Saratoga News

Photographs by Robert Scheer

A Sense of History

The Garrod family maintains a large slice of the valley's agricultural past

By Mary Ann Cook

The Garrod Farms branding symbol is G with a lazy F (having fallen over on its face at a right angle to its upright position). That lazy F may be the only thing inactive about the Garrod Farms operation, under the trusteeship and general management of Vince Garrod.

Four of Garrod's six children are directly involved in the operation. Emma Drinker is coach and riding instructor and oversees the stable office; Victoria Bosworth runs the horse-boarding operation; Jan Garrod is in charge of all the farming, including the vineyards; (brother-in-law George Cooper runs the winery, bottled under the Cooper-Garrod label, and he and Vince's sister, Louise Cooper, live on the ranch); Tim operates the ranch in Lassen County where cattle, alfalfa, garlic, strawberries, wheat and barley are grown, along with the hay used at Garrod Stables.

The two maverick offspring are both teachers: Peter, dean of graduate students at the University of Hawaii, director of the experimental program and professor of agricultural economics; and Chris Baldwin, who teaches in the San Jose Unified School District and lives with her husband and two children on the family homestead on Mt. Eden Road, along with her mother and father. Jan, Emma, Victoria and their families live in separate houses nearby.

Overseeing all this action is Vince Garrod, who grew up in the same house where he now lives, which was built in 1868 and moved to its present site sometime before 1893, the date that marks the founding of Garrod Farms. In those days the land contained pastures, orchards and vineyards, and Vince's father, R.V., was the landowner.

Vince grew up "gulchin' out," the title of his memoir. The phrase probably originated with the woodcutters who were the first to "gulch out" here. The phrase was "used almost exclusively in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties by those who lived and worked in the coastal mountains" for hauling goods out, as Garrod writes in his memoir.

The best name for the area he has lived in all his life, he contends, is Dobe Gulch, short for adobe, the heavy, sticky clay soil.

Vince Garrod grew up "proud to be a prune-picker." In those days everybody in the area was a prune-picker, from children of 6 or 7 on up. He says his own goal (at about age 10) was "to pick 10 boxes a day; at that time that would make me one dollar. I made this goal and completed the season and received $35.

"A mark of a real prune-picker was a pair of jeans or overalls with pads sewn into the knees with holes worn into the pads, shoes with the toes worn out from dragging on the ground and hands with the nails and cuticles all torn."

With this background, Garrod feels a special affinity for his workers: That's why he says he's proud to be a prune-picker.

The Jim Inouye family was the first Japanese family to settle in Saratoga after being incarcerated during World War II. They lived in a house on the Garrod Farms that now serves as the stable office. "I always felt that was so unfair, putting the Japanese in camps," he says. Jim Inouye pruned trees for the Garrods.

Besides picking prunes, Vince Garrod cut 'cots, cultivated the orchards, tended livestock and attended Saratoga schools. He remembers winning a book called High Flying in a kite-building/flying contest at Oak Street School. He got his kite--hexagonal, and made of split redwood trays and butcher paper--up so high it took 20 minutes just to reel it in.

When World War II was declared, Garrod was a senior at UC-Berkeley, majoring in agricultural economics. His brother was drafted, his parents were aging and he was 4F because of an ear problem, so he went back to manage the farm and to finish up his degree by correspondence.

Meanwhile, he had married Jane Whiteman, a nursing student at Stanford, who was also a Saratoga product. They had known each other since grade-school days. Besides being the Garrod matriarch, Jane is an accomplished watercolorist whose work appears in the art gallery co-op at Fourth Street and Big Basin Way, as well as in the winery tasting room and stable office.

The farm was in prunes and apricots when Vince Garrod took over its management. But after 20 years of tending to painstaking apricot harvesting, as well as battling fungus, gophers and rising costs and restrictions, he replaced the apricots with horse stables. And by 1968 the prunes were gone, too, to make room for boarding stables. In 1971, grapes were planted.

Besides being the trustee of all this and Lassen too, Vince Garrod is vice chairman of POST (Peninsula Open Space Trust), a private agency that buys land dedicated to open space, currently conducting a three-year fund drive for $28 million. "You can't save it unless you can buy it," he comments with a wry smile.

It was the sale of about 120 acres on the northern side of Garrod Farms for $1,025,000 that initiated the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District in 1980, and thus Garrod was one of the founders and organizers of that agency.

He is also a founder of the Los Gatos- Saratoga Recreation Department and continues to be a director there. For 23 years he was a Saratoga school board member. "That was very satisfying. It took a lot of time but was a lot of fun. In my time the district went from one to five schools, so I helped buy some of the land, watched them get built."

One of the hardest things about that tenure was making personnel decisions, reassigning or firing employees. "People are mostly good-hearted, good-spirited," he says. "The deviations from normal are hard to understand."

Although he plays string bass for the Skillet Lickers, a group that "plays for food at nursing homes and churches, or wherever Les Landin can be talked into it," Garrod's chief hobby is going to meetings, he admits, grinning.

When friends ask him what he's going to do when he retires, he says, "I am retired. I've been retired for 12 years. This keeps my mind occupied." Since a heart-valve replacement and resultant infection and stroke three years ago, his gait has slowed and he's reluctant to travel; he would slow down his mate, he feels. Wife Jane and daughter Victoria are just back from Turkey on a church-sponsored trip.

Something of a present-day Will Rogers, Garrod says, "I've never met anyone I dislike."

His offspring would put it more strongly. Jan, Emma and Vicky collaborated on the following about their dad: "He's one of the most amazing people we know. Everyone likes him, and friends often come to him for advice. A man of the soil, he grew up as a farmer, worked as a farmer and will always be a farmer. His love for the land and that which comes from the land is evident in all he does.

"He has terrific insight into people and problems and is understanding and caring. At 79, he can remember the names and faces of friends throughout the years, as well as text from his college days. A very smart man, he also has a sense of humor and can laugh at himself and the rest of the world with ease. He is a grand old fox."

Among the groups whose meetings Garrod has attended are the Black Mountain Soil Conservation District, which he helped organize; the California Association of Resource Districts; California Apricot Producers, for which he served as president; California Canners and Growers, for which he served as director; the Santa Clara Grand Jury; the Board of Governors of Farmers Insurance Exchange; and the Santa Clara Valley Water District's Agricultural Advisory Board.

"I'm easy to get along with, don't get mad. I'm a facilitator of bringing things together. I guess that's why I go to so many meetings. I enjoy life, take things as they come."

There was a time in 1952 when it looked like that enjoyment was over. A truck tire blew up as he was filling it, and a metal rod impaled him and inflicted such bodily damage that his doctor said, "Anyone else would have been dead." But he mended to sire two more children and continue the Garrod legacy.

Because he was an honor student at Berkeley, "I would have gone on and gotten further degrees, become a teacher, if it hadn't been for the war," he speculates. His oldest, Peter, has done that for him. But when his brother, Dick, came home from war, the two decided that Vince would be the farmer. Dick worked for State Farm Insurance instead, an extension of the work their father had started during his lifetime.

Their father, R.V., wrote "The Saratoga Story," a pamphlet describing the early days of Saratoga, available at the Saratoga History Museum. Vince's own recollections are in Gulchin' Out. During his childhood and young manhood, his view was a sea of white from the orchards in bloom in the valleys below, rather than the green of today.

A huge hill of horse dung sits at the very top of the Garrod property, nearly as large as a small house, a natural byproduct of the stables. "You're looking at the biggest pile of shit in Saratoga," he says with a laugh and an apology, fearful of giving offense.

As for the rest of the view, "it's a nice place," Garrod says, ruminating about his 120 acres, perched on a nob that overlooks Silicon Valley and from which you can see a sizable portion of the rest of the Bay Area as well. "I always feel good when I come out here."

And via the open space district, he shares his spot on top of the world with the rest of us.

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