Utah Valley Orchards Interviewee: Vern Stratton (VS) 645 East 800 North, Orem, Utah 84097 Interviewer: April Chabries (AC) and Randy Astle (RA) Interview location: 645 East 800 North, Orem, Utah 84097 Date: July 30, 2001 Note: Edited for clarity, NU=not understandable 1. Ancestors: John and Emma Stratton, and James and Eliza Stratton. 2. Emma Stratton s brick house. 3. Growing up on the farm during the depression. 4. World War II. He returns and manages a farm of his own. 5. College: Brigham Young University and Washington State, Pullman. 6. Farm help during WWII: Inmates and German POWs. The POW Camp was on his father s land. 7. Farm help through the years: Timp Labor Association and Navajo Indians. 8. Fruit distribution 9. Urban conflicts with farming. 10. Recreation on the farm. 11. Sons in the flower business.
AC: Let s start with your ancestors and how you got started in your business through your family. VS: I grew up in Orem. I am now 74 years old. The first I recall was back in the late 1920 s and early 1930 s. I was a young boy. My grandfather was John H. Stratton, my grandmother was Emma Evans Stratton. They were the second generation, their parents were original pioneers. My great-grandfather James Stratton and his wife Eliza Riggs Stratton were two of the first settlers off what was then called Provo Bench. As they related it to me then it was just Indians and sagebrush and rattlesnakes. There was a road NU wherever you wanted to go through the sagebrush. There were no roads, just a few trails. They lived down on the old fort where the old settlement was in Provo along the River. In the late 1800 s, with a few families from Provo, they decided to move out and start farming and set up some residences on the Provo Bench. They came out and started building rock and mud houses to live in. The following year they decided to try some farming. They started to clear the sagebrush. They d homesteaded the ground from the government. It cost them about 50 cents an acre or something, just a token payment, but back then 50 cents was a lot of money. The following year they decided to start trying to irrigate so they could plant some trees. BREAK IN TAPE: Second interviewer Randy Astle arrives. AC: James and Eliza were here and they started to irrigate and to farm? VS: They had come out from NU and they settled down in Provo which was in the lower part of Provo down by the old fort, if you re history by the river. Half a dozen of them moved out one year and started to homestead some land and clear the sagebrush and build their homes. Rock and adobe homes so they could live here year round. Then the following year they decided to try and get water out of Provo River which was in the river bottoms a little ways away. So they took the rocks and slips, if you know what a slip is, NU teams of oxen it s a scoop that you work by hand. They surveyed from the Provo River at the mouth of the canyon and followed the grain about a mile down. They brought it up onto the bench, and they cut it back and made a ditch which is now at Center and State Street in Orem where the ditch goes down. It s still called the Stratton Ditch because my great-grandfather was president of the company. They started to plant alfalfa fields and grain as soon as they got water the next year. The following year my grandfather and grandmother decided they d like to get into the fruit business so they started planting peach trees and berry fields and that s when the fruit business started in Utah County. AC: They started the business? They were the first ones to plant the fruit trees? VS: Well commercial, I think yes. AC: Emma had the first brick house here on the bench. Where was that? VS: It was where Albertson s is right now at State Street and Center. That was my greatgrandfather s original homestead. There was an adobe house there, then they built the first brick house next to where the original adobe rock house was. Stratton, Vern 2
AC: Was your father also in the fruit business? VS: He was in the fruit business. My grandfather bought the land from my great-grandfather, that original homestead, and he sold it to my father. My father lived there, and my grandfather moved to 1600 South and State Street and homesteaded another 60 acres and planted fruit trees there. Built a beautiful brick home there. They went up Spanish fork Canyon with their wagons and their horses and carried red rock. Those big, red rocks out of the red narrows up there and made a beautiful red rock foundation. They had a beautiful home there, a large two story home. Big rooms and the inside was artistic. They were into doing things very artistically in those days. They were skilled craftsman in woodwork chalices, and colored windows, beautiful. They spent a lot of time because they had more time than anything else. The craftsman did a good job in those days. AC: Is that house still standing? VS: No, unfortunately it got torn down. It shouldn t have been. I bought it from my grandmother and my wife and I remodeled it a little. We lived in it for ten years, built a fruit market to the side of it. I just got tired of over-working so I sold it to NU. I was going to move the house up onto the NU but I didn t put it in the contract, I didn t write it down. He agreed to let me move the house, because he didn t want it. One of those mistakes, you trust people, you think their word is as good as their bond, but unfortunately it isn t to some people. One day, NU caterpillar pushed it down which I had no say in. It should be in the historical registrar, because it was one of the original, beautiful homes in Orem. AC: What was it like for you growing up on the family farm? VS: Just all I ever knew was hard work. It was during the Depression when I grew up. I was born in 1926 so I was 5 or 6 years old when the depression came. Through hard times my father had lost his home on Center Street and all these packing houses that the bank had foreclosed. He d saved 60 acres from 8 th East to 4 th East on 800 North in Orem. This was a gravel road then. We moved an old shed where this church is just west of us here. Sixty acres of sagebrush and my mother and all eight of us kids in this little shed. We started to plant peaches here, and we just started to farm. RA: There were no trees here at the time? VS: No. We started to plant peaches, and cherries, apples. Then there was a hundred acres north of our land, he rented that and planted tomatoes and sweet corn. This is where I grew up right here working on this 160 acres from daylight till dark and after. You did chores before daylight and after dark. I was in the field all day. AC: What were some of the chores you did? VS: We milked cows, slopped the pigs they called it, fed the pigs. We had to dock the NU had to take care of them. We had to take care of the horses. We had horses to do the plowing and the cultivating, the mowing and the haying. I had to stack hay, mow the hay, stack it, stack it in the Stratton, Vern 3
barn. We had to keep the corrals clean. We had an outhouse we had to keep clean. We didn t have any indoor water or plumbing, just an original old homestead. There wasn t much around. We didn t even have electricity, no electricity went past here then. We used kerosene lanterns or candles. AC: When did electricity come to your house? VS: Oh it was about 8 or 9 years later. I was in about the 8 th or 9 th grade, whenever Gangbusters was on. I remember we got a radio and we listened to Gangbusters and Amos and Andy on the radio. I think it was 8 or 9 years after we moved up here before we finally got electricity. It was quite a novelty to turn on a light at night and turn the radio on and have electric light to study by instead of kerosene lanterns. That s where I grew up and I just worked here on the farm. I went to Lincoln High School which was on 800 South. AC: Where did your father get the starters for the peach trees? VS: He got them from different nurseries. One was here in West Orem that used to do this budding you were talking about and there was one in Salt Lake. There were people in the business that that s somebody at the door. BREAK IN TAPE RA: Did you do a lot of picking? VS: I picked fruit all the time. When strawberries would start in the spring we d pick strawberries every day for 30 days. When raspberries and cherries came we d pick raspberries and cherries for another 30 days. Then tomatoes would start in August and we d pick tomatoes until frost came. Then in September the peaches would start and pears, and we d pick peaches and pears for two or three weeks. Then after that we d pick apples until the snow. We d harvest potatoes out of the field until winter came. Busy everyday, there was no such a thing as days off. We didn t even get the holidays off. We were poor. It was the depression and everybody had to work. There wasn t any choice. You didn t have any options, you just either worked or you didn t have anything to eat so we worked. AC: When did you decide that you wanted to continue the farming tradition? VS: World War II started when I was 15 years old, and my two older brothers were in the service. One of my older brothers died just as the war started, so my brother Herbert and I were the only two boys left on the farm. When school started in September we couldn t go to school, we were the only ones here to manage the farm. We had to manage all the picking crews and the packing crews and the loading crews and everything because there was no other men around that you cold hire. So we just had to stay on the farm, and we d miss six or eight weeks of school until the apples, prunes, and potatoes were all harvested. Then we lost school credit, but fortunately we were in the farm program, young farmers. We had NU. They taught agriculture in high school then, so I was taking those classes and he said, If you keep some record, if you take a piece of the land and keep agriculture records, we ll get you some credit. That s like Stratton, Vern 4
economics, and bookkeeping, and management of a farm. Then we can give you credit for that time which is as good a schooling as you ll ever get. After two years I could see that there was a profit. I thought, well that isn t such a bad business. My brother and I rented a separate piece of land called the Shea Place, where the Orem City cemetery is now. We planted tomatoes and cantaloupes and harvested the grapes, apricots, and cherries. We kept accurate production records, and we showed a profit. I had a little money in the bank at the end of the two years. I didn t think farming was quite so bad after that because I could see it was a profitable business. AC: Did your brother Herbert go into business as well? I know he has the fruit stand on 8 th North and 8 th East. VS: Yes, he went into the service when he turned 18, and when I turned 18 they drafted me. It was during the Belgian Bulge, and they wouldn t let you stay on the farm. One of my brothers deferred for the farm, we had to leave somebody to grow the fruit, but the rest of us went. When my brother and I got out of the service I told my dad, Help me find a piece of land. I ve seen enough of the world. I ve been knocked around with being in the service for six months. I ll try farming on my own. We looked at pieces of land and we found 25 acres of bare land and rocks right up at the mouth of the canyon where Osmond Studio is now on 8 th North, where that hospital is now. I thought that was a good place to be for fruit. My father borrowed the money and we bought it, and I signed a note with my father and I started farming. AC: When did you go to college? VS: I got out of the service in 1946. I started farming then, and I started planting trees and berry fields then the next winter 1947. I went in the mission field for three and a half years, so my brother Franklin had to take care of my farm while I was gone. Franklin was the one that was deferred on the farm. Herbert, the other one that was in the service, he came home and bought a 25 acre farm over here. After I got out of the mission field then I started going to school at Brigham Young University, and then I got married. AC: Were you running your farm during the time that you were at BYU? VS: Yes, and I took a full course load at BYU, and I had a job at the Orem Police Department. I told them I d like to work nights, and so they put me on swing-shifts and graveyard shifts. I went to school and worked full time for the Orem City Police until I got my degree at BYU. I also got married and started a family. I was used to work so it didn t bother me. AC: What degree did you get from BYU? VS: A Bachelor of Arts and Sciences, I have a composite major in Agriculture and Spanish because I had a lot of Spanish credit from your mission. I took a test, and BYU gave credit based on how well you did on the test. I got 25 hours of A credit. I knew the language, I knew the grammar and the history and the culture. I learned it when I was on my mission in Texas. Stratton, Vern 5
RA: I suppose it s kind of the same thing with the orchards you learn more working on them than you do in the classrooms. VS: I always had a desire to learn the scientific part. I wanted to know why the leaves were green, and why you prune them this way, and why you fertilize, and how trees make buds that bloom in the spring. I wanted to know the cause. I love science, chemistry, physics and math. I enjoy those classes so I wanted to get my schooling. When I graduated, I got a teaching assistant position in Washington for my master s degree. AC: You got your master s degree at Washington State? VS: I was at Washington State, Pullman for two years and taught Pomology 101. It was easy for me, teaching how to plant trees, train them, and grow fruit. I had been doing it all my life. I d studied the botanical part of it, I knew why then. By the time I got out of school I knew why the trees were green, why you fertilized them, and why you pruned them. I had answers for all those questions I had been asking myself when I was a young boy. AC: Did you do your schooling back to back? After BYU did you go immediately to Washington State? VS: Yes. AC: Was your brother taking care of your farm when you went up to Pullman? VS: No, I took care of it, I d come home in the summer. I d send my wife home a couple of months earlier to manage it, and then I d come home for three months. It was only a couple of years. I got by. You don t do as much farming when you re going to school full time. AC: You said during the war that you and your brother supervised crews. What type of help did you have during the war? VS: The first part of the war we had inmates from the state prison. There were some men there for rape, some for murder, some for robbery they used to tell us their stories. They d bring them down with guards. They weren t the hard core inmates, they were the ones that they could trust who wouldn t be giving them any problems. We used them for a couple of years. Then they built a prisoner of war camp on my father s property right up here on 8 th East and then we had German prisoners of war the last year of the war. AC: Did they buy the land from your father? VS: No, they just used it. They moved in on his tomato patch. They said, he won t care. They knew him pretty well. It was fine. Everybody was involved in the war effort, they wanted to get the war over with. RA: Did anyone else use inmates? Stratton, Vern 6
VS: I don t know. We had to have help and my father made the arrangements and they used to come down everyday. They d bring them down in the truck. They had guards with them, but they had no place to go. They were probably their best inmates, and had earned the right to go out and work. The German prisoners were better workers than the inmates, but any help was good help then because you didn t have any help. You used anything you could get those days. We used the German prisoners for one or two years, and as soon as the war ended they closed the camp down and sent the prisoners back to Germany. I wasn t here then because I was in the service, but the previous year we used them everyday. AC: On your own farm, what kind of help have you had through the years? VS: When I first started out I used Anglo-Saxon men, and I worked on the farm, I was young. A lot of my friends that didn t have farms would come and work for me. Then as I got older, younger people that lived around here worked for me. We used to take trucks into Provo when the harvest would come on (strawberries and cherries) there were a lot of young people that wanted to work then, because they didn t have any other place to earn money. There weren t a lot of hot dog stands and Dairy Queens to work in. So we d have regular stops and we d pick up the help we needed; all farmers did that. We used local help for quite a few years until that dwindled. After the war everybody got more money and kids got bigger allowances from their parents so they didn t want to work. They didn t need to work to have spending money. Then the government let us import documented workers from Mexico, they had a program to bring them in. We formed the Timp Labor Association and sent our President to Mexico to a recruiting center. He d get them all documented with passports, and we d bring them up on buses and guarantee them work and a place to live. It was a regular contract. After their term was over we d send them back to Mexico. AC: Did you ever have housing on your land? VS: We used the Prisoner of War camp for years because when the war ended they sold it to my dad. They were old barrack buildings, but it was very adequate. They were good buildings and they had a boiler there where you d have hot water in the showers and a nice, big kitchen. So we had good housing until it burned down, careless people burned it down. The Indians didn t like to cook inside so they d cook outside. We had a lot of Navajo Indians too from southern Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. But they like to cook outside and the bonfire caught the grass and burned the buildings up. AC: Did you have Navajos for quite a few years that worked for you? VS: Yes, along with the documented workers. We d hire anybody who wanted to work. Still do. We re still in the same position. Anybody who really wants to work we ll give them a job. There aren t many people who want to work on the farm. It is hard work. AC: I know you have a fruit stand, do you distribute your fruit in other ways? Stratton, Vern 7
VS: Yes, I wholesale most of my fruit. I have a packing shed and a cooler. We NU our apples and pears over the machine, and if we pack peaches we hand sort them. I sell to Associated, to stores and to wholesalers. For 30 years I ve run a truck to Albuquerque, New Mexico, I have half a dozen accounts there. Fruit stands, peddlers, stores and wholesalers, you sell to anybody that ll buy from you. RA: How has the shape of the community changed? It used to be all orchards and now it s not. How do you think that s influenced Orem and the kind of people who live here? VS: It s gone from an agrarian to an urban lifestyle. When I was a boy it was agriculture. When we lived in this little house I was telling you about, I d walk through the fields from 8 th North to the high school, that s about two miles. It would take about 20 minutes to get to school, sometimes even less than that. I d cut through the ditches and hop the fences and jump the canals and that s the way we went to school. Most everyone was involved in agriculture, or if they weren t involved they were they were sympathetic. Now the urban people aren t sympathetic to agriculture because those two lifestyles clash. Some people don t like you to spray. Some people don t like you to burn limbs. Some people don t like you to run noisy tractors up and down the rows. On and on and on, they can sure find a litany of things to complain about some people. But I get along pretty good with my neighbors. I ve had to tell two or three of my neighbors in a nice way, I m not moving so if you can t get along with me, just move. If you can t stand what I m doing, I can t move my operation, you ll have to move. I m not trying to be mean or ignorant, but I have to farm the land and there are certain things I have to do. If you can t live in peace with it, it s best you just moved. Some of them have moved, they took the advice and it s better. But most people around here like to see the orchards. They like to see you farm. Most people are still sympathetic because they like to eat fruit too. They know people have to grow fruit before you can buy it in the grocery store. We don t have too many arguments. Most arguments come from when they get flooded with water. Somebody doesn t take their ditch water and it floods a basement or a canal breaks and floods some homes. Water is very destructive, it doesn t take much to ruin a basement. AC: What were some of the things that you did for recreation growing up? VS: When I was a boy? Mostly I worked. That was my recreation. We d make flipper crotches, we were good at that. We had plenty of trees to cut a good Y and make a flipper crotch. We made our own kites. We were very skilled at making kites because we whittled. We didn t have any money to go buy anything with. We whittled our own little cars to play in the sand pile, and made our own little boats with NU plastic to float on the water, our little motor boats. We d make guns with rubber bands and clothespins, whittle our guns out to play cops and robbers. We just made our own toys, never did buy a toy because we never did have money in those days. But we were happy. We were fine. We played NU run my sheepy run, and all the games that kids played then. We played a lot of them at night. But in the summer we worked a lot, we didn t have a lot of time to play. Once in a while we would go fishing, we d dig some worms and go up Stratton, Vern 8
the canyon, or we had a picnic once in a while. That s about it. I used to go deer hunting for a few days in the fall because then the harvest was all over. AC: You have a pretty big family don t you? VS: I have four sons and four daughters. The four sons are all in the flower business. Two own the Cascade Shadows, one owns Rainbow Gardens in southeast Provo, and one owns Highland Farms just north of the American Fork temple in Highland. One of my daughters married a sign man, one married a computer man, one married a doctor, and one married a guy who is a good banjo player. RA: Did your children work on the farm growing up? VS: My kids were my absolutely my best help. My boys would meet after and make cases. We used to make wood berry cases, we d start early spring, I d get the wood out of the lumber yard, and they d cut it up for me everyday. I d pay them half a penny or a quarter penny a case, and they d make cases all spring. They stack three or four thousand cases for me. They would help pick the fruit, the strawberries. They were my best help because I could count on them. I could get them out of bed in the morning and take them with me. They learned how to do it better than anybody else. They soon became my supervisors, they d supervise people in the fields. The boys would drive the trucks and deliver the produce. That s why they ve gone in business by themselves because they found out that they could make money at it. They could see if they put the work into it, they could have some dollars and be their own boss. Once they got to be out on their own why they decided to go into business for themselves. RA: Why did they decide on the flower business instead of fruit? VS: They started out being NU and steel-men building steel buildings and cement. They were in the construction business, because that s where the big money was. One went with his friends and worked in the oil fields because he could make pretty good money. Better than the farm paid, a lot better than I could pay them because they got to be quite skilled at NU work and building steel buildings. It was dangerous work and they d have to travel around a lot. Then they got married, and they didn t like to travel around so much. Two of my boys were erecting steel and they said, Dad we ve had it, we re going to try farming. I said, Okay. I was getting ready to retire. I said, There s my cultivating equipment tractors and cultivators and sprayers, and there s the land right over here where the school is. Go ahead and grow some vegetables. So they liked it, and they were good at it, they worked hard at it. One year I had a little wooden greenhouse, right here by my big greenhouse where I d grow my tomato plants and pepper plants ahead of time (I planted seeds in peat moss). I d grow them for about a month or six weeks in my greenhouse where I could keep them warm, and then I d put them out. This way you got on the early market. I gave my sons the greenhouse, and one year they planted some flower seeds in there. Flowers were so much easier than fruit and vegetables because when they got the flowers up into bloom, they could take them out and sell them. They Stratton, Vern 9
didn t have to do anything more with them. They didn t have to re-plant them. They could see that was the best way to go. The next year they filled the whole greenhouse with flowers. Stratton, Vern 10