"Hapa's Brewing Doesn't Do Things By Halves!" Says Edith Daley

It’s a crazy time in Silicon Valley right now - lots of construction and new office space, lots of traffic, lots of folks moving in. The 1970’s tilt-ups around our current office are failing to the bulldozer and getting replaced with four stories of apartments and AMD engineering cubicles. Our office manager just moved west from North Carolina, and I can’t imagine how crazy this place seems to her - wide open skies, brown hills, and too damn many verification engineers and JavaScript ninjas. Neighbors fighting neighbors over coding style conventions. French bulldogs with LinkedIn profiles. It’s a common story - if this was the turn of the century, we would have had a bunch of Italian immigrants, fresh off the boat, looking for cannery or farm work, and we would have overheard arguments about the correct way to fix a canning line without stopping the line or losing a finger. If this was the 1950’s, we’d be fighting for seats at the Burger Pit against IBM and Lockheed engineers, while a bunch of drunken Fairchild engineers argued about the best way to dope germanium. Instead, we avoid getting run down by Nvidia self-driving cars or a Google bus, and fight for space at the bar with senior product managers with pugs on leashes.

Silicon Valley overheating means things are changing. In our neighborhood, we’ve lost a couple former orchard farmhouses that survived surprisingly long in the middle of subdivisions- the triple size lots are too valuable for a 1920s 2 bedroom house. The trendy bar out in the country by Saratoga is getting torn down for executive-level houses. The occasional 1950s strip mall goes post-modern, with a bunch of hipsters at Philz waiting for a bespoke cup of coffee to finish dripping. (Geez, just pour the d*mn coffee already!) If you're a friend of older San Jose - whether the 1920's, the 1970's, or the 1990's - this isn't a bad time to be taking a good look at the old stuff you like before it turns into a new apartment complex.

But progress also means some things are getting reused. Paradiso’s Deli, out by the former Del Monte cannery, looks like it’s been reinvented and reopened. Santa Clara is slowly working to reinvent its downtown. And in the former Salsina cannery building off on Lincoln Ave. in San Jose, redevelopment has cleaned up this underused building in what used to be San Jose's western cannery district and turned it into a bike repair, gallery, and beer hall.

Salsina Cannery, 2019

I've written about this building before. It was built in 1918 as Salsina Packing, a cannery founded by Carlo Aiello and Alfonso Lambroso to make tomato paste for the American market, though they quickly branched out into apricots and peaches. Edith Daley, my favorite San Jose Evening News columnist, visited the cannery in 1919; her story led with the headline "Workers at the Salsina Plant Smile Easily". Edith was impressed by the new and impressive building, the friendly management (William Leet bought ice cream for the entire canning staff on the day of her visit), and its well-ventilated interior - a big deal for the usually-hot cannery. She was also a mite confused by the name, asking for Mr. Salsina before being told that Salsina (tomato paste) was the product, not the producer! Salsina hit challenging times in the post-World War I recession. The company was sold to Virden Packing in 1922 to build William Virden's goals for a fruit-and-meat-packing colossus. Virden Packing, over-extended, failed in 1926 and got broken up, but the building appeared unused for quite a while after that date.

Back side of cannery - much more utilitarian

In 1935, the former cannery building appeared as the home of Saint Claire Brewing Company the first local brewery to open after the end of prohibition. Saint Claire disappeared by 1936, and the building was used for a series of businesses: warehouse space for the San Martin winery, a drayage company, and a good ten or fifteen years as a discount furniture store.

But the neighborhood's changed; the former cannery district is now mostly large apartment complexes. Salsina's well-ventilated cannery became studio and retail spaces a couple years ago.

Working end of the brewery

So here I am, sitting in the same cannery where Edith Daley saw “Billy" Leet buy ice cream for the entire cannery crew back in 1919. It’s now Hapa's Brewing. My chance to sit inside shows it's a stylish building both from a model railroad and canning perspective. Concrete floors for ease of cleaning and storing a seasons worth of tomato paste. The sawtooth roof adds interest from above. Concrete walls on the street side, worn corrugated iron on the railroad side. Huge beams holding up the roof so there’s more space for canning equipment. Light rail rolls by much more often than the "Friendly" SP ever serviced the Los Gatos branch. Today's Saturday afternoon crowd provides the background noise to hint at how active the building sounded at its birth. The Sainte Claire Brewing folks who had the building in 1935 would be pleased that the buildings still a happy provider of alcoholic beverages.

Edith’s pleasant description of the building still holds true - “The plant is sunny, well-ventilated, and a pleasant place in which to work.” Definitely true - the sawtooth roof brings in a surprising amount of light, and open loading doors keep it light and airy in today’s moderate May weather. I wouldn’t mind being stuck here in July. I'm not at all displeased about sitting at the bar today.

Freight door from original cannery

A hundred years ago when Edith visited, she found a San Jose where the cannery mostly had Anglo workers. “There’s a dignified high school professor from San Francisco happily at work on the fruit grader. There are sons and daughters of doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, and they are making from $20 to $25 per week.” Mrs Addington was forewoman, J. Turner watched the incoming fruit and tomatoes to ensure it met Salsina’s quality. With the demographics she saw, perhaps it’s not surprising that Edith found the “little Italian girl- the most prolific of the bunch” so surprising in Campbell a few weeks before. Even for an Italian-run cannery, Italian immigrants on the line were either not easily identifiable, or not newsworthy to Edith’s eyes.

Fifteen years later when the Sainte Claire Brewing company started making local beer, a good fraction of the groceries in San Jose had Italian names... at least for the markets that wanted to sell local beer from San Jose.

(Side notes about the people Edith met in 1919: Mrs. Ludy Addington, 132 Topeka Ave. in the Burbank neighborhood, was a midwest transplant; her husband, Charles, ran a service station at Race and San Carlos in later years, though he listed his occupation as "oil and gas merchant" in 1920. Charles was a Southern Pacific brakeman in 1913. Jacob Turner, from Ohio, listed his occupation as cannery superintendent in 1920. He lived at 529 N. 19th Street with his wife and eight children. By 1930, he was running his own plumbing business. Running a cannery made one very good at quick plumbing repairs, I expect.)

And once you get to modern days, Salsina’s demographics have changed again. All the nearby apartment buildings means that the place is filled with the local twenty-somethings on a Saturday, maybe working at Splunk in Santana Row packing web log data into attractive canned formats, contracting at Google but angling for a full time role at Facebook, or maybe figuring out ways to profit from supporting the masses coming to make the Santa Clara Valley a productive bread basket of technology. The faces are the usual Silicon Valley mix - some Anglo, some Asian, some Hispanic, highlighting just how varied the Santa Clara Valley is. Like Edith, what I’m seeing doesn’t match the true demographics of Silicon Valley; it’s less Hispanic here than San Jose as a whole. The place also doesn’t look like my co-workers - the collection of chip engineers at work who may have been born in India, but decided long ago that the Santa Clara Valley would be their home. Over in Fremont, they’re replacing the Portuguese Holy Ghost parade with Indian festivals. If you show up at Holi, you might get covered in colored pigment. The stories the immigrants tell are the same - new immigrants risking it all to move to the US, the dangers of starting anew in a land without friends and family, and figuring out how to mix traditions from the old country with their new home.

Billy Leet isn’t serving ice cream in the 21st century, but at least Hapa has a taco truck, helping to keep this century’s puff piece writers well-fed.

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Hapa's Brewing is at 460 Lincoln Ave in San Jose. It's a popular place, so folks other than me must think their IPA is tasty! No food in the restaurant, but they invite food trucks to stop by many days - check their events. Compare the photos from a few years ago to see how nicely the place has been fixed up. After your beer, walk around the neighborhood and check out the former Standard Oil depot at Auzerais and Sunol, and meander along the Los Gatos Creek trail beside the apartments that replaced the Del Monte cannery.

Edith Daley Visits Campbell

One of my favorite finds for Santa Clara county history has been Edith Daley’s cannery stories. Daley was a writer for the San Jose Evening News in the ‘teens and early twenties. During a slow news summer in 1919, she spent a few weeks visiting the canneries around San Jose and writing about the people and sights in the cannery. Through her booster-ish writing, we learned about the modern, clean concrete floors and nursery at Del Monte’s Japantown cannery, Elmer Chase’s prohibition on asking canners how long they’d been in the business, Jenny Besana’s knowledge of fruit contracts at Contadina, or the size of Greco Canning’s tomato paste boiler. Daley had a large collection of non-cannery writings; she also wrote poetry and a history of World War I from San Jose eyes. However, the San Jose articles tell stories about the fruit business that we couldn’t get anywhere else.

I’ve been disappointed because Daley’s articles only focused on San Jose canneries - no dried fruit packers, and no plants outside San Jose (except for a quick visit to Pratt-Low in Santa Clara.) I’d always assumed this was local paper provincialism. However, a while back, I followed one of the classic tricks of library research - poke around at newspaper issues before and after the interesting articles, and see what turns up. (Full disclosure: I first used this research trick as a ten year old when I figured out that if I found a model railroad book at a particular place on the shelf, I ought to look at other books on the same shelf in case they were interesting.)

Pay dirt.

There’s no signs of articles by Edith Daley, but there were a pair of uncredited articles about the mood in Campbell as the fruit came in. Both articles have Daley’s voice, and read like rehearsals for the articles to come in subsequent weeks. They also match Daley’s interest in worker and child welfare which appeared in many of her articles. The first, “Many Types on Campbell Sts. as ‘Cots Start” on July 10, 1919, highlights the crowds coming to Campbell to work in the canneries. The second, “Better Living Conditions for Fruit Workers” in the July 11, 1919 issue, highlight both housing for cannery workers and conditions inside the cannery.

Daley had plenty of industry and workers to visit in Campbell. 1919 was the middle of a cannery boom in the Santa Clara valley as technology, demand, and the end of World War I coincided. Edith remarked on three canneries in Campbell: California Canneries (a new outpost for a San Francisco canner, with a new building ready for canning within two months of construction), “J. C. Ainslee” (sic), and the George E. Hyde Company. The Hyde Cannery still exists as the Water Tower Plaza office complex near downtown. The Ainsley cannery, just north of Campbell Ave., is currently townhouses. California Cannery’s sawtooth warehouses still sit just south of Fry’s Electronics.

All three were going great guns during her visit. California Canneries, like Ainsley, exported canned apricots to England, and has just announced it had sent its first 1400 cases to Liverpool. Summer heat affected the ripening; the previous day, the canneries were able to handle all their fruit by mid-afternoon “but if the hot spell had continued they soon would have been working triple time.” Speed of ripening was a huge issue in those days; “one prominent fruit man” claimed we could have lost a million dollars in fruit if the hot weather had continued for four days, for the fruit couldn’t have been canned quickly enough.

Daley commented significantly on how the canneries and the fruit rush required many more people than could be gotten from Santa Clara county, and relied on attracting temporary workers. Now, a huge influx of workers isn’t always seen as positive. There’s stories about the pea harvests in Alameda County in the 1930’s attracting harvesters before the crop started; the locals weren’t always happy with the itinerant labor turning up, especially if they didn’t have cash to live on. Daley suggests that the gathering hordes in Campbell were more welcomed.

“They say that the population of Campbell has more than doubled overnight - in less than a week at any rate - and one can well believe it as one walks around the streets of the little orchard city.

“And what a variety of them there are! There is the city girl, who takes it all as a lark, and, it is feared, is a little more afraid of spoiling her hands than the efficient worker should be. She is not averse to earning a few dollars for fall hats during the summer months, however.

“Then there is the black-eyed little Italian girl - the most efficient worker in the game. It is a matter of dollars and cents with her and she clears $5 or $6 a day without half trying when the 'cots are running good.

“There are the ex-tired businessmen of the bay cities who want to spend a few days away from the pavements and who have brought their wives and kiddies with them to enjoy the celebrated Santa Clara valley. And kiddies! There are scores of them,, of assorted sizes, shapes, and colors. All with little sunburned noses and knees, and a universally happy expression of health and pleasure.”

The idea of city folks coming to help out isn’t new; there are stories of school teachers moonlighting at Contadina in the 1940’s, and judges acting as fruit buyers in the Central Valley, but Daley makes it sound as if pulling in temporary workers from San Francisco was commonplace. It’s almost as if Apple drew ten thousand temps from around California each summer to assemble the new new iPhone.

Daley’s “little Italian girl” is an interesting counterpoint with the likely-anglo workers from the city. 1919 was at the tail end of a huge wave of Italian immigration to the U.S. between 1900 and 1920. Although the little Italian girl was likely born in the U.S., she was still a bit alien to Daley’s eyes… and like most new immigrants much more focused on earning money for the summer than the city folks out on a lark. Daley’s newspaper articles for other canneries usually comment on workers in two ways - either the longevity of the (anglo) crew (“many have been here for twenty years”) or the many languages being spoken. Daley seemed bemused and interested in the newcomers; when she visited Contadina, she commented on packing cardoni (artichoke variant cultivated for the stems), she noted the new foods being introduced. “Our every day salt-and-pepper-and-butter with an occasional bit-of-onion palates are finding new satisfactions in Italian flavorings. Maybe before long we'll find Cardoni on every menu!” I suspect Daley wouldn’t mind that her children and grandchildren are eating pizza and burrata.

It’s a bit surprising that Campbell in 1919 was still using primarily anglo workers, and that the Italian girl stood out enough to get Edith’s attention, for new immigrants were awfully common in the fruit industry. A 1919 Del Monte Lug Box newsletter included sections in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, hinting at the numbers of new southern European immigrants filling its canneries. Edith’s later visit to Bisceglia Brothers mentioned workers from Oregon, Nevada, Watsonville, Calaveras, and Napa and Sonoma Counties - many Italian, though Daley mentioned several languages being spoken. Bisceglia Brothers rounded up their workers with letters in the spring offering work and “free rent” in their cannery village.

Daley highlighted how the crush of workers drained Campbell’s housing. Daley’s guess that Campbell’s population doubled wasn’t too far off - Campbell only had 2,000 residents in 1939, so for 1919, a few hundred workers per cannery would certainly double the population. Workers pitched tents wherever they could - army tents, pup tents, and pieces of canvas stretched around poles. Some brought camping trailers. Edith noted that California Canneries had a canning village of wood and canvas cottages (with cot, table, stove, and running water); Ainsley’s canning village exploded in size in 1919, with “little red cottages nested among the rows of cot trees with the branches bruising against the windows”, and the dirt roads along the orchard lined with more cars than “First Street on a Saturday afternoon”. (That’s First Street in San Jose, the main shopping street, not some sort of rush for margaritas at the future site of Aqui in Campbell.) Ainsley’s cottages rented for $2.50 a month, and Daley claimed she could hear Victrolas playing “Over There” from within.

That $2.50 a month wasn’t free, but it was awfully cheap. Wages averaged $3.50 a day (unless you were the extremely productive little Italian girl.) Getting fed cost 25 cents a meal at the company cafeteria. Children under fourteen went to the cannery kindergartens to be minded. The working conditions weren’t too bad either, with Ainsley installing fans driven by belt to cool the cannery.

And, in typical Edith Daley fashion, the cannery was described as a fruit slaughterhouse where an apricot entering would not be long for this world.

“Cookers, syrups, all the machines are arranged a la Ford factory, with the fruit received at the receiving door at one end of the plant and issuing into the warehouse at the other end in the form of cases of cans of 'cots - extra fine. A cot never retraces its steps after it reaches the fatal doorway. It might as well abandon hope as it enters, for its doom is sealed and it is only a few minutes before it is pitted, sorted, syruped, exhausted, cooked, canned, its lid sealed on, labelled, and stored away until some bally Britisher orders it for his breakfast and it must start its long jaunt across America and the Atlantic towards its final resting place.”

So thank you again, Edith, for the local color. I’ll be pitching a bunch of tents in my HO scale orchards, and make sure the Campbell downtown streets are packed. I’ll make sure to add the little Italian girl to the Campbell street scene. She’d be twenty years older than when Edith saw her, and might have her children in tow for a month of canning ‘cots. But just like in Edith’s day, Ainsley’s kindergarten would still be operating in 1930’s Campbell, and Campbell’s city streets would still be filled during fruit season.

Cannery Crime Blotter I: Bye-Bye Buick!

This is the first in an ongoing series of true crime from the annals of San Jose canneries. This article was lifted from the editorial page of the August 10, 1919 San Jose Evening News.

F. H. Daley, is actually Fred Daley, better known as the husband of Edith Daley, San Jose News writer. In the 1920 census, he listed his job title as "cashier", but later described himself as a manager. In 1920, Fred and Edith lived at 179 9th Street, just behind San Jose State. Edith and Fred moved into the new Palm Haven neighborhood in the 1920's. If we wonder how Jack heard this story, a likely guess is straight from his spouse.

Edward. L. Perrault lists himself as a cashier at the Hunt Brothers cannery in 1920 (the actual owner of Golden Gate at the time.) He's listed as 21 years old in the 1920 census, and living in San Francisco with family by 1921.

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Call the Police!

by Jack Wright.

Contrary to custom at some former times in this column, the following story is a TRUE one, but it seemed so good that even two columns in large ten-point type doesn't seem too much to give it.

Its moral is the danger of absent mindedness and its characters are local folks. It happened yesterday. Let's go!

E. L. Perrault is the efficient accountant of the Golden Gate Packing company. He has been so for years, and his mental completeness has never been questioned. Never has he come into contact with the local police, either as accused or accusing.

Yesterday, he made his first trip to the police station - two of them, in fact. The reason was as follows.

F. H. Daley, also of the Golden Gate company, is the proud owner of a new Buick. It has a self-starter, gas and electricity, side curtains, and would have hot and cold running water if those were common equipment. He is quite proud of his car - naturally.

Yesterday Perrault had to make a hurry trip to the bank. Perhaps payment for a few boxes of those worth-their-weight-in-gold 'cots had been made. What was more natural that he should borrow the resplendent new Buick for the trip?

In the machine, Mr. Daley had left a small cushion and his coat.

When Perrault left the bank for the return trip the coat and cushion were gone!

Upon his return to the packing house he went shamefacedly to the owner of the car, passed back the key, and said "Er - what did you have in the pockets of your coat?"

"I don't know; bankbooks, letters, etc. I guess." was the answer.

"W-w-was it a valuable coat?"

"About the only coat I've got. Why?"

"Well, someone must have been a fast worker because I wasn't in the bank more than five minutes and when I came out the coat and cushion were gone. I went to the police and they are working on the case."

Mr Daley didn't worry, particularly, but had occasion to go out to his car in the packing house garage a little later in the afternoon. He couldn't find the car! It was gone!! Heavens, was an organized band of thieves set on pursuing him and taking everything he possessed? He wondered if his house was still on its foundation.

He summoned Perrault hurriedly. "Well, the car's gone too." he said.

"No it isn't. I just drove it back here."

"It's not here now. They sure MUST have been fast workers."

Starting forward Perrault exclaimed "but there's your car!" He pointed to the Buick standing in the Daley compartment.

How the old bus had changed - aged! Gone were its new side curtains; gone its bright luster; the spare tire was no longer present; a crack slanted across the wind-shield and a fender was badly wrinkled.

Gradually a light commenced to dawn on F. H. Daley.

"Is this the car you drove home?" he questioned.

"Why yes. It's yours, isn't it?"

Bright day broke in the mind of Daley. "Young man you'd better hustle back to the corner of First and Santa Clara streets with that car or the police will transfer their attention from the thieves who stole the coat, to you! I don't know whose car this is. The only thing I know is that it's not mine!"

One leap carried Perrault to the seat. One motion started the car out of the garage. One dash skimmed through streets to the center of town, just in time to waylay a bewildered-looking man who was gazing where his car ought to be. One long explanation was all that was required to settle with the police.

And of course, this story has a moral: be very careful about doing silly things when your boss's wife works for the local paper.

Public History and Private Stories

Jennie Besana (right), the "big little boss" of Contadina, with her husband Frank, sister, and nephew.

When I started researching the local railroad track and canneries, I was looking for dry, geographical facts. Where was this cannery? When did the railroad pull up those tracks? Was the cannery open during the summer, or year round?

I found a lot of those facts, but the more I researched, the more I found myself getting pulled into stories of the people. In old newspapers, I learned about business scandals at the Higgins-Hyde packing house. Business deeds for the Ainsley cannery highlighted that one oak desk, three oak chairs, and one gas heater wouldn't be included in any sale of the cannery. I did a fair amount of thought about why those chairs might not go along with the cannery. Edith Daley's puff-pieces on San Jose's canneries often included colorful quotes from obviously real people. ' "How long have I been engaged in the fruit canning industry? Must I tell that?" asks E. E. Chase with a smile. "That is almost as bad as asking a woman to tell her age!" '

And that's when the stories started getting personal. Dr. Nola shared stories of his father's packing house, and told me about playing in the heavy burlap sacks used to pack fruit for Europe. E. O. Gibson took a Southern Pacific engineering drawing of a land sale in the Almaden Valley, and shared family memories of the great-uncle who was trading in former railroad right-of-ways for fun and profit.

That's when the stories started crossing over from the straight history to the family stories. That's not a bad thing; history books can be a lot more interesting when they bring in the personal stories of the folks who were involved in the activities. I might even say my interest in the Los Gatos branch was encouraged by Bruce MacGregor's great books on the South Pacific Coast railroad, which all included colorful and down-to-earth stories about the employees and people along the tracks.

Doing more genealogical research - tracking down family trees for some of the people that turn up in these stories - makes it more likely that these stories cross over from public history to private story. The story of Jennie Besana, the "big little boss" responsible for bookkeeping at the Contadina cannery in San Jose is the most recent example. I'd taken Jennie's name from Edith Daley's San Jose Daily News story on the cannery, and tried to learn more. There wasn't much to go on - no obvious Google hits, and little in city directories. I ended up searching old newspapers and ancestry.com for more on her, and learned a bit about her family, her marriage, and her too-young passing. I found some others also doing similar family research; I chatted with descendants of her husband's family, and heard their stories of Jennie and of their family.

I'm still hearing stories. I heard a few weeks back from Jennie's great-niece; my original article on Jennie helped her learn more about her family, and provided stories she hadn't heard before. She also shared the photo at the top of this article. That's Jennie Besana on the right - the big little boss of the Contadina cannery. The others in the photo are Jennie's sister and nephew. It's a neat photo, probably from the early 1930's. Jennie and Frank show up as very happy. Jennie's dressed more conservatively than I would have expected for a woman who showed ambition and smarts to run the bookkeeping and contracts side of the cannery. (She wasn't completely serious; her niece remembers last seeing Jennie and Frank in Berkeley at a Cal game, where Jennie was wearing a yellow corsage in the shape of a "C".) They're both doing pretty well; Jennie worked at the United States Products cannery during the depression, while Frank was at Pacific Manufacturing over in Santa Clara. They own a house in the country out in Cupertino with a bit of land, and they can commute down Stevens Creek Road for work each morning - not a bad life. And yet,tragedy could still strike, regardless of how happy they are....

To be honest, as much as I'm glad I've done the research on the canneries, these stories are more satisfying. They make the places I'm modeling more real. They also tell about the dreams, successes, tragedies, and boring daily routines for folks of the Santa Clara valley a hundred years ago. They also remind us how much things are still the same, even as the Valley has filled up and the fruit industry replaced with semiconductors or software. I'm glad I've learned enough about the local canning business to know where the canneries were, or where a spur track was. But I'm happier with the stories of the people - hearing about Victor Greco's troubles trying to start a new tomato paste business, kids playing on the burlap sacks soon to send prunes to Germany, George Hyde's work to build a modern cannery, or my neighbor's summer job as the mechanic's assistant at the Dole cannery.

Or hearing about Jennie Besana, who was ambitious and smart enough at 20 to be the bookkeeper for a newfangled cannery selling strange new tomato products for Italian immigrants. There's a bit of her in every intern over at Google.

Like Uber, but for Smashing the Grocery Wholesalers

If there’s one word that defines Silicon Valley these days, it’s "disruption".  A high tech company sees some industry that works inefficiently, does an end-run around the current folks in that business, and "reinvents" the business.  We’ve seen it with companies reinventing advertising (Google), book sales (Amazon), taxis (Uber), or want ads (EBay / Craigslist).  Sometimes, these can be great for consumers.  Taxis on demand!  Diapers and ice cream delivered to your door on demand!  However, if you’re in the established business, your life becomes very, very difficult.

Luckily, things were so much simpler in the old days, with friendly orchardists, canneries, packers, and wholesalers living in happy harmony… right?

Not quite.  The Valley was full of stories of reinvention, obsolescence, and battles to keep up with the Jones's Cannery.  The Santa Clara Valley was the site of one particularly big battle back in 1920, as the large meat packers attempted to move into the wholesale grocery business.  Their effort turned into ten years of battle over the Packer's Consent Decree, deciding whether the meat packers should be allowed to sell canned fruit, and whether one of the upstart canners - the California Cooperative Canneries - was merely a front and supplier for the Armour monopolists, or was a farmer-owned attempt to do an end run around canners and wholesalers that had unfair control over the price of fruit.

Cooperatives Blossom

When the fruit business first hit California, growers and packers followed the customs of the day; as "Sunsweet Story" put it, "the first duty of each individual... was to look out for his own interests almost wholly to the exclusion of the interests of others." Everyone pulled their own tricks to increase profits. Farmers would send green fruit to the cannery hidden in the bins. Packers would spread false rumors about low prices, or mix poor-quality fruit in with better fruit. Wholesalers in Europe would reject an arriving shipment, knowing the shipper would have to sell the "bad" fruit at a lower price.

Everyone also thought the other guy was making a killing. Growers assumed that the packers were making money at their expense. Canners were suspicious of the wholesalers and brokers selling their crop, and assumed their growers would flee to a canner offering more money each year.

For the growers, the solution was to go in collectively and run their own processor. These efforts started in the 1890s with dried fruit collectives doing their own packing and selling. The first round of co-ops (including the California Dried Fruit Association and Santa Clara Valley Fruit Exchange were unsuccessful. However, during World War I, a new generation attempted to use the co-op model. Orchardists selling dried prunes and apricots created the well-known California Prune and Apricot Growers (which we still know as Sunsweet). Raisin growers in Fresno started the Sunmaid co-operative. On the canning side, the movement led to co-operatively owned canners such as California Cooperative Canneries.

California Cooperative Canneries

Like Sunsweet, the California Cooperative Canneries was an attempt to work around the packers and better control the prices paid to growers.  The cannery was the work of one Vernon Campbell, an inventor, canner, and most of all "promoter".  Vernon's brother, the well-known Southern California lawyer Kemper B. Campbell, described his brother as "the genius of the family” for his work in the canning industry.

"[Vernon was] the first one to can olives in tin… invented the process of making all the olives look black and shiny, whether they were black and shiny when they started out or not… a pioneer in teaching the rest of the country to eat ripe olives", and learned how to transport ripe olives in brine".

In addition, Vernon started Moneta Canning in Ontario, California with his family, managed the Central California Canneries plant at Visalia in 1913.  Vernon was also a true believer in grower cooperatives, starting several in the early teens.

Vernon Campbell, 1922.

Based on his experience in the olive and canning industry, Vernon wanted to shake up the canned fruit industry and get rid of the inefficiencies where the canner and the wholesaler took the majority of the profits.  So in 1918, at the same time that Sunsweet attempted to wrest the dried fruit market away from the dried fruit packers, Vernon decided to go after the canners.  He started the Santa Clara Valley Grower’s Association to attract farmers interested in a cooperatively owned cannery, and started building at Eighth and Taylor.  He also lined up some significant names to help with the cannery.  Albert Haentze, a Chicago business and real-estate man who had retired to the life of a rancher and San Jose winemaker at Evergreen's Villa Vista ranch, signed on as a manager.  S. E. Johnson of Cupertino, another founder, brought his reputation and pull as director at Grower’s Bank in downtown San Jose. Within 65 days of construction, the plant canned 10,000 tons of tomatoes, and an unknown amount of apricots.

Edith Daley visited the California Cooperatives Cannery, and described her visit in the July 16, 1919 San Jose Evening News. Ralph Crary, VP and sales manager, explained why this co-operative would succeed.

"The co-operative cannery is an entirely different proposition from a purely commercial plant," explained Mr. Crary. "The commercial cannery will say to a grower, 'We don't want your fruit.' We say to every one of them, 'Bring it in!' Not only that, but we are ready to take care of all increases in acreage. In reality the psychology of the two methods of operation is as far apart as the poles. The principle in either case is entirely different. In the purely co-operative canneries the grower not only gets a good price for his fruit but by the elimination of the middleman he shares in the canning profit as well.

"The co-operative enterprise," continued Crary, "usually fails for lack of three things: managerial ability, finance, and distribution. We have all three if we may be allowed to modestly admit it. Our officers are men of standing, unquestioned ability and valuable experience. Finances are arranged for and the problem of distribution is solved. It is our aim under good leadership to so enlarge our capacity and distribution that we can put California canned products within the reach of everyone."

One problem, of course, is who would buy all those canned goods, and whether the wholesalers, brokers, and distributors would work well with the new cannery.  Campbell himself wasn't a big fan of the existing system; he declared:

“The sore spot in our social infrastructure is distribution.  We continue to use the ox cart when a steam railway is needed… The prodders now have a modern piece of machinery under Government control [World War I production and price controls], but “special interests” are moving heaven and earth to prevent our use of it…  Good Lord, if this company could save the billions that are wasted and extorted from the people through the present so-called system of distribution, which is an uncoordinated, hit and miss, unintelligent, go as you please, hold up game, we would not need to worry about the cost of freight, wages of railroad workers, the cost of armaments, or the need of good roads.  There would be more money than anybody would know what to do with, at least until Henry [Ford] increased his fliver factory and output sufficiently to absorb the surplus cash."

Meanwhile, two thousand miles east, Campbell’s savior from the patchwork of wholesalers appeared.

The Meat Packers

The other half of this disruption story came from an established player: the meat packers.  Companies like Swift, Armour, and others had already disrupted the fresh meat market by taking a local, personal, and inefficient job (slaughtering and selling meat in small towns), and turning it into an industrial, regional, and efficient process.   The companies bought huge numbers of animals, and dominated the livestock auctions.  They ran the specialty newspapers that published the auction results. They built huge, centralized slaughterhouses to turn the animals to meat.  They took the huge volume of leftovers from the butchering, and became a major seller of offal, hides, sinews, sausage meat, and hide glue.  They ran their own refrigerator cars to control how the meat was carried.  They negotiated special rates and trains with the railroad to get the meat to towns quickly.  They sold direct to butchers to control prices and the market.  Because many towns weren’t big enough to need a full railroad car (10,000 pounds) of meat, they ran “peddler cars” along fixed routes that could provide smaller amounts to a series of towns on a fixed schedule.

The packer’s success was a mixed blessing.  Their new methods provided fresh, inexpensive meat quickly to every town and hamlet in the U.S.  However, they were also seen as monopolists and bullies, controlling prices and chasing out local butchers and slaughterhouses.

The packers, meanwhile, saw an new business that could use their special touch. As wholesalers, they already delivered meat to every small-town butcher in America.  They already used extra space in those refrigerator cars for related groceries - lard, meat by-products, butter.  Their distribution network could handle even more.  Why not distribute rice?  Why not soap?  Heck, why not even canned goods?  Armour and the others would be able to fill out their freight cars; they could cut deals on wholesale groceries for towns too small to take a full load of meat, and they’d be able to make a tidy profit by eliminating the existing grocery wholesalers.

And why stop only at wholesaling? Why not control production of all these new foodstuffs as well? At first, the packers bought canned goods from the packers - usually in huge quantities, much like Walmart might buy today.  But then they realized owning the cannery might be even better.  Swift and Company had already been in this game for quite a while, owning Libby’s since the 1880’s.  (Libby's had started off making canned meat; Libby's fruit cocktail came later.)  The 1918 season encouraged the packers to reconsider buying canned fruit on the open market as overwhelming demand blocked Armour from buying product.  Supplies were so short, Armour couldn’t buy canned fruit at any price from the California Packing Corporation. When fruit was available, fear of market control between producers and packers discouraged sales. When Armour tried to buy 20% of Sunmaid’s 1918 crop (800 carloads!), the raisin cooperative turned them down for fear of losing control over their fruit and brand.

And this is where the two stories came together.  Vernon Campbell wanted to break the canner's grip over growers with his own canneries.  Armour wanted to break the wholesaler’s grip over small town grocers via an alliance with a friendly canner.  It’s a match made in heaven.

In 1918, Armour offered to finance the expansion of the cannery at San Jose as long as California Cooperative Canneries could supply them with the canned fruit they needed for their wholesale grocery business. Their $200,000 represented around 40% of the investment in the plant. Campbell had already been pestering the local banks and investors for money that year, but was consistently turned own. For their money, Armour took a 51% ownership stake; the contract guaranteed Armour all the fruit they requested by January 1 of each year at the same price that Del Monte was selling canned fruit futures.  If the cost of production turned out to be more than that price, then Armour would pay actual cost.

Apparently, Campbell wasn’t shy about his Armour connection, nor about his plans to let cooperative canneries sweep the state.  Mark Grimes, president of the California Tomato Growers’ Association, claimed during 1922 Senate hearings:

Through extensive conferences held with Vernon Campbell during 1918, I know his ambition is to have Armour, through California Cooperative Fruits, gain complete distribution of California canned fruits.  This plan and effect were discussed by him with Davidson, their Chicago representative, and Pfiffer, who was at that time in Armour’s Chicago office, in my presence and the presence of other witnesses in San Francisco in 1918.”

Solicitation for growers, Modesto Evening News, Feb. 11, 1920.

To the growers, having another buyer meant profits; Campbell claimed that his entry into canning raised the prices of fruit across the state.  R. G. Spencer, "organization manager", declared that the cooperative raised prices for fruit in the Central Valley by $40 a ton in 1919.  Dallas H. Gray of Armona was the Visalia buyer for the cannery; he went to bid on the “Visalia Pool” of cling peaches, and bought 6,000 tons one season at $92.50 a ton for cling peaches and $55 for free-stone and lemon peaches.  The Del Monte buyers laughed - “Gray, you are crazy for taking on a job like this.  You know you cannot get enough cars to ship 6,000 tons of fruit out of Visalia.” But Gray did it - needing sixty men at eight receiving stations across the region to collect the fruit, then somehow finding a way to get the fruit quickly to the cannery at San Jose.  The cannery cleaned $6,000 on that deal alone.

Campbell wasn’t doing badly either; his contract as the general manager meant he got 0.5% of the gross receipts of the cannery.  For a cannery selling a million dollars of canned fruit a year, he was doing awfully good.

Fears of the Meat Packers

The deal with California Cooperative Canneries was a great deal for Armour.  They now had a ready supply of fruit for their challenge of the wholesalers.  They also had their pre-existing distribution channel:  1,120 “branch houses” for wholesaling, 1,297 “route cars” visiting fixed routes and stopping in thousands of smaller towns, cold storage warehouses, and trucks.

And, as you might expect, the grocery wholesalers got very, very scared.

In 1922, looking back on the entry of the packers, the wholesaler John G. Clark of Bad Axe, Michigan summarized those fears.

“Michigan is very close to Chicago and prior to this consent decree a number of so-called peddler car routes existed on the railroads in Michigan radiating from Chicago.  It was a common practice that, if a quantity of fresh meat insufficient to make a minimum car was unobtainable in a town, then very attractive prices were made in canned goods, soap, rice, or other non-packing house products, in order to move the car forward at the carload rate of freight with this rapid service.  With the tremendous tonnage controlled by the packer, he is enabled to continue to enjoy preferential treatment over the wholesale grocer, as was clearly shown at the above mentioned Interstate Commerce Commission hearing.

The FTC, investigating the packers in 1918, noted the effect of the packer's entry into the business.

"Already even the oldest and most strongly established wholesale houses are seeing line after line of their merchandise absorbed by the packers' branch-house stem.  First, they saw the packers encroach on the handling of butter, eggs and cheese, then canned goods, then various kinds of "package goods", and now rice, sugar, coffee, and other staples are being increasingly handled by the packers.  Last year the Big Five's combined sales totaled $2,127,245,000.  At the present rate of expansion, within a few years the big packers would control the wholesale distribution of the Nation's food supply." (1918 FTC report on the meat packers).

Wholesalers were up in arms as they saw their entire business threatened by the entering monopolists.  They were particularly incensed because the packers had, in their opinion, all sorts of preferential treatment.  The packers ownership of their own refrigerator cars to carry the goods meant they weren't subject to the car shortages that every other business faced.  They received lower shipping rates, and had lower minimum car weights for shipping charges.  They had better schedules with their peddler cars.   

Many of those advantages transferred over to California Co-operative Canneries. If the railroads couldn't provide enough freight cars to the canneries, the cannery could request cars from Armour's private fleet. Vernon Campbell highlighted that the refrigerator car shortages were a problem even for non-perishables such as canned goods; the risk of freezing mid-continent convinced canners such as him to use refrigerator cars for any product shipped even in fall or spring.

Some of the arguments weren't completely fair.  Armour might have a smaller minimum charge and easy access to their own refrigerator cars, but they also paid to build and maintain the cars.  The fixed peddler routes gave them guaranteed capacity and fixed schedules, but independent packers could sometimes ship faster without the fixed schedules. The packers also had strong reasons to build their own car fleet. Swift, the first meat packer in the refrigerator car business, built their own refrigerator cars because the railroads weren't willing to risk their investment in stock cars and animal pens.

The packer's moves into the canning business also were at an awkward, politically charged time.  World War I's food demands for soldiers and rising prices meant that the packers' actions were looked upon suspiciously.  In 1917, President Wilson took a stand and asked the Federal Trade Commission to research whether there was an unlawful monopoly in meat packing by the "big five" - Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson, and Cudahy.  The FTC found there was, and highlighted that much of the problem was their marketing and wholesaling:

If these five great concerns owned no packing plants and killed no cattle and still retained control of the instruments of transportation, of marketing, and of storage, their position would not be less strong than it is.  The competitors of these five concerns are at their mercy because of the control of the market places, storage facilities, and the refrigerator cars for distribution." (Federal Trade Commission Report on the Meat Packing Industry).

At the time, the "Big Five" packers controlled somewhere between 60 or 80% of the meat industry, depending on how you counted.  Packer's profits in 1917 were four times what they are before the war. They slaughtered 70% of the livestock.  They owned 90% of the refrigerator cars in meat service.  They ran their own ice docks.  They could demand rebates and discounts from railroads, rather than regular shipping rates.  Their companies were in the hands of very small number of rich individuals rather than a wider set of shareholders who might encourage moderation.   

The "Big Five" packers also had control over half the eggs and cheese, and a quarter of the canned fruits and vegetables for some products.  They secured control over vegetable oil, and were trying to extend their power to fish and other foods.  Between 1916 and 1917, they tripled their canned goods sales, outdoing the two largest independent wholesalers by a similar amount.  In 1917, Armour handled 23% of all grain at Chicago.  The same year, Armour started handling rice, and immediately became the "greatest rice merchant of the world" in their own words.  Rice prices, coincidentally, rose 65% the next year.   This wasn't a time when their actions would be viewed charitably.  

The pressures of the public and of President Wilson led to a serious investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.  Needless to say, they didn't look upon the packer's actions generously.  

First off, the packers hadn't made it easy to trust their actions because of thirty years of suspicious behavior.  The first study of the packers in 1890 found explicit collusion and restraint of competition; these revelations led to the Sherman Antitrust Act.  The packers found ways to work around the laws.  They split up the meat market between the companies, with each company having an explicit quota of sales, with companies buying too much livestock or selling too much fruit kicking back the profits to those not meeting quotas.  A 1912 investigation found that until 1896, the packers still met every Tuesday afternoon as a group to discuss sales and adjust each packer's sales.  Although the packers stopped meeting in person in 1896, Henry Veeder continued to manage "pools" to set quotas and margins for each region, and assess penalties and bonuses for packers who strayed from their quota.  The pools were finally ended after a Department of Justice investigation in 1903.   To work around the defeat of their pools, Armour, Swift, and Morris instead secretly arranged to buy up the competitors and build a new "National Packing Company" monopoly (imitating the American Can Company monopoly, and the California Fruit Canners Association merger of canners around the same time).  The government looked poorly on the merger, so National Packing was split up in 1912, and the smaller packers split between Armour, Swift, and Morris.

Even in 1917, the packers still seemed to think that the U.S. wasn't going to act against them.   During the 1917 investigation, government investigators caught the packers in outright lies, with an Armour vice-president claiming no interest in the Chicago stockyards, yet the treasurer of the company later admitted that they'd transferred the company's complete ownership as the investigation was started.  The company's attorney initially refused to testify on the grounds he might incriminate himself, but later testified to facts that didn't match documents he'd signed.

The FTC also found the packers were expanding their monopoly into foreign countries, and actively expressed worry that the packers' action was going to reflect badly on the U.S.  In a short time, the U.S. packers controlled half of export meat for Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

The Packers Get More Than a Hand-Slap

The Federal Trade Commission 1919 investigation was damning.  Six volumes long, it condemned the meat packers in every way possible.  The FTC's opinion was for more control - turn the refrigerator cars and stockyards under government control, divest the cold storage plants and warehouses, and run stockyards as common carriers who had to provide access to all.

The final Packer Consent Decree wasn't as extreme as the FTC wished, but it was a huge attack against the packers.  The initial agreement in 1919 banned the big five meat producers from owning stockyards and stock-market newspapers, stockyard terminal railroads, retail meat markets, public cold storage warehouse. They were banned from handling fresh milk, and manufacture and sale of other food lines.  The packers were explicitly banned from selling fresh or canned fish, vegetables, fruit (except meat-related stuff such as baked beans or mincemeat), soda, candy, coffee, nuts, flour, bread, and grape juice.  They had to get out of the market supplying soda fountains.   Worst of all, they had to sell their refrigerator car lines.   And this wasn't going to be a slow divestment: companies had to plan to dispose of the banned businesses within 90 days.   The federal government locked the status quo in place even more with the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, which restricted the packer's behavior in the meat industry.

From the 1922 re-hearing on reversing the consent decree:

Mr [Vernon] Campbell: “When I talked to Mr. White, vice-president of Armour & Co, I asked him why they had signed such a foolish agreement, and he said they were holding a gun to his head and he had to sign.
Mr. Breed: Mr White, of Armour & Co. said that?
Mr. Campbell: Yes Sir
Mr. Breed: “Who was holding a gun at his head?”
Mr Campbell: “Attorney General Palmer.  The point was this: that all this publicity, and this continual hounding by the Federal Trade Commission, and those wild charges made against the packers, it was injuring their business in foreign and domestic trade; it was depreciating their securities, and it was causing the foreign governments to begin to investigate the affairs of the packers, in some instances closing the doors to their business, so that in order to relieve themselves from this persecution they were willing to do almost anything to get out from under the charges, Mr. White said were unjustly made, by the Federal Trade Commission.”

Or, to quote that old Transylvanian proverb, “When the peasants with pitchforks and torches are at your castle door, it doesn’t matter that you've already stopped building the monster."

The final ruling on the Packer Consent Decree dragged out over years. The packers, with Vernon Campbell as the public face, took to the Senate in an attempt to reverse the Packer's Consent Decree. By 1924, the California Co-operative Canneries was allowed to legally fight the case (Packers Lose in Food Fight.  May 20, 1929 Milwaukee Journal.). An appeals court temporarily reversed the decree in the mid-twenties, but the decree was finalized in 1929 when the the Supreme Court refusing to get involved.

After the Packer’s Decree

The packers moved quickly, selling many of the businesses within a year of the initial decree.  Armour sold their refrigerator car business to a new Fruit Growers Express company. The packer's exit also encouraged the growth of other refrigerator line companies, including the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific's Pacific Fruit Express. Libby, McNeil, and Libby had already been spun off from Swift & Co. in 1918.

Overall, the fallout was mixed for the meat-packers.  Immediately after the divestment, the post-war downturn in the economy cut their sales, and caused investors to flee Armour's stock.  J. Ogden Armour, the majority owner, had been relying on debt to buy all sorts of unrelated businesses. When Armour's stock tanked, he watched his fortune disappear until he was finally chased out of the company in 1923. Morris & Co., also suffering, was merged into the remains of Armour. Louis Swift, by comparison, saw the decree as a chance to streamline his business and left in a stronger state (Maureen Ogle, In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America).

Vernon Campbell, meanwhile, was in a tough spot.  Within a year of starting the California Cooperative Canneries, he'd already lost the company that was bankrolling him, which also was buying 50% of his product. Finding buyers was now his primary job; he applied for a passport in 1922, with the purpose of "selling canned fruit in Europe".

But the California Cooperative Canneries did survive. In 1926, the company even managed to expand, building a tomato cannery in Sacramento, buying Delta Packing's cannery in Isleton, and starting a related shipping terminal in Oakland. A 1928 newspaper article claimed Co-operative Canneries had ten outposts across California.

Like all canners, the depression hit the canner hard. The Sacramento cannery shut down unexpectedly in September 1930, leaving 150 workers without pay for the season. The other canneries also succumbed to a lack of market for their goods. By 1931, the company was gone. A new co-operative, the Tri Valley Packing Association, bought the San Jose, Modesto, and Visalia plants. Sacramento's cannery was reopened by the landowners as Bercut-Richards Packing Co.

California Cooperative Canneries plant, Modesto, 1923.

With the end of the cannery, Campbell left the Bay Area, finally settling in the Sierra foothills by 1940. At age 65, he still listed his occupation as "promoter and organizer of cannery plants". He'd been a promoter the whole time. Even his opponents saw him the same way; Ernest Richmond (of Richmond Chase) denigrated some of Campbell's work in Southern California, but declared "he, himself, is a promoter 100 per cent efficient." Even retired, Campbell was still quite insistent on promoting co-ops and taking on the established canners.

---

Quotes from Kemper B. Campbell come from his oral history from the Bancroft Library's Regional Cultural History Project.  Most of the Vernon Campbell quotes from the U.S. Senate's 1922 hearings to overturn the consent decree. For more about the meat-packing trusts and why they were so distrusted in 1918, check out Charles Edward Russell's Greatest Trust In the World, published in 1905.

Vernon Campbell photo taken from his 1922 passport photo. California Cooperative Canneries ad for growers from the Modesto Evening News, February 11, 1920. Modesto canning employee photo from author's collection.

Note to Self: Never Ask A Canner His Age

Here's another wonderful article by the Queen of Letters for the Evening News, Edith Daley, as she uses up the paper's supply of exclamation points again.

The cynics reading this July 14, 1919 San Jose Evening News article back in the day probably sneered at the puff-piece journalism, but if we wondered what these places - and people - were like, Edith Daley tells us more than any other source.

Chase Plant Magnificent Says E. Daley
"How long have I been engaged in the fruit canning industry? Must I tell that?" asked E. E. Chase with a smile. "That is almost as bad as asking a woman to tell her age! " However, he did tell - that he came to the Golden Gate Packing company [4th Street between Julian and Washington] when he was a youngster, more than 40 years ago. "I was just a roustabout", he explained, with a reminiscent smile. Forty years of honest effort - rarely successful effort - of untiring zeal and irreproachable methods! E.N. Richmond adds to that his more than twenty years of like integrity and ability in the dried fruit industry, and together these successful business men blend experience and strong personalities into the "dream come true" that lies back of the gold-lettered sign.

"Elmer and Ed. We heard them call each other that. It was refreshing in the midst of a business camouflage of dignity that often seems afraid of upsetting! It visioned business as a great game that men play with much the same zeal with which they play ball on the corner lot or flew kites in their knee-trouser days."

Read the full article for details about the cannery on Stockton Street and the former Castle Brothers plant on Montgomery. Mr. Chase, who took particular interest in the cannery, notes that the plans for the new building took a back seat to keeping the trees along the Stockton St. side. The SP drawing for the Richmond-Chase spur, or a group photo of workers at the Stockton Ave plant for some ideas about the trees they were unwilling to cut down. Also check out the stock cars bringing fruit to the plant one busy year.

[Employee photo from the San Jose State University special collections, as part of a photo album of Richmond Chase memories.]

Edith Daley visits Herbert Packing

Edith Daley was only a San Jose Evening News writer through about 1922. After that, she becomes the long-serving librarian for San Jose. Luckily, her few years on the paper left some gems, including her visit to the George Herbert Packing Co. at 3rd and Keyes south of downtown. George Herbert had been a dried fruit packer with a large, barn-like structure (pretty much the uniform for dried fruit packers) on Lincoln Ave. He sold out to Sunsweet in 1918, but must have wanted to stay in the fruit business, so he bought the Frank-Smith cannery at 3rd and Keyes and started canning.

Edith went to visit in July 1919, and her article in the July 19 Evening News certainly shows her excitement:

Mr. Barthold, the superintendent, grows enthusiastic over the big boilers and the 300 feet of spur track, the 40,000 square feet of warehouse space, the surrounding blocks of property owned by the company, and the fact that his is a "six line plant." The outside property means that the cannery will never be crowded and that all further improvements contemplated can be rapidly brought to completion. You learn how the syrup is made down stairs and then pumped upstairs in order to come down again and be "dished up" into the cans by that rotating "syrup-eating" machine so nearly human it is uncanny! (If anything can be uncanny in a canning factory!) There is a big comfortable free bus that makes the trips to East San Jose every day for the benefit of 35 of the employes. There is a cafeteria and a kindergarten! At the cafeteria everything is served from breakfast to dinner - a substantial hot dinner at night. There's everything from a sandwich to a home-made pie a la mode---and at moderate cost. There are dignified tables; but the long white counter is so attractive to the women workers that a sign has been found necessary. It reads: "as far as possible we want the counter for the men." Sitting at a counter to eat is simply one of man's inborn rights and no amount of suffrage can change it!"

I didn't know that thing about inborn rights and sitting at the counter. Time to claim my birthright at Denny's.

Then the superintendent proved that he is not only a packer but a poet! We went upstairs to visit the sunny offices and he called my attention to the "view". It was an attractive picture to look down over the immense fruit room with its rows and rows of cutting and canning tables splashed with bits of silver from the cans and the pans where the women in their blue aprons and white caps worked interestedly and happily. The blue and white and silver gleams of that picture with the contrasting soft colors of the apricots would make a poet of any superintendent with wide-awake eyes!"

And that's the greatest part of Edith's writing - where a few Sanborn maps might hint at a building, or photos might hint at the contents, articles like these highlight what the canneries were like when you were inside them: full of color, full of noise, full of smells, and chock-full of some awfully interesting people. If I was modeling the area around Third and Keyes, I'd be painting some figurines blue and white to represent those workers taking a quick smoke break outside and contemplating their pie-a-la-mode at dinner.

I'll let you read the rest of the article - last year's production, the cannery's friendliness to visitors, and the drying plant on Monterey Road - but I'll end with Edith's final words:

"Labor has presented not problem at the Herbert Packing Company. Things are well handled in this regard, but when the peaches begin to roll caneryward in carload lots there will be more women workers needed. There is work to do---work for everyone. Labor isn't any fly in the fruit. The real "terrors" in the cannery are prices of sugar and "shook!" Both necessary---and both going steadily up hand-in-hand. Where sugar used to be $4.00 a bag it is now $9.00! "Nevertheless" said Mr Barthold, "there's lots of sugar and there's plent of cans and there's always help enough and there's money in the world---we are going to have a big year!"

The George Herbert cannery still exists on the southeast corner of Third and Keyes in San Jose. Although the current occupants probably don't spell WELCOME with capital letters, you're certainly welcome to drive by and stare out the window or view the building on Google Street View.

In addition to serving as San Jose's library for a good twenty years, Edith Daley also published the War History of Santa Clara County about World War I as well as M"The Angel in the Sun", a book of poetry with no cannery content whatsoever.

Profiting from Prune Pits

With the Santa Clara Valley producing insane amounts of prunes and apricots, we know that there were lots of boxcars heading east (and ships heading out over the seven seas) loaded with dried and canned fruit.  But all that fruit leaving California left behind a toxic legacy… apricot and plum pits.

Well, maybe not so toxic, but certainly space-hogging.  Those pits did have value, as we learned a while back when reading about Sewall Brown's profitable apricot pit business out between Campbell and Los Gatos.  And Sewall Brown wasn't the only one making money off waste products; we've also got the story of Stanley Hiller, Sr.

Hiller was, according to his contemporaries, an inventor and mechanical genius.  Stanley was down in Los Angeles during World War I, working in the fish canneries to turn the leftovers into chicken feed, when he heard about a problem the allies were having.  The poison gas used on the Western Front required good gas masks, and the U.S. Government wanted filters for these masks.  Henry quickly rushed off to start his own business trying various materials to use for charcoal filters.  He imported tons of coquito nuts from Mexico which worked ok, but fruit pit charcoal worked better.  The government had already cornered the market, and ended the war with an extra 7,000 tons of pits, stacked on rented land. Hiller bought them, as-is, where-is, thinking that charcoal might be useful for other purposes.

Hiller and his partner Louis Clark thought of various tricks for using those pits - grinding, charcoal, etc. Meanwhile, PG&E and Western Sugar Refining, the two landowners, sent them various polite notes asking him to vamoose with the pits ASAP.  Louis remembered:

"Right here Clark tipped back his chair, locked his hands behind his head, see sawed back and forth--and looked at Hiller--and laughed!  Then they made a duet of it.  "Member, Hiller, how they howled at us to move that mountain?"

"I remember one day in particular when the whole world--looked at over our shell mountain-- turned deep indigo. The fellows working for the two big companies stood around and kidded us. They told us we were broke and didn't have enough sense to know it. Said we might as well give up. Hiller and I went back to the office pretty well discouraged. The mail almost finished us. PG&E wrote, ordering us to move that shell."

Now, one of the problems of getting rid of the shell was the time needed to turn it to charcoal. The government process required twenty days, but it was cut down to six by the end of the war. Hiller needed to create charcoal faster if he was to get rid of those shells. Hiller and Clark created a continuous kiln (like a cement kiln) for processing the charcoal, and cut the processing time down to twenty-four hours, and got rid of the pile before PG&E could complain. You can even check out their patent if you want.

By 1921, Hiller's company, Pacific By-Products, was running in San Jose at the corner of Sunol and Auzerais (390 Sunol St.) and producing 75 tons of charcoal a day, and produced ten million tons during 1920 and 1921. The bagged charcoal, sent via railroad car from their 5 car siding, went for industrial uses as well as chicken feed. Hiller and Clarke didn't stop at that; they worked on other machines - one for clarifying the cooking oil used in fish canneries. Another invention inspired Hiller when he saw sugar syrup spilling out of canning equipment in a San Jose fruit cannery. With sugar at 25c a pound, that syrup represented real money. He created a new machine that could catch spilled syrup, clean it, and return it to the canning line, saving the canners big money. The 1922 Canning Age magazine shows the waste syrup refiner, both stock and in place at the Santa Clara Pratt-Lowe Preserving Company.

They also had their mishaps; a Sanborn map illustration on History San Jose's site shows the ominous warning that the plant burned down on May 6, 1932. The San Jose News's article on the fire called the two-alarm blaze "stubborn" but Louis Clark said the loss was almost completely covered by insurance. The article also mentions that the fire didn't reach the piles of sawdust used as part of the firing process.

Pacific By-Products must have stayed at the location; the 1933 and 1934 city directory still shows them at 390 Sunol. The 1934 directory also lists the manager as Roland Roderick as the manager and F.S. Lawrence as the superintendent. The plant isn't listed in the 1936 city directory - did they move, or did they shut down? I haven't looked yet, though ancestry.com now has all the city directories I'll need to answer the question. Only further poring through dusty volumes will tell.

Their five-car siding lasted into the 1950's, even if they didn't. I even modeled it on my layout, unsure when I laid the track why there was the long siding along the property line. I'd just assumed it was storage or perhaps (as one switching crew on my layout discovered) it was a handy place to store part of the train while switching the Del Monte cannery.

And if you're a Bay Area kid, that Hiller name ought to be familiar. Stanley's son, Stanley Junior, was also quite an inventor, and went on to design clever, utilitarian helicopters through his Hiller Helicopter company, a long-time fixture out on Willow Road in Menlo Park. Stanley Junior also tested some of his helicopter designs at the family estate above Oakland, now the area called Hiller Highlands above the Caldecott Tunnel portal. Stanley Junior also funded the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos. He wasn't the only aviator in the family; Stanley Senior had also built and designed planes in his day back in the 'teens, but luckily for us came back to the stable and profitable fruit business in San Jose.

[The interview quotes come from the Edith Daley columns in San Jose Evening News, July 19, 1921 and July 20, 1921 The photo of the infamous mountain of pits comes from the March, 1922 March 1922 Canning Age magazine. Sanborn map image from History San Jose - I'm glad I copied it because they've taken down the original site.]