The Willow Glen Resident

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

Iron Man: After manufacturing fruit-dehydration equipment for 53 years at his shop on Autumn Street, George Garbarino is retiring, and Garbarino Machine and Iron Works is slated for demolition.

Garbarino Machine and Iron Works slated for demolition after 53 years in business

Family-owned shop produced equipment for many canneries

By Cecily Barnes

Eighty-six-year-old George Garbarino slowly limps across the same cement floor he's moved across every day for the past 53 years. He wears a dirty blue apron around his khaki pants and a baseball cap to cover his white, wispy hair. Stepping to the front door of his soon-to-be-demolished Autumn Street iron shop, one block from the San Jose Arena, Garbarino says, "Now I can pay all my bills, and I can relax."

After 53 years making fruit-dehydration equipment in the shop his father began 70 years ago, Garbarino will retreat to his 10-room home on Willow Street. He'll also occupy himself with woodwork projects.

"I built my own patio, you know," he says proudly. "I added to it--25 or 30 feet."

Garbarino Machine and Iron Works was founded in 1928, when Paul P. Garbarino left the San Jose Foundry to make a go of it on his own. For the next 70 years, Paul and his sons designed and hand-crafted fruit-dehydration and stacking equipment for clients including Marianis Packing Company, Sunsweet and CalPrune Packing House. The shop also fixed machinery for companies not in the fruit business, such as the San Jose Mercury News.

Even after the Santa Clara Valley's orchards were razed to make way for high-tech campuses, fruit-packing companies in the San Joaquin Valley and around the world continued to purchase Garbarino equipment.

"We get the work because we do good work," Garbarino says proudly. "A lot of our customers we've had for 40 years."

In Garbarino's office, an aged bulletin board displays yellowing obituaries of clients and friends with whom he had decades-long relationships--Joseph Robino of Valley View Packing Company, John Cantoni of Sunsweet and Edmund Mirassou of Mirassou Winery.

"These were all good customers; we sold to every one of them. It's a funny feeling to sit down and you can't even call them," Garbarino says.

When Garbarino retires, he will return to a community of friends. Sadly, he's had two wives pass on, and his children didn't survive childbirth. "That would never happen today," he says.

Garbarino's sister, Marie, lives in Willow Glen, and his younger brother, Edwin, lives in Eureka. His older brother, Paul, has passed away. Until recently, Edwin would come to San Jose once a month and help out in the shop. With it gone, he'll still come to see his brother and sister, but likely not as often. And when he does make it to San Jose, the city won't feel quite the same.

"It will be different," Edwin says emphatically, "but everything has to stop sometime."

All three Garbarino boys started working at their dad's shop straight out of high school, with George and Paul taking time off to serve in World War II. Marie Garbarino worked the books at the shop until she married one of her father's employees, Frank Mabie.

Immediately after high school, George Garbarino had a chance to join a training camp for professional baseball players in Arizona. Joe DiMaggio had taken him up to San Francisco and introduced him to professional ball. "But my mom wouldn't sign the papers," he says. "She said, 'You go down and work with your dad.' It was the Depression, and we were a family."

The family grew up in a house with kerosene lanterns, well water and no telephones.

Garbarino leans over and puts his mouth to a stream of water that shoots from the cement work sink on the shop-room floor. He guffaws when asked if the water is filtered. "I drink out of the creek sometimes," he says. "We had well water growing up; we drank anything."

Garbarino walks slowly outside his building, where memories seep from piles of scrap metal strewn in unruly stacks.

A wire fence separates Garbarino's shop from Los Gatos Creek, where Garbarino and his brothers used to spear enormous fish from the creek. Photos on the office wall show the men proudly displaying their catches.

"I used to take my gun and hunt right out there," he says. "If I did that now, I'd be arrested."

In all likelihood, the new property owners won't swim in the creek, catch fish in the summer or hunt for game along the creek bed. The SJW Land Company will probably move the homeless encampments along the creek, where, according to Garbarino, "good people" live.

"One guy wanted to know once if he could fish the creek," Garbarino recalls. "I told him, 'I don't own it.' "

Within six months, bulldozers hired by the SJW Land Company will flatten Paul P. Garbarino Machine and Iron Works to make room for a shiny new parking lot. The lot will be used by customers of a new restaurant planned for the corner of Autumn and W. Santa Clara streets. These developments are the first in what will be a slow move to develop a commercial strip along Autumn, says SJW property manager William Moore.

"If you look at the Midtown Specific Plan, that area is slowly evolving for restaurants and other commercial uses," Moore says. "With the light rail coming into Diridon [Station], it's going to be a tremendously popular entrance into the Arena."

Once escrow closes this week, Garbarino will have six months to vacate his building. However, used to doing business in a different way, Garbarino started selling off all the shop's equipment as soon as he had a verbal agreement with SJW. Almost everything is gone.

"Any deal you did, " Garbarino says of his early business years, "you did with a handshake."

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