybody", has a wrecked bank account due to going over the waterfall of Vacation.

The Gasoline Alley gang was at work, or at least Walt was, with the gang urging him to take the day off and go golfing.

It was also hurricane season, with the 1919 Florida Keys Hurricane forming to the south of the peninsula.  In those days, there was considerably less warning than there is now.

Labor Day, 1919

American troops near Marfa, Texas, are treated to a picnic in honor of Labor Day, September 1, 1919.

September 1 was Labor Day in 1919, then as now falling on the first Monday of September.  The unofficial end of American summer was a day off for most people, including I'd note most local newspapers, and it was celebrated in much the same fashion as it currently is.  Foot races and picnics were held in the mining town of Hanna, Wyoming.  Motorcycle races were held in Marion Indiana.  Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech on labor in Plymouth.

In the case of American solders serving on the border, which was still quite tense, this meant, if they were stationed near Marfa, a lunch served by the American Red Cross.

If they were assigned to the transcontinental Motor Transport Convoy, which was now running several days behind schedule, it wasn't a day off. They traveled from Carson City, Nevada, to Meyers, California

The road was treacherous and the Nevada Highway Department closed the road in the Sierras for the convoy.  Motorcycles were used to police the convoy speed and spacing, as well as looking for hot bearings.   The convoy went 34 miles in 13.5 hours and its arrival in Meyers was treated as a great success.  The Mayor of San Francisco traveled out to meet the convoy.

A party that claimed to represent labor was laboring away in chaos on this Labor Day weekend in Chicago.  The left wing turmoil going on in Chicago saw yet another Communist Party emerge out of the departed hardcore left wingers of the Socialist Party, when the non English speakers formed their own Communist Party of America.

This is really confusing as there already was a Communist Party of America, that had existed since May. This new one joined the old one rapidly. The English speaking Communist Labor Party would follow within months.

Of interest, the new foreign born Communist Party of America that formed on this day was double the size of the Socialist Party of America, with 60,000 members, and six times the size of the Communist Labor Party, which had 10,000 members.  This pretty shows that the leadership of the Socialist Party was more conservative and democratic than the rank and file, which had gone hardcore left. 

It also shows that the sentiments of the Socialist were highly influenced by immigrant members who were likely hardcore leftists when they arrived in the country, something that the Communist Party and its sympathizers on the radical left have not really liked to acknowledge.  The 1910s through the 1930s were the high water mark of radical Socialism in the US and its interesting to note that this was also the case for Anarchism, although it was waning by the 1930s.  In both instances the movements had significant immigrant representation within them and, moreover, representation from certain concentrated areas of Europe where the movements were also strong.  It's fairly clearly the case that in those instances they brought radical sentiments with them, rather than acquiring them in the US, although there were certainly native born radicals as well.

All of these movements were on the way out by the 1940s for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they'd been tested with disastrous results in Europe by that time and World War Two caused an economic boost in the country that buried any lingering sympathy for economic radicalism.  But in 1919, Communism was untested and on the rise, even if a language barrier caused it to oddly develop in the US, briefly, in a fractured fashion.  Even at that, however, it never really had very much appeal for most Americans, including foreign born ones, let alone most American workers.

Workers and the high cost of living were the topic of that day's Gasoline Alley, which was published in the local Chicago newspaper.  In a somewhat serious edition of the cartoon, the Reds made their own appearance that day.

It was a day off, of course, for most Americans and that meant not only picnics and races, but trips to the movies, which the movie industry used to introduce new films.

Her Purchase Price frankly had a the type of plot that movie goers of the era loved but which are creepy today.  In that film, Sir Derek Anstruther encounters European looking Egyptian slave Sheka while touring Egypt.  She learns that she's been raised a slave since taken by a bandit in her youth.  So he buys her, after falling in love with her.

Low and behold this disrupts Sir Anstruther's inheritance so the loyal Sheka sells herself to somebody else so that he's not dispossessed.  But Sir Derek pursues, and in the meantime her parentage is cleared up and all is well.

Hmmm. . . .

For folks who were bothered by the racial qualities of that one, let alone the moral questions raised by buying your bride in an Egyptian slave market, The Brat was also released on this day in 1919.  It featured a a chorus girl known only by that nickname who resists improper advances, resulting in her arrest.  The prosecutor's brother, however, is studying the underworld and therefore the judge lets her live in his household so that she can be the subject of study.  Well you can see how that one goes. . . 

Frankly, that was a bit disturbing as well.

Well, north of the border there was Back To God's Country, in which the daughter of a Canadian woodsman grows up in nature and has a rapport with animals.  She falls in love with a Canadian government official and marries him, after escaping the clutches of a bogus Mountie who attempts to rape her and who kills her father.  She then travels with her husband on a whaler but the captain turns out to be the rapist in disguise, so she has to escape by dog sled in the Arctic, with her husband.

Maybe it would have been better just to skip the movies on that Labor Day.