Oral History Program Ralph Neilson Interviewed by Shanna Richelle Seiler 04 February 2005 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ralph Neilson Interviewed by Shanna Richelle Seiler 04 February 2005 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Neilson, Ralph, an oral history by Shanna Richelle Seiler, 04 February 2005, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Ralph Neilson. The interview was conducted on February 4, 2005, in Perry, Utah. Mr. Neilson describes his personal knowledge and experience with canning and preserving, as well as his career in agriculture and farming in Utah. SS: Alright you can state your full name, date and place of birth. RN: Ralph Neilson, born in Brigham City Utah on September the 27, 1932. SS: Tell me about Neilson’s produce, how long have you been doing this for? RN: Neilson’s fruit been here, my dad started the business in 1934. We have been, he moved her from San Pete Utah and he became a school teacher and he couldn’t make a living enough to feed his kids on teaching school so he started doing some farming by running land. Then he started buying land the first land he bought was in 1936 and he bought that for I think $100.00 an acre. From that time on everything that he could make he would put back into buying land and buying farms. Consequently over the years we have gotten to the position where we are now where he had about 300 acres now we are down to about 200 acres. My brother he wanted to do something else so he did something else. There is still three of us in the family that own the land and one of them is a doctor one of the them is a retired school teacher and the other one is me and I am a retired school teacher that still farms. SS: Where does most of your produce come from? RN: In the summer time we grow about 200 acres of produce. It is all peaches and apricots and sweet cherries and apples. We used to grow other fruits, cantaloupes, water melon 1 and con. But because I am the only one left I buy those form the farmer. Most of the stuff in the summer comes from our farm besides most of the stuff I buy from. A lot a fruit produce comes out of the North West and of course in the winter time our produce comes from California or Mexico or South America. It comes into Salt Lake and you buy it off the market. SS: Tell me about your family. RN: I have 4 kids, a wife and 4 kids. Three girls and a boy. One daughter, her husband they live here in our area. She helps me her husband is a post master out in Tremonton. Others live in Roy and Salt Lake and Arizona. SS: This is a family owned business, correct? RN: This is a family owned business. Of course it was started by my dad and then as he bought the land he put his kids names on the land along with his and there was four of us siblings from my father. Then when he and my mother passed away then it was all in our four names and now one of them is took his and give it and now the three of us owned the land. SS: Tell me about the clients that come and purchase fruit. RN: Well it is interesting over the years when we first started there was a lot of these peddlers that would make money on the side my buying fruit and take out into these smaller towns in the area and peddle fruit. They would buy it that way and then the truckers that would take it up into Montana. In the season peaches and cherries well they’d haul them up there. They did a lot of canning up in that area at that time. So we sold it up into actually Idaho Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. And I still sell a lot of 2 stuff into Colorado and into Wyoming and Idaho. There still is quite a few people that go there and they do can. We don’t sell to super markets at all because super markets they won’t accept a product unless it is almost a perfect product. It has to be packaged and everything has to be perfect about it and you can’t sell good fruit and have it perfect because it is green. You have to pick it green and then people don’t they buy it and they won’t come back. SS: What is the highest selling item that you guys carry? RN: The best is always what you do the best in that is we grow the most peaches. About ¾ of our product is peaches. Our area is more conducive to growing peaches. We feel that we grow some of the best peaches in the country as far as flavor and other things is concerned. The other areas we do different things, in Idaho and Washington they grow apples, and they grow some peaches. Our crop here is mainly peaches and we do a lot of sweet cherries and apricots. (PHONE RANG) SS: Alright you were telling me about the peaches and the apricots. RN: The peaches are our main crop and just for our climate is more conducive to growing peaches so our conditions are the best. A lot of people, most people don’t realize this but our area we have the most mild climate in the state of Utah. Except St. George and theirs is too mild for growing fruit successfully. They come onto it and they freeze out but we are able to grow peaches almost 100% successfully. Whereas if you go down to Provo, and they have a hard time growing peaches, it is colder down there than it is up here in Brigham City. We have a more mild temp. Why it is I don’t know, they say it is because of the lake but I don’t know if that is 100% true or not. So we grow mostly or mainly peaches and we think they’re the best there is. 3 SS: Brigham City is famous for its peaches and all the research that I have done I have gotten stories about coming down in their covered wagons. RN: That’s how they’d take their vacation in September. Peaches when there weren’t very many varieties, the crop would come on about the 20th of August until the middle of September and so people would come down from Idaho and Wyoming and take a vacation and come over and get their fruit so they could take it home and can it. Well now we have peaches that come on the last week in July and pick until the first week in October. So peaches we have a long, long time and a lot of different, more variety. What’s happening, people don’t can so much but people do eat a lot more fresh peaches. I remember people used to always can and they would as if the peaches are for eating or for canning and I would say, well you can do both. Most people think of them as eating peaches now because most people don’t can. Fresh fruit is always better than canned fruit. It’s hard to beat good canned peaches. SS: What do you remember about the fruit way when you were young? RN: Well when I was young it was a two lane highway out. All the fruit at that time was packed, there was several little packing sheds around, it was packed for railroad cars or ice cars. There was no refrigeration in those days. Ice cars it was transferred into the mid-west. Back into Nebraska and some back to Chicago and it was picked very green and packed in Bushel baskets. Green faced and down as fast as they possibly could. Then they’d send it back there. Most people back there, that’s where they would get their fruit. The Fruitway really wasn’t a fruitway to speak of except these local people, when I say local I mean southern Idaho and western Wyoming, those people knew it was here, they’d drive down and get the fruit. The people out of Salt lake wouldn’t come 4 up, and people out of the cities wouldn’t come up because people didn’t travel back in the day that much. The fruitway, after the War was over people started traveling a lot and it started getting more popular. The fruitway, this was the place where a lot of farmers and a lot of people out selling their fruit and it was very good quality fruit and people just loved to do it. It almost took the place of the old market place in Salt Lake. There was a market place down there in Salt Lake the church built in the late 80s early 90s so that the farmers had a place to take their produce into the market and then they would sell it. The people in Salt Lake would go down there and the peddlers would come in and buy it also to take it out onto the towns. That kinda fizzled out in the, after the 50’s was over with the people started coming to the fruit way. This is the place they get the freshest fruit. SS: Are there more stands now than there were? RN: No there’s less. What has happed there in the 60’s 70’s and 80’s between a ten mile strip between Brigham and North Ogden there was about oh, probably as high as 30 fruit stands. Now we are down to about 10-11. The reason is that the people who were in the fruit business at that time, as they grew older the next generation didn’t have that much interest in it. So the people would grow older and they’d have to quite or die off or sell their property. Consequently there’s fewer of us that do this thing. People don’t can as much so it is harder to sell big quantities of fruit. People used to come in and buy ten bushels of peaches, now they come in and buy a half a bushel to eat and come back a week later and buy another one. It’s not like it was before. So the fruit way is still quit famous as far as a place to get really good produce and very inexpensive produce compared to the stores. There a big variety, we’ve got a lot of thing here. 5 SS: People would come in and buy tones and tons and tons of produce? RN: Oh yeah they’d buy all their canning. That was a big part of life back in those days, for the family to can. It was the whole families outing you might say, and they’d take it home and the kids would help um can it. That was the way of life. Things had changed. SS: Did you guys can with your kids? RN: Well we still can, I still can, my wife doesn’t can as much as I do but she still cans a lot. I freeze peaches every year and we can peaches and do grape juice, and yes we do a lot of things. I have four kids and one cans the other three don’t. They don’t think it is necessary. I guess it is really not, but it sure, I think it gives you a better quality of food. It is a lot cheaper and it is the way I like it we grew up with it. SS: Do you guys make preserves out of them? RN: Oh yeah, we make a lot of jams and those kind of things, in fact I’ve got to make a bunch up no ‘cause I have a lot of berries and the fruits in the freezer I’m thinking about making jam and preserves out of. Of course that’s the best there is you can’t buy as good as stuff as you can make. SS: I saw down there the Neilson’s jam, do you guys make that. RN: I had a guy out in Tremonton make it for a while I’d send him the stuff out. But now we just make it here in the shop. SS: How long does it usually take? RN: Oh it doesn’t take long. To do a batch only takes an hour or so. You just do it and you do a lot of it. We do it a little bit at a time. 6 SS: Is it a pretty popular item? RN: Oh yeah, we have people who use a lot of jam, buy a lot of jam. I buy jam from other people who make it also. SS: What is the busiest time of year? RN: The busiest time of the year is when the summer starts and cherries come and everybody loves sweet cherries. They are easy to eat they are good. Cherries start in the middle of June, maybe the 20th of June. That’s when it gets busy and then it gets busier and busier until about the middle of Sept. The busiest month is probably the 10th of august through the 10th of Sept. The thing that helps keep it busy is of course Brigham City celebrated peach day for over 100 years and people for some reason they think that’s the best time to buy peaches. It probably is but we have a lot of different varieties now so you could probably get them at any time. That’s kinda a gathering place for people to come back and renew their acquaintance with the family members and friends they grew up with. There is a lot of people who come back into Brigham. The come for about 2 weekends, Labor Day weekend and peach day weekend are really our busiest weeks. We sell a lot of peaches. They come and they get them ‘cause they know, people will tell you they don’t get peaches anywhere like they do in Northern Utah. SS: Tell me about what you were telling me before about the strawberries and making jam. The price difference. RN: Oh, you know it is interesting, most people don’t can anymore or do anything. I buy a lot of strawberries in the spring of the year from California and different places because 7 they are really cheap. Four, five, six dollars a case. I’ll have those out there and maybe 200-300 to sell and I’ll have ladies come in and buy a bottle of jam that costs more than the case of raspberries. The case of raspberries or strawberries or whatever it is would probably make anywhere from 15-20 bottles of jam. They seem to be self-sufficient enough that they are content to pay for the service, they don’t want to do the work themselves. SS: Was that different a while ago RN: Oh no. Years ago of course everybody is dependent upon themselves but now it’s a lot different. So times change and we all realize that people have a lot more money now these days. Consequently they spend a lot. When I was growing up no one had any money so you just made do with what you had do and that’s one reason I think everybody is self-sufficient or tried to be. They would buy their product and take it home and put it up. They could make money go a lot further. SS: Do you guys can a lot for your own personal use RN: Yeah we got probably at least 2 years supply in our basement of fruits. And there is nothing nicer than having to go down and get a bottle of cherries to make cherry pie or something like that that you do. Then you don’t have to go to the store, when we go to the store it scares you when you buy a can of pie cherries or pie it costs you a lot more than it does when you process it in the summer time. SS: You told me that you canned with your family when you were young. RN: Oh, yeah. My mother always canned. That’s what we grew up on was the stuff that we preserved. 8 SS: How do you remember doing it? RN: Oh mom would do it at home when we would be out here working. We worked all the time on the farm. She worked with us also when she would get time. She would do it in the night time and we would help her when we get home from work. You had to do the work first and then the other. SS: Was it a family event? RN: Mom would do most of it of course, because she was a hard, hard worker. We would help, we all like to eat it I’ll tell you that. SS: Are there any memories that you have about doing that with your family? RN: Oh I was lucky enough to work with my parents all my life. My dad taught school so as long as he was farming we had to do that as a family. After I graduated high school and college and I taught school also and farmed with him. So I was able to work with my parents every day of my life and that was a great blessing because a lot of kids never see their parents. They were my best friends and they would help each other out. The more you can do together the better off you are, the more memories you have and the more you learn. They teach you, your parents know a lot even though sometimes you don’t think they do, they know a lot more than you do. Some days you will maybe catch up to them. There is a lot of good memories, we used to sell the product. Us kids would go around with our red wagon and peddle around in the streets before the war. That wasn’t easy, go and knock on the door and say, you like to buy a cantaloupe or some watermelons. That wasn’t easy but that is what we had to do. We worked and probably more than at that time I would have liked to. Now that I look back it was the best thing 9 that ever happened to us. Our life has been very, very, very good to us. By doing things with your family and canning and growing crops and different things has been really good. SS: I am interested in knowing how the information that is passed down, how did you learn how to can and how did your mother learn how to do these things. RN: I don’t know how my mother leaned how to do it but I know that we learned by, you were there and doing it. It was a part of life and what they did you did. That is the way we did it. My mother was a great cook, my wife is probably the closest thing to her. She learned a lot from her and she was always a great cook. You learn by being with them. My mother died at 91 and up till a year before she died she would make rolls every Sunday just to give them to the neighbors or somebody, all of her life. You learn by example hopefully. I think that is the way to do it, and we think of it as a necessity. SS: Did she also make jam RN: Oh yeah mom made everything. In fact, my mother, she died about 8 years ago and that wasn’t very long ago, and I don’t think my mother ever, ever one time in her life went into a mall. She would make her own stuff and she would go into these small stores, that wasn’t a part of her life. So yeah, that is the way we were taught. That is the way they lived, and that is the way they taught us and that is the way that I live still. My kids don’t do it quit that much, I have failed as far as passing that on to them. They have their lives to live to. SS: Did you have a favorite recipe that your mother used? 10 RN: No, just, back in those days she made the jam before we would do frozen jam. Then frozen jam came to be and I remember everything was canned. Peas, veg and everything, they were horrible. But we had to eat them and they were nasty. When the freezers come out we started getting frozen peas and froze corn, and they were really good. Then frozen jam that was really good. My wife got in on that more, it was more of her age to go into the freezing of the jams and that’s about, that is the main thing that we eat now is frozen jams. It is very easy to do, don’t take very long to do it. You just take the berries and mash um up and add sugar to them and add pectin and stir everything and put it in the thing and freeze it. SS: Is there any other interesting stories? RN: Well the way we got started in the produce business is that my dad was into raspberries. It wasn’t growing fruit trees, he didn’t have any fruit trees. He went down to Salt Lake and buy produce. He would take it out to Eureka and those towns out south of Salt Lake, up in that area. They were selling strawberries, or raspberries for seventy five cents a case. In Brigham everybody had a little patch of raspberries or something around the house to sell. At that time they’d take it down to Newtson Brothers to sell. They were paying 35 cents a case. He put two and two together and us kids we grew up gathering raspberries during the raspberry season. We’d take them to Salt Lake, every night about 5 o’clock we had to be home and go gather raspberries that people all over town would go pick them up. They would always store them in their basements. Pick them in the morning when it is cool and put them in there basement. We’d pick them up that night, start about five and get through about nine. We’d put them in an old pickup we had to haul them to Salt Lake. My mom and dad had to get up around 3:00 in the 11 morning and take one of us kids and haul them to Salt Lake and put them on the market and when they wouldn’t sell out then us kids would go up into the avenues and go knocking on doors to sell raspberries. I remember that. And that is how we started, that we just the beginning. You have to fight and be aggressive all the time in selling your product and growing your product. It doesn’t just sell itself. That is how we really got started and then dad started buying these farms, and he rented farms because those guys were getting old to and they would lease him the farm and he would run it. Then we had a five acre orchard and we would take our peaches down to Andersons Produce who were big packers and they would pack it and put it in these railroad cars and send it to Chicago. In more years then not we would get a bill, we wouldn’t get paid you would get a bill. Because in Chicago or somewhere back in there, Kansas or Nebraska and they’d gone bad and so we had to pay them to get them dumped. So you could figure that wasn’t going to pad out very well. So he got another bunch of school teachers who had some farms and he organized a co-op and they built a building down by the railroad tracks. They bought some equipment and they started packing their own peaches. That way when they got rejected or kicked over, then it was our fault not someone else. So we did that for quite a few years and then we had the most. We were producing more than all the rest of them put together and we didn’t have the time to work with everybody so we built this and that is when we started selling to these truckers. We sell cherries to San Francisco on special orders. Los Angeles and ship them wherever we could. You soon found out that you sell it wherever you can. Wherever, now those things have changed, as you go through the years. SS: Do you guys get a lot of requests for the peaches outside of the state? 12 RN: Oh yes, most of our peaches are sent out of state, over to Denver or into Cheyenne, Wyoming or up into Idaho falls up in those areas. We sent some to Jackson Hole and down to Phoenix area, into Nevada. Not a lot but maybe 4 or 5 hundred boxed of peaches. If you don’t get it out of here there is not enough people, you have to have people around here. Salt Lake is getting big enough that it is helping but, Denver they have a lot of people so that is where a lot of fruit goes is over there. SS: Can they produce it as well over there? RN: They don’t produce any food, they do down in Grand Junction. We are fortunate enough that they come on about 2 weeks ahead us. So when theirs are getting old enough ours are coming on, so it is a continuous supply and demand. You soon learn to market wherever you can. Years ago you used to sell to stores but now we don’t anymore because there is too much red tape and if you don’t have a large enough operation to pack it for ‘em so they will accept it. It is a lot of work and the sad thing about it is in Utah, it is soon gone. Twenty years from now down the road there will be very little or virtually no agriculture in Utah, the way that we do it. Fruit farming will be gone. We don’t grow hardly any apples at all here anymore. In Utah County they still grow quite a few apples, but they are having their problems too. Used to grow probably 2 million pounds of pie cherries in this area. Next year there might be ½ million pounds produced. In three years I don’t think there will be any produced, so pie cherries will be gone. Apples are gone in this area. We can’t compete with not only the North West but China produces many apples now. They used to big a big area that the United States shipped to, now they send theirs back. We went over there and showed them how to do it. Now it has backfired. Everything is changing so fast there is a lot of stuff produced 13 now that we have never heard of before and there is a lot of stuff we used to produce and we can’t afford to do it anymore. (Flip Tape) RN: Utah, in the beginning all it was, was the church. They controlled everything and ran everything out. They recognized the fact that farmers didn’t have a place to sell their produce. So in Salt Lake, it is right where the Hilton Hotel is now, they built a market. It was a big one, there were a lot of produce houses that would take their stuff in there. This is probably the 1930’s, they went out and farmers would bring their stuff and people would come in and buy it. The church built that, it got so that was outdated. So the sold that ground and the hotel bought it. That was very interesting, I have some pictures around here of that. Yeah Salt Lake market was quite a thing. It was big long cement stalls where pickups would back into the side of it and unload their goods and people would walk down the middle and buy. It was very interesting, the funny thing was, it opened about 6 in the morning, people don’t even get up that early anymore, then it was 9 or ten you were through. By then if you hadn’t sold your stuff you better get out and go sell it somewhere. That’s when we would go hit the avenues and knock on the doors. Sell them for 5 cents a cup. SS: Do you guys participate in the Farmers Markets at all? RN: Right now, no. I had a granddaughter that lived in Salt Lake last year and had a business where she sold produce and a son that did the same thing last summer. That was pretty good for them, they did really quite well. That is another thing that has happened to our business is that these peddlers are keeping the people from the cities from coming up here. That is why we are getting less fruit stands is now these peddlers 14 take it to the street corners in Salt Lake, or Ogden, Bountiful, people just go to these street corners and buy them. In fact there also, is what is going to be the outcome of the fruit way is we will always grow some fruit but you get less and less people coming up after it. With the cost of gas and everything now people don’t travel like they used to. Everything changes and you have to rely on that. 15