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.

How Many Fruit Lugs Does A Cannery Really Need?

You really don't need to know how many 40 and 50 pound lugs (crates for hauling fruit from the orchards) the Hyde Cannery in Campbell had before you can start building a model of the cannery. The answer, by the way, is 33,400...

Historical research can be a great thing as long as you don't mind the occasional diversions, side tracks, and interesting-but-potentially-irrelevant details you run into. After all, if you want to build a model railroad that others will say nice things about, all you really need is something that on the surface looks right. In my case, few people are going to check that I modeled the Campbell station right, or correctly placed a packing house, or ask whether fruit would have come to a cannery by rail or by truck. Few will care if there's boxcars at the Hyde Cannery when the plant was shut.

But those diversions can be part of the fun. I don't really need to know the exact date that a cannery changed ownership. I don't need to know details of the machinery. I don't need to know which doors were used for loading, and which for unloading. For me, though, learning about those details, poking around in old food machinery catalogs, reading the news reports of the day, or tracking down ownership is a treasure hunt in its own right. All that extra detail also gives me the background to really explain the setting that I'm modeling, and to add some of the details that might make things seem just a touch more accurate.

I'd still admit that leafing through dusty microfilm to check out old mortgages might cross the line from fun to a bit obsessive, but there's always the chance I might hit a Mother Lode. That's worth a bit of sneezing in the Recorder's office.

Our Hyde Cannery story left off a while back with a quick history of the Hyde Cannery, along with mention of how Mr. Hyde mortgaged the property and equipment for $190,000 back in 1923. Now, you'd think that looking through deeds and mortgages would be mind-numbingly boring... at least until you realized that the right mortgage might have some juicy details about life at the cannery.

And these mortgages do. Let's dive in, shall we?

It's 1923; the Hyde Cannery had a glossy spread in Cannery Age a few years before, but this year Mr. Hyde needs to deal with debt. On May first, the following mortgages appear at the Recorder's office:

• Mortgage #1: Mr. Hyde borrowed $70,000 against about his cannery's machinery from the Merchantile Trust bank in downtown Campbell, payable May 1, 1928 (7/2/1923, book 41, pg 5).
• Mortgage #2" Hyde also borrowed $60,000 from M.E. Lennon secured by the exact same list of equipment. (7/2/1923, book 41, page 11.)
• Deed of Trust #1: Finally, Hyde borrowed $70,000 from M.E. Lennon and the San Jose Abstract and Title Co. against the lands where the cannery sat, property east of the railroad tracks along Dillon Ave., and land south of the cannery near Rincon Ave. (7/2/1923, book 41, page 15.)

Now, I find it a little interesting that the equipment can be mortgaged twice, but I'll trust the two mortgagees both knew about each other and assume that the equipment was worth enough for both of them to be made whole if Hyde wasn't able to pay them off. I don't have access to earlier mortgages to figure out if this is refinancing some of the equipment Hyde bought in previous years, but we can suspect that starting up a world-class cannery took lots of money.

But I'm not here to make wild-ass guesses about mortgage conventions in the Santa Clara Valley in the 1920's; I'm here to look inside and outside those canneries so I can build decent models of those canneries. The mortgage documents give all sorts of magical data I wouldn't be able to find out elsewhere.

Go check out those mortgages, and look at that nice, detailed list of the equipment in the Hyde Cannery, and see that data for yourself, and let's see what questions we can answer about the Hyde Cannery.

For example, how many people do you need to run a cannery, and what does that say about appropriate set-dressing - number of figures to put around the scene, or bicycles to place nearby? Obviously, you'll need lots of women to help cut fruit. The mortgage cites 125 Webber adjustable stools, 100 wood stools, and 25 cutting tables. You'll also need to feed that staff, and the mortgage includes the cafeteria fittings: 23 tables, 92 common dining chairs, a large commercial Montague range (wow, they're still in business, and still in the Bay Area!), and 77 trays. Hyde also lists seven 9x12 foot tents. I'll plan for evidence of a few hundred workers.

Or you could look at the tonnage of fruit coming in, and the number of cans going out. For hauling product around, Hyde had 5,930 can trays for carrying the filled cans over to the machinery, 1,000 tray stands, and 2,200 tin pans. There's also 3,500 fruit trays for sun-drying and 22 cars for the dry yard, 15,400 50 lb lug boxes, and 18,000 40 lb lug boxes. Hyde expected a lot of fruit to come in each summer, and needed enough boxes to hold seven hundred tons of fruit coming in from the fields. I need to plan on a huge pile of those lugs out behind the cannery during the off-season. The Dole cannery at Fifth and Martha had an entire city block reserved for fruit receiving and storage of lugs.

Hyde did have machinery to help those hundreds of workers with the tons of fruit. On the canning side, Hyde had a pair of Berger and Carter slicers (seven and nine blade), seven syrupers (for #1, #2.5, and #10 cans). A sugar conveyor. Five hundred feet of black pipe for carrying hot syrup around the plant. They had a "Smith pie foundry", which I assume was a cooker for turning cast-offs into pie filling. (The 1921 Canning Age magazine noted that they were using a Berger and Carter pie foundry - a San Francisco manufacturer that I'm sure made great pie foundries, but probably couldn't hold a torch to the fine San Jose craftsmen.) Four 21' canning tables from Smith Manufacturing, two 26' canning tables from Premier Machine, two 24' canning tables, two 20' iron slicing tables, and two 20' iron pear canning tables, all from Smith Manufacturing. Cooking vats. Cappers. Exhaust boxes. Hundreds of feet of conveyors, box nailing equipment, and some hand trucks. A "portable elevator". And powering this entire mess were three 50 HP steam boilers turning hundreds of feet of pulleys and belts to power the equipment. On the drying side, Hyde had a prune shaker, 48' sorting table, 24' "San Jose processor", and various sorters.

You'll need an office staff, though it doesn't need to be large. Hyde had two adding machines, four filing cabinets, two roll-top desks, an Underwood typewriter, and an Addressograph printer, and a mimeograph. (Note to self: make sure the plant smells of the mimeograph fluid.) They even had a "phone system", though I'm not sure how sophisticated that would have been in 1923.

From the model railroad perspective, the vehicles used by the cannery are more important details, both as a hint about common car and truck brands for the area, as well as what I ought to park near the cannery. The mortgage shows that Hyde had three Ford extension trucks (which I suspect are Model TT trucks), though the Canning Age article also mentions a four ton truck and trailer. That article notes that the larger truck made daily trips to SF; my initial suspicion was fruit to be sent by steamship, but it might have been more likely as fruit going to the San Francisco grocery wholesalers.

Getting this sort of detail in the county records must not be too unusual; I found a similar document for the sale of the Hunts Cannery on Fourth Street to Richmond Chase. Although the Hunts sale didn't list the exact number of items ("uncountable number of fruit lugs"), it does hint at the number of canning lines and favorite brands. For example, Hunts, in 1942, used a pie foundry from A.B. Draper, so we now know of at least three manufacturers making such a beast. (12/30/1942, book 1123, page 411).

So that's how a few trips to the Clerk/Recorder's office turned from a quick attempt to identify the owners of buildings to understanding the size of the pile of fruit lugs needed in the off-season, and a realization for the favorite brands and models of trucks to use for my cannery.

I also learned what a pie foundry is, though I'll need to look at some old equipment catalogs to find a picture of one. Luckily, there's a few collections of food processing machinery paper, such as the Floyd Hal Higgins collection at U.C. Davis, so with a bit of luck, I could see what a pie foundry looks like.

And the Hyde Cannery would have had a pile of 34,000 fruit lugs piled in the drying yard behind the cannery during the off-season... though I don't need to know that to build a model of the cannery.

[Panorama of Hyde Plant and photo of Hyde Cannery's original canning equipment are from the Bancroft Library via the Online Archive of California. Most of the photos from that collection were published in the August 1921 Cannery Age article about Hyde.]

Bad Years in the Valley

I've heard it said that all the worst mistakes on an engineering project happen on the first day when our assumptions and premature decisions appear on the whiteboard. We start building, then six months, a year, or five years later realize that reversing that mistake on day one will be near impossible.

That certainly happens with model railroads. We'll decide on the towns we absolutely must have, or we'll choose a prototype and setting that won't carry the traffic we want, or we'll overestimate (or underestimate) the number of operators we can easily fit.

My worst mistake, it appears, is right there at the top of my blurb about my Vasona Branch layout:

It's summer 1932, and the Great Depression has taken hold in the U.S. Even with the depression, Santa Clara's crops still head for Eastern markets. Apricots fresh and dried, prunes, and cherries from the Valley of Heart's Delight all are grown here, and all get exported to the rest of the country.

If I've learned anything over the last couple years, Santa Clara's crops were not heading for Eastern markets. Hunt's Cannery closed for 1931 and 1932. Crop prices were insanely low, and crop sizes were huge. Packers and farmers tried to sell their crops ahead of the rest of the market, causing prices to plummet further. California Packing Corporation (aka Del Monte) had earnings collapse from $6 per share in 1930 to 9 cents a share in 1931, and produced its worst year ever in 1932.

My visit to the Campbell library and quick glances at the Campbell Interurban Press highlighted how much worse it was. It turns out that the Hyde Cannery, one of the two canneries I model in Campbell, shut down in 1928; although there are hints in "The Orchard City" that it opened for a couple seasons, I doubt it. The March 30, 1930 issue quotes Mr Squibb, secretary for the cannery, declaring that the cannery will be open for the 1930 canning season. Not so; the advisory board for the company overruled him, and the July 1 issue included the front page banner "Hyde's Cannery Will Not Operate This Year, Is Decree of Directors."

Having the cannery news on the front page must have been a pretty big deal in town, as the Campbell Interurban Press rarely had business articles on the front page. I suspected it would cut into the column-inches that could be devoted to the local Sea Scouts chapter. (For the record, I have nothing against the Sea Scouts, but it was just a bit tedious to read through four years of meetings, and mysterious fires in their boat-house, etc. I'd also like to know why they even had Sea Scouts when the bay was miles away!)

Hyde must not have been open in 1931 either; the October 20, 1931 issue includes an article "Local C. of C. Asks Growers to use Hyde Plant" with explicit hopes of stealing 12-15 jobs from the association's San Jose packing plant:

The Directors of the Campbell Chamber of Commerce met Monday in a special meeting to ask the California Prune and Apricot association to consider the Hyde packing plant for processing and packing prunes. Thousands of tons of prunes are temporarily stored here by the association."

Hyde stayed dark till 1937 when Sunsweet bought the plant and turned it into the "Campbell Cooperative Dryer". Hyde's days as a cannery were, as far as I can tell, over way back in '28.

[Update: I spoke too soon. The "Campbell Packing Corporation" used the facility in 1933.]

Luckily, it appears, the Ainsley Cannery (which became the Drew Cannery in 1932/1933) kept running. A June 30, 1932 article mentions that Ainsley was "running 'cots" starting the next day. Although it was "a fair crop with regard to size and better than usual quality", the cannery production was going to be considerably lighter than usual because of "depressed business conditions throughout the world." There would also be fewer jobs, with folks who'd worked for Ainsley in previous seasons having priority for the available jobs. This same season was the one that paid the Olsons fifteen dollars for their entire 1932 crop of apricots. And they were lucky; one of the advantages of growing apricots was that the farmer could sell to the canner or the dryer depending on demand. The prune farmers had no such choice, and were completely at the mercy of the dried fruit prices.

But that's not the worst of the Depression stories. The Hunt's Cannery might have been closed for the 1931 and 1932 seasons, but that didn't mean it opened again afterwards. Hunts sold the cannery in 1942 after using it only as warehouse space for the intervening years. The cannery changed hands again in 1943 to Seagram's which must have been buying it as warehouse space for the Paul Masson wine business they'd recently bought. The May, 1943 article describing the sale mentioned "the cannery has not been in operation for 10 years. Recently, 13,000 of the 70,000 square feet it comprises were leased by Louis Devich of San Jose. He stated he would can apricots there this year."

I hope Devich managed to do some canning for the 1943 season, if only to perfume Los Gatos one last time with the smell of cooking apricots.

The Hunts cannery survived, by the way. Drive by the intersection of Highway 9 and Santa Cruz Ave. just north of downtown, check out the shopping center on the northeast corner now inhabiting the buildings.

Some of the disappearance of the canning industry in Campbell and Los Gatos was obviously caused by the Great Depression. I could also imagine that some of the pressure on Hyde and Hunts was from more modern and efficient plants in San Jose. Either way, Campbell and Los Gatos would have been a lot quieter in 1932 than I'm modeling them.

So I'm at a crossroads. Do I keep my 1932 era and pretend that the canneries were running full-bore? Do I push my era back a few years into the late 1920's when the cannery traffic would have been more appropriate? Or do I rethink my choice of industries, and keep 1932, but downplay the unused canneries and instead focus on the businesses that were running?

Hard Times in San Jose

As much as my layout might show a busy, productive valley in 1932, the truth wasn't always as nice. As I've mentioned before, the market for fruit was so bad in 1931 and 1932 that the Hunts Cannery in Los Gatos didn't even bother to open both years (after canning six million pounds of pears the previous year), and the Drew Canning Company co-operative in Campbell (represented on the layout) paid the Olson Family $15.21 in December 1932 for their 1931 harvest of eight tons of apricots. Getting paid a year late and $2.00/ton must have hurt; Mr. Olson held onto the letter and showed it to anyone for years afterwards who suggested he should join another co-op.

These two photos from the Library of Congress show pea pickers in the San Jose area in 1939. Both were taken by Dorothea Lange. The caption on the second is 'Idle migrants. Foothills north of San Jose, California. "If the sun shines tomorrow and nothin' happens, we'll pick.".' I suspect car encampments of migrant workers were a frequent sight in the Valley in the 1930's. Some day I'll comb through the contemporary newspapers looking for stories.

[Professional research trick: if you ever see interesting photo reproductions available on Ebay, and they don't look like family photos, go poking around the Library of Congress and other museum sites for the same photo. For an even easier search, just type in the photo/auction caption into Google. I found these photos when tracking down some photos of the "Mine Hill School, Englishtown" at New Almaden; the photos at Ebay looked suspiciously like Historic American Building Survey materials, and a bit of poking found the original photos available for free.]