Utah Valley Orchards Interviewee: John Crandall (JC), 800 East and 31 South, Orem, Utah 84097 Interviewer: Emily West (EW) Interview location: 800 East and 31 South, Orem, Utah 84097 Date: Fall 1999 Note: Edited for clarity, NU=not understandable Overview: 1. Ancestor s homestead 2. Occupation principal, teaching 3. Past crops: pears, cherries, apples, peaches 4. More on ancestors (grandfather) 5. Division of property between descendents. John (2 acres) and Merrill run the farm, but third brother isn t interested and sold his portion to a neighbor. 6. Distribution: Muir Roberts, local fruit stand 7. More on ancestors (father) 8. Railroad distribution 9. Workers: Mainly Mexican migrant workers, Native Americans, local kids. Migrant housing on property. 10. German POW workers. 11. Responsibilities: tractor, no extracurricular activities. 12. Orem as farming community, small town, few wards 13. Orchards teach how to work and being thrifty. 14. Recreation 15. Water: Orem Water Supply, Alta Ditch Water vs. Provo Reservoir. John is threatened by a neighbor woman over water rights. 16. Self-sustaining, animals on the farm 17. Current distribution: fruit stand, outlets in SLC. 18. Current crops: apples, pears, peaches 19. Harvesting crops, help, troubles with peaches 20. Orchards give kids a place to play 21. People don t understand all the work that goes into fruit farming: hobby farmers, customers. 22. Struggles with the government, Geneva Steel, environmentalists, apple market bottomed out with competition from China. 23. He enjoys farming. 24. Hard to make living on farming, Merrill and Tim Crandall doing well though. EW: You re John Crandall? JC: Yes..
EW: We re at 31 South and 800 East, and your orchard is right here? How big did it start out being? Did you grow up here? JC: Yes, my grandfather (Charles Crandall) homesteaded. He was the first one to farm it, so it s a part of the farm that remains in the family. The other part was over across the street, but that was sold when the housing started coming around here 20 years ago. But we kept this eight acres here. It was divided equally among my brothers about 10 years ago. My brother Merrill is still in the farming business full-time. His son Tim is also farming, and he is taking over. He still has the fruit stand. EW: You don t farm full-time. What did you do? JC: I was a teacher and then a principal. I was a principal for about 20 years. EW: What school? JC: Well, two or three. Last one was Scera Park - for the last 11 years. I was at Cascade up here for five years. I taught basically the sixth grade. EW: What crops do you produce? JC: Pears and cherries and apples and peaches. EW: Your grandfather started the farm and then your dad and you inherited it? JC: Yes. Well I don t know that my dad inherited it. I think that my grandfather s children bought it from him. He owned all the big area here. He had three or four children, and each one of them at one point operated part of the farm. My dad started his own across the street here. He planted it, and I remember talking about pulling up sagebrush and that type of thing to plant it. EW: Do you know how many acres your grandfather homesteaded? JC: I don t, but my brother might. He is older than I am, and he s more involved in that. It was a pretty good chunk - maybe 70 or 80 acres or something. EW: When did you and your brothers divide up your dad s land? JC: He sold the big place over here. It s all houses. Housing is all around here, and this is the only piece that s not housing. That was sold I would say probably 20 years ago, 25. I don t know, but this piece remains, and I operated it. When my mom died several years after my dad died - about 10 years ago, it was all taken care of and divided. I have two brothers, sisters too, but just the two brothers inherited these eight acres. It was divided into three equal parts. That was about ten years ago. EW: So there are equal parts of eight acres. Crandall, John 2
JC: Yes, I think it was about seven acres actually, seven, six, nine or something like that. EW: So what did you end up with? JC: With this section here from Center Street down to about a couple hundred feet beyond my house here. My one brother owns the fruit stand and the orchard, and he owns twelve acres on the other side there plus the acreage he s got here EW: You mentioned before we started that some of it was being sold, or just had been? JC: Yes there were three parts, and my second brother owned the middle part, but he never did run it. He never was involved with farm, so I kind of operated it for him. Then two or three years ago I decided I was tired of operating the farm. I didn t want to do it anymore, and as soon as that happened he sold the two acres right in the middle of his piece. EW: You own this piece, the middle piece was sold, and Merrill owns twelve acres over there. JC: Yes, I think it s twelve. EW: What did you do with your crops off this little piece of land? JC: When we had the big farm, we shipped most of them. There was a fruit-shipping company called Muir Roberts. We would pick it and haul it down to them basically, and we would sell some of it fresh locally and haul a little bit to Salt Lake to the markets and stores, but basically we d just ship it through Muir Roberts. We would haul it to them on railroad cars. Then they would ship it all over the country. We might get something out of it, and we might not. Mainly I guess that s why houses are here instead of farms - because it just wasn t profitable. EW: Was your father a full time farmer? JC: Yes. EW: He managed to make a living off of that? JC: Yes. EW: He produced the same things? JC: Right. EW: Peaches, pears, cherries, and apples, and his fruit went through Muir Roberts.? JC: Yes. EW: Did you help take it down to the train and pack it? Crandall, John 3
JC: Yes. EW: What was that like? JC: We packed it here, and when we got it packed we just hauled it down and put it on the railroad cars. It was like a lot of work all day and half the night. Farming is hard and particularly then. EW: What was the harvest season like when you were grown up? JC: Well, it was hard work. It was involved, frustrating, and disciplining; and just a tough life. EW: What was your favorite fruit? JC: I don t know if there s a favorite. Each one of them had their advantages and disadvantages. Pears were probably the easiest to sell. There was more demand for pears. Actually there was probably more demand for peaches, particularly now; but peaches are hard to process because they re so perishable. You can t wait too long to pick them or they get too ripe, and cherries are kind of the same way cherries are difficult to get picked. When we had the big farm, we used to bring in Mexicans. It was legal, and this was such a big farming area that it just worked out with the government that we could bring these people in, and they really saved us. There are a few Mexican laborers around now, but not too many. The government has made it so hard to deal with, and there s not that much farm now. The farming country now is over in Payson and West Mountain. Most of big farmers during our time moved and went to West Mountain, and they re farming over by (NU). EW: Did you ever use any Native Americans? JC: On occasion, yes. EW: Do you know where they came from? JC: Oh, basically from the reservations. EW: Did they do the same things the Mexicans did travel through with the harvest? JC: Yes, the Mexicans stayed here. We had housing for them, and they stayed with us during the harvest season. The Indians would come up just for harvest season, and they d bring their whole families and camp out at the bottom of the orchards or some place. We d get help wherever we could. EW: Did you use local children a lot? JC: Yes, before we were able to bring the Mexicans in, particularly for cherries and for strawberries. We used to have lots of strawberries, and we d go down to Provo in the morning that s when the kids least wanted to work. We would go down to Provo and pick them Crandall, John 4
up at the employment house 50, 60 kids at a time three fourths of which didn t want to work. They were a bigger problem than help, but it was the only help you had. Getting them to work was just a headache. EW: When did you start using the Mexicans? JC: Oh, I don t know, probably 1950. Once again, my brother was really involved in this, so he ll correct all these dates. EW: Do you have do you have any idea of how many of them you used? JC: Well, during the harvest season we used from eight to fifteen of them at a time. EW: Did you have any year-round employees? JC: No, during the harvest season, and we might keep one over to help us prune. My brother will tell you that he s had one that s been with him for probably 25 years, but he just died a year ago. He s been coming back from Mexico for about 25 years. He d come up in March and stay till November. My brother just got so he could depend on him - just a friend to take over and do everything. EW: We ve been told that there were Germans and Japanese. JC: I remember Germans. There was a German camp up the road approximately where the junior high is now. EW: Did you use German workers? JC: Yes, I remember them being really good guys. They were probably very happy. They were here in the orchards and not shooting or being shot at. I would have only been about 12 years old then. I do remember them very well, the guard walking around with the gun over his shoulder out in the orchards with them. I remember them being happy, and I would talk with them or at least try to be with them, and they would play with us and were very cordial and fun to be around. I think they were happy to be here. That s my impression, being twelve years old. EW: What were your specific responsibilities on the farm growing up? JC: Well, we really had to work. My kids kind of laugh when I tell them what I was doing when I was young. We used a lot of horses, and I used to drive the horses, probably when I was about seven years old. You kind of laugh at that now, but that s the way it was. I remember we got our first tractor during the war, about 1942, and the reason I remember that is that in order to purchase it you had to get government clearance. You couldn t buy equipment like that unless you had a government clearance, and I remember listening to my dad several times on the phone to Washington, D.C., trying to get clearance. On a couple of occasions he thought he had clearance, and we went to Salt Lake to get it and we couldn t because somebody hadn t done Crandall, John 5
their work. That was bureaucracy. As soon as we got it I drove it. I was about ten or eleven then. So I ve driven a tractor a long time. EW: What was the hardest part about growing up on a farm and working in the orchard? JC: Oh, just hard work. We really had to work then because our folks depended on it. I remember my dad would be waiting for me at school to pick me up so I could come home and get right out into the orchards and start to work. I didn t think a whole lot about it. I was just expected to work, and we worked all the time and that s just the way it was. My wife tells me that s the way it is now that s what I do is work. I ve been out in the orchard this morning. EW: What was school like for you? Was it hard to go to school and then come home and be in the orchard? JC: No, I don t think so. I basically enjoyed school. One thing that I couldn t do was participate in athletics much because we had to come home and work. EW: When you were growing up, were there a lot of non-farming families in the area? JC: Some, but basically it was a farming area. EW: Did you ever feel any kind of division between the farmers and the non-farmers? JC: No. EW: What was Orem like at the time? JC: Very small, very small. As I recall, there were about three LDS Church Wards. EW: You knew everybody? JC: Oh, yes. EW: What do you think you learned working on an orchard that people don t learn otherwise? JC: Work. Even my kids and grandkids don t have a clue. We try to get them to help once in a while, and they don t know how to do it. First of all, it s that they don t want to. They re having too much fun watching television or whatever. It s just because they haven t had the experience. They haven t had to do it, and they don t know how to do it. EW: What else do you think you learn? JC: Oh being thrifty, using things that are maybe not just from the farm. The thing that concerns me is when I see the waste of food and everything. We just didn t have it to waste. In those days, this gets a big laugh from our kids, you used to wear your shoes half-soled. Instead of growing Crandall, John 6
with them you went with a little mark on them. We d wear everything out and that doesn t happen today. EW: Was the farm self-sustaining? JC: Yes, most the time. My folks never went on about it, but I m sure that they suffered at times. When I got old enough and started really depending on it a little bit myself, it was tough. I hated to be depending on it. For example, it seems like in those days, more than now for some reason, I think the weather patterns changed a little bit. Every other year or so we were frozen out completely. So I don t know what my folks did then. I didn t think much about it then except for my mom. Some of my greatest memory memories are of being just a child and having her go out in the orchards at night after a frost. One day the cherries were in full beautiful bloom, and the frost would come and wipe everything out in one night. I remember her going out and walking through the orchard and tears coming because the very livelihood had gone. EW: Is that part of the reason you decided to go into teaching? JC: Oh, yes. EW: So did you go to school at the Brigham Young University? J C: Yes. EW: You got your teaching degree there and started teaching? JC: I continued on with the farm, too. JC: I toiled the farm for a long time. My dad was getting older, so I just took over. The reason they sold it is that we just couldn t keep up with it. I was just running myself ragged trying to run farms and hold jobs, so I said, Let s get out of it. It s not worth it for me. So that s when he sold that part. I went to school during that time. I tried to get them to let me work a straight graveyard which they wouldn t do; so when I started school, I was working all three shifts. On day shifts I d miss a day s work and a couple of days of school. On swing shift, the afternoon shift, I was okay, but that s all I did. I would go to school till noon and come home and work till four (in the orchard) and then go to work. When I was on graveyard, I d get off at eight o clock and go to school till noon. At one o clock I would come home work on the place go to bed at five or six, get up at eleven and go to work. We had kids and so it was tough on my wife, but we knew we had to do it and we just did. EW: What are your favorite memories of growing up on the farm? What were the things you liked to do most? JC: I just liked to work in the fields and drive the tractors and things like that. Winter time wasn t so bad. We had to prune and that type of thing, but it wasn t as bad as it was in the summer. Crandall, John 7
EW: What did you and your brothers do for fun? JC: I used to participate in athletics. I played a lot of baseball. We used to travel a little. We had lots of neighborhood cliques and friends, and when we were young we d get together and have lots of big open places to play. Running through the fields and around the barns and playinghide-and-go-seek in the haylofts and that type of thing. We had friends fairly close, not next-door neighbors, although we did have a right-next-doorneighbor, my aunt and uncle. We used to ride our bikes to go to other kids places. It wasn t like this, going down to houses. It was a half-mile away. We had horses I used to ride a horse. When we went to school we rode our bikes. EW: What can you tell me about the water rights? JC: My grandfather was one of the originals that founded Alta Ditch Springs that s part of Orem Water Supply now. My grandfather, Charles, and two or three others of the old-timers were the ones that discovered that. They dug the ditches and so on from that spring down to the orchards. It was and is a great big stream that flows all the time. We had that, and that was our water right that s what we irrigated with. At one point Orem City wanted that water right to put in their culinary system, so they bought it, and it was worth a lot more money than Deer Creek water. At some point, probably around1940, they traded the Alta Ditch water-right for Provo Reservoir water. Orem City now has the Alta Ditch Spring water that goes into their culinary water supply. It was traded when these men, including my grandfather, had it. Then of course it went to my dad and then the next generation, and they traded it to Orem City for this reservoir water system which we use now. EW: Do you know of any disagreements or fights over the water rights? JC: Yes, I am aware of some. In fact, down in West Orem at one point a man was shot. EW: Do you know anything more about it? JC: I don t know anything about it. I only remember it happening. Yes, there have been some tense moments once in a while. I was threatened once. EW: What happened? JC: A lot of people didn t understand water rights. Ditches have rights over everything. It s there because you need the water. There was kind of a division head gate. Anyway, a new family bought this area where these ditches all came together, and they fenced it. They must ve had two or three acres, so they fenced these head gates and these ditches. We had to clean them, and we had to take the water. So on one occasion I went up, and a gal came out and said, You can t come in here. I said, I got have to come in here I need to get the water. I probably was walking up the ditch, or maybe I was cleaning the ditch. She said, You know you can t. I said, You know we have to. She said, The next time you come, I will shoot you. So the next Crandall, John 8
time I went up, she came out and she was threatening me. I just said, You know there is nothing I can do. So we got a lawyer and handed it over to the law, but even after that s kind of scary. We tried to get them to put in a gate. We didn t care if they fenced in their yard or their property, but we needed an access to the water. We needed to clean the ditch that was the problem. Anyway, it was solved. So, yes, there have been some concerns over the water. If you don t have water, you don t farm. EW: Did your family keep any animals when you were younger? JC: Not too many, just horses to work on the farm. We had our own milk cows and chickens. We were self-sustaining. We didn t go up to grocery store very often. EW: Do you still have this land right here? JC: Right. EW: This two acres or so and you re still farming it? How long do you think you ll do that? JC: I don t know. Until I die probably. EW: Are you retired from the school system now? JC: Yes. We just keep the property because we don t know what else to do. We ve had lots of opportunities to sell it, and we don t know where to go. We think we might move some place, but we don t know where to move. So we just keep it, and that s basically the reason I farm it. It s not a real profitable thing. EW: What do you do with the fruit? JC: We sell a lot of it right here. EW: On the road? JC: Yes, and then we haul it to fruit stands, and we have a couple of outlets in Salt Lake that we ve had over the years. We haul a lot of it there. EW: What do you grow now? JC: Apples and pears and a few peaches. EW: No cherries? JC: Cherries are basically what had been sold, and he s cut it down. I had one cherry tree in my back yard, and that s it. Crandall, John 9
This year I ve spent a lot of time thinning, particularly apples. Usually you can chemically thin them, but I didn t think there were going to be that many this year. By the time they were in bloom I looked at them and said, There s not going to be that many, and there really aren t. It s only about a 50% crop this year, but it still takes a long time to go out and pull off apples. EW: You do all the harvesting and everything yourself? JC: If we have lots of good crop, we hire help. They ll come and work for me for a day or two, and they ll miss a week and then I ll get them to come back and help me a little. I pick most of my own peaches because I can pick them pretty well, and most of my apples I pick. I get them to come and help me pick pears once in a while. EW: I hear picking peaches can be quite a trial because of the fuzz. JC: Yes, I ve been cleaning them, too, and it s a real job. It s hard work and not fun. EW: Do orchards do anything specifically for a town? Do they mold a town in certain ways? JC: I think if you could make a living with a farm, it is a really good life, and my folks did it alright. We ate. But yes, my little grandson he just loves it here where he can go out and play. Run and play and run in the orchards and dig holes. They look forward every week to taking the irrigating turn, and they like to go out and play in the ditches. I think a lot of children miss out on things like that. He runs the tractor and the four-wheelers with me. He ll get on them, and he just loves to be involved in that type of thing. EW: Does Orem still have a sense of that farming community? JC: I don t think so. There are no farms around. This is probably the biggest area of farming in Orem now. There is this little patch of ten trees here and there, but basically there are no farms here. This is it. Vern Stratton up here on 800 North has got a little bit. There are a couple of little places down in west Orem, but basically the farms are gone. EW: Do you feel like there are a lot of people in Orem now who just don t have any idea what that was like? JC: Oh, yes. I know they don t have a clue. In fact, these people that just bought the farm here, he wanted to keep a few trees just so he could have some fruit to eat. He s really got an education. They didn t realize how much time it takes to thin and spray and prune and harvest. I probably spend 150 hours just thinning alone. That doesn t count the irrigation, the discing, the harvesting, the pruning, the spraying and everything else there is to do. Then you sell a box of fruit for ten bucks, and some people will come and say what a rip-off. One gal last year drove up in a Cadillac. She was complaining, and I said, Ma am with all the time I spend here I probably lose a dollar an hour during the harvest season. I lose money, and you re complaining about the price. Come on up one of these days and follow me around in the orchard and see what goes into making a peach this big for you. But they just don t have a clue. Crandall, John 10
EW: Do you think what s really hard for farmers is the misconceptions and the misunderstanding? JC: Oh, yes. EW: What do most people think farming is? JC: I don t think they have a clue what goes in an orchard. They don t have an idea of what goes on and the cost involved. They never have a clue where it came from or what went on with it. EW: Do you think the government is much help? JC: No. Government is a hindrance. When we brought the Mexicans in we had to fight the government to get them into the community because they said, Get local help to do it, and local help wouldn t do it. When we got Mexicans in many, many years ago when Geneva was functioning, they said, Don t bring those in, you re taking our jobs. We said, What do you mean, your jobs? They said, Our Union workers down here, when they re not working will come and harvest it. We said, Your union workers make at that point, say five bucks an hour down there. Here they ll make 50 cents an hour. He said, What do you mean? We said, Okay, you guarantee us that you ll harvest this fruit, and we won t bring Mexicans in, but you sign a contract that you ll guarantee that this fruit is picked, and of course they backed off. Then oh the environmental things and the sprays that we use. Every year they take one off the list that we can use because it s a hazard. You d get cancer if you inhaled it for 75 years for eight hours a day. You re just fighting things like that all the time. We used to use a spray that we could spray once a month, and it would hold. They took it off the list, so now we re down to spraying every ten days or so which creates more work, more costs, and so that s why farms are going. You just can t keep them. EW: You think it s just rising costs and falling prices? JC: Oh yes, oh yes. EW: The only kind of farm that can survive anymore is pretty much the large one. JC: Even there, they tell me that many of these big people over in Payson are going under. In fact, I see they re subdividing them now. You probably weren t aware that the year before last we had a big apple crop, and most of them went on the ground. We had 700 bushels of apples out here and didn t pick a one, because you couldn t sell them. The reason you couldn t sell them is because China was shipping apples over here. It wasn t just this area - it was all over Washington. Many farmers went out of business. They were just hanging on, and then this hit. China, who we taught the technology of growing apples, was shipping them over here and taking the markets over. The government wouldn t do anything to prevent shipping them in, so we couldn t sell our apples. There were thousands and thousands of bushels of apples that went on the ground. The ground was covered with big red apples you couldn t give them away. Crandall, John 11
EW: So do you think farming in this country will pretty much go under and it will be foreign imports? JC: Yes, I do. EW: In a lot of ways there s really no long-term hope for a farmer in America. JC: I read and I hear about the grain farmers and wheat farmers and the different kind of farmers, the cattle farmers, I understand are suffering, so I think that s will happen. The farming thing is gone. You only have to drive over through West Mountain or the big farm area, and you see large acres of trees being pulled out, and they re just not taken care of anymore. EW: Do you think America s losing maybe some of it s heritage that way? JC: Oh, sure it is around here. I don t know about elsewhere, but I think it s the same way wherever you go. I talk to people from California once in a while talk about the big citrus orchards being pulled out, so I think it s probably the same there. EW: Can you think of anything else that you ve experienced or done that you d like to tell us? JC: You know we ve been fairly happy. I enjoyed my growing-up years on a farm. I enjoy what little I do now. I kind of use farming as a little therapy. At least when I work, I come home and get on the tractor and run up and down the rows a little while and do things. But you don t make a living on it. My brother does really well because he s got a fruit stand, and he retails, but he doesn t have hundreds of acres like some of them do and try to make it that way. They ve got a nice situation, and his son Tim is interested in it. He enjoys it, and they do a good job. The main thing is to have an outlet. If you have one, you do okay. They have a little local-type thing here, and he s hooked up with it and with a couple big stores in Salt Lake. They do a good job of farming. They re one of the few in the area I think that are doing pretty well. Tim s in the school system, too, so it works out nice with him. He s out during the summer when his basic action is taking place. Crandall, John 12