City of Sunnyvale

Hello, my name is Dave Johnson from a ranch on Lawrence Road. My Great Grandfather took title to this portion of a land grant, El Rancho Quito, after my Uncle Bev won it one night when he was very drunk in Paris. He played poker with Manuel Arguello, an emissary of King Phillip of Spain, who had control of the land grants in California. When Uncle Bev saw the property and all the fruit trees on it, he wrote to my Great Grandparents and promised to deed them the land if they would come out to California and care for him until his final days. They set out in a covered wagon and finally made it to find Uncle Bev was telling the truth. It was beautiful and bountiful. We had apricots, pears and prunes. Let's talk about the prunes: A prune is not a dried plum. The two are related, but that's all. A prune comes from a prune tree in a prune orchard. If you took one of Bob Butcher's prize plums, dried it and called it a prune, he would be upset! Most people didn't know that prunes are picked from the ground. When the sugar content is just right the prune falls and is ready to be harvested. The picker placed them in a bucket, then they were dumped in boxes, they were loaded onto a truck to be taken to the drier or dehydrator.

Quite a few of us young, strong boys were hired at SunSweet to operate forklifts to move the boxes of fruit off the trucks, load them on the trays for drying and then into the individual designated stalls to await packaging and shipment to market for sale. It was quite an operation. There was a large club house, called the Napredak Hall, near our ranch where crowds of Slovakians, Yugoslavians, and other ethnic groups gathered for celebrations, dances and dinners. Many of them parked near our ranch and walked to the Hall. Thinking that the fruit on the ground was no longer good because it had fallen on the ground, they thought it was okay to take some of it for themselves. When my dad found them picking his perfectly good fruit, he asked what they were doing. They assured him they had not picked any off the trees, only off the ground. He explained the way they're picked and they understood and no longer indulged themselves. When Lockheed moved in, in the 50's, the ranchers started selling to manufacturing and housing, because the city taxes rose too high to be able to afford operating an orchard any longer. The orchards started to disappear as the factories were built. Homes sprang up as workers arrived to fill the available jobs, traffic increased, roads were paved, extended, and widened. Progress and growth meant more schools had to be built for the growing families arriving. The whole valley began to change as the blossoms and the fruit disappeared. My time on the ranch came to an end in 1961, the end of a lifestyle that I wouldn't have missed for the world. I'm glad I was born during a time when I could be a part of ranching. And a prune will always be a prune, never a plum.

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