Photograph courtesy of Palma Nichols
Historical Harvest: For more than 50 years, Ralph Cassibba, pictured here in 1997, used traditional ranching techniques to grow award-winning prunes on his South San Jose orchard.
Remember When
Family orchards becoming things of past
By Cookie Curci-Wright
In 1945, Ralph Cassibba was a young, energetic, fresh-faced kid, just out of the service. As his father before him, he had a dream--to grow the Santa Clara Valley's richest prune harvest. With a small down payment, salted away from his military pay, the young veteran purchased a prune ranch on McKean Road--the same orchard planted by his father in 1921.
Joe Cassibba, Ralph's father, emigrated here from Sicily at the turn of the century. He brought with him the inherent skills of ranching, pruning and grafting--knowledge needed for the production and development of a fine and healthy fruit orchard.
Like his ancestors, Ralph Cassibba drew his energy for ranching from his desire to succeed and from the love he felt for his land. He worked his orchards with the barest of tools, tilled the earth with tractors and disks, and grafted and pruned each tree painstakingly by hand. His reward was the privilege of bringing in one of the state's richest prune crops.
In 1940, canning and packing companies such as Del Monte, Sunsweet, Mayfair and Valley View Packing transformed the valley fruit production into a nationwide commodity.
During the 1930s and '40s, the springtime offered a breathtaking view of the valley from atop Blossom Hill Road (named for the beauty that once was its view) in Los Gatos. San Jose residents took long leisurely drives to its highest point to admire the pink and white fruit blossoms that blanketed the valley as far as the eye could see.
For more than 50 years, Cassibba used the same ranching techniques on his McKean Road orchard as did his father 90 years ago.
Every year, Ralph Cassibba personally drove his own flatbed truck, laden with grade-A prunes to the Sunsweet packing association in Morgan Hill. From there the crop was sent to northern parts of the state, to the dehydrating plants in Winters and Yuba City.
The prunes from Cassibba's fruit trees took first place at the Santa Clara County Fair for more than 40 years.
The Cassibba family shares a special legacy, one that touches every descendent of our valley's early founders.
"I was holding on to a memory," says Cassibba, wistfully, "a piece of our valley's past and its heritage."
Cassibba, as his father and grandfather before him, relished putting in a good day's work. During prune season, he often put in a grueling 14-hour work day. Cassibba says of his ranch, "It was a place where I could go and work with my hands, till the same soil my father did before me, and savor the same rich, sweet taste of a ripe plum--picked fresh from my trees--and where rows of white blossoms filled my landscape with the promise of another fruitful season."
The intricate pruning of fruit trees is an important part of producing a successful crop. "I pruned my trees in the old-fashioned way, the way my father taught me and his father before him," Cassibba says.
Working alone, the tedious hand pruning took the entire two months of October and November to accomplish.
"I irrigated all my trees manually, eleven hours of watering per cycle" he says, I dug deep irrigation ditches with my tractor, using heavy steel tractor disks and portable aluminum piping to fill the zigzagging ditches high with water."
Each year, 50 to 60 tons of prunes, more or less, depending on the weather, were harvested from the Cassibba Ranch and carried by fork-lift into huge bins. The same family of laborers was employed every year to harvest the prune crops.
The revenue earned from his prunes varied every year, with the economy and the popularity of the prune.
"I wasn't in the prune ranching business just for monetary gain. I could have sold out for a profit years ago, if that was my goal. It goes much deeper than that for me," Cassibba says. "It was knowing that, when I pulled up a tree from its roots or pruned its branches, it was my father who planted that tree. By keeping those trees alive, I was keeping the dream alive for all the pioneer ranchers whose hard work was represented by the continuity of my ranch."
Time, escalating costs and a lack of product demand has made it necessary for ranchers, such as Cassibba, to relinquish their long-held land. The valley's few remaining fruit orchards are now subsidized by national companies.
Ralph Cassibba grew up on a 15-acre ranch in the Robertsville area of Almaden. His parents, Joe and Rose Cassibba, purchased the land in 1922. Ralph and his sister Palma, as with most children of local ranchers, worked on the family ranch every day, before and after school, helping to pick and dry the prune and apricot harvest.
"In those days, the whole family pitched in to dry the fruit. We dipped the prunes into a lye water solution and the apricots into sulfur and spread them in wooden trays to dry in the afternoon sun."
According to Ralph, Papa Joe Cassibba had his own unique way of budgeting his ranch and household finances. The revenue from apricot crops went to the fruit pickers, the income from the prune trees paid the household mortgages and living expenses, and the money earned from the walnut harvest paid the property taxes. A small vineyard on the property was cultivated to make Papa Joe's homemade red wine.
The original family ranch was sold in the late 1960s. It is bisected by what is now Chenoweth Avenue.
"Ranching was a lucrative, family business in my day," recalls Cassibba, "passed on from father to son. Those days are gone".
Today, the Santa Clara valley has become famous for its microchip. The big machine of progress has plowed under most of the valley's prune orchards. New home construction, condominiums and business complexes fill the old orchards and ranch sites where, in many instances, rotting plums lie on the ground beneath unattended fruit trees.
Grandma used to say, "Progress is someone trying to make things as good as it used to be."
I know progress is good and necessary, but there are times when I have to agree with grandma's philosophy.
Like myself, there are many longtime residents who remember our valley when it was "the Valley of Heart's Delight" before the silicon chip came along, a time when a "mouse" was something the cat dragged home, a "menu" was something we ordered from in a restaurant, a "window" was for looking through, a "disk' was pulled behind Papa's tractor and a "chip," well, a chip was something a cow left behind!
Cookie Curci-Wright can be contacted at cookie-wright@mymailstation.com.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
