HISTORY: Roads in Porterville were rough and dusty December 2008

Editor’s note: The following correspondence between father and son has historical value. John Carl Gauger wrote letters to his son, Robert “Bob” Gauger, until his death in 1969. The letters were passed on to his daughter-in-law, Mona Gauger, after the death of her husband, Bob. The Recorder will publish the letters in Gray Matters until the last one.

When I first started to grow oranges the grower had to arrange for his own pickers. I always used the same family of six. It usually took them a week to pick the crop.

When FDR introduced welfare and we were required to pay unemployment taxes, labor contractors took over the chore of keeping the books and paying the taxes.

Then right after World War II the unions came in. They had contracts with the packing house and the workers were paid sick leave, vacation time and unemployment pay.

Now we have another union trying to replace the one that has served the workers well for 20 years.

Its leader, Cesar Chavez, is using all of the tactics he learned in the school of civil disobedience. He flattens tires, threatens families, and in a few cases, burned down their houses.

The workers tell me they don’t want to join his union because the dues are higher and they don’t get any more benefits.

Nov. 9, 1947: I always preferred to haul my own fruit rather than pack down the orchard with heavy equipment.

The packing house told me that they planned to do some picking on the 5th so I got ready to haul empty boxes on Monday and Tuesday.

When I hauled my first load on Monday morning it was still a little sticky from the preceding Friday’s rain. Mr. Eddy said he would send out three crews the next day, so I hauled three loads of empties that day instead of the two I had planned in order to accustom the team gradually to the 21-mile daily grind.

Next day Fanny was quite stiff in front but as I had to wait for the first load to be picked I massaged her legs while the horses were feeding and by 10 a.m. I had my first load on the wagon and was on my way to the packing house.

When I was returning from my second trip and passing the Roche Avenue School on my way home at about 12:15 [p.m.] several kids climbed on the wagon for a short ride to Grevilla Street and then got off and returned to the school grounds.

The horses jogged along after that and when I arrived at Boradori’s, old Joe was standing beside the road and asked me “Where did you get that little boy? Is he one of Robert’s?”

I looked back surprised and there, directly behind my seat stood a little youngster smiling broadly but fascinated with the horses.

When I asked him where he lived he said, “In town.”
“Where in town?”

He didn’t know. “My Mother said I could take a ride with you.”

I asked him whether he had had lunch and he said “No.”

Well, I knew that his mother was probably scouring the neighborhood for him, however, I didn’t want to dump him on the road nor take the time to return to town again, so I continued on home with him and had lunch while he played with the dog and cats and chased the chickens.

I gave him a bunch of grapes since he refused to come into the house with me to have lunch because his mother had instructed him “never to go into other peoples’ houses unless she was with him.”

I hitched up again and picked up the 39 boxes of fruit remaining in the orchard and started back to town. At 3:30 [p.m.] we began to meet some of the children going home from school and each asked me whether the youngster on my wagon was the “missing boy.”

The whole Roche Avenue School had been asked to report the “missing boy” if they saw him anywhere on their way home.

I continued on, accompanied by a parade of children racing to report that they had seen him. When I reached Morton Street, a police car over hauled me and asked the same question. I was glad to turn my charge over to them for final delivery to his frantic mother.

I guess that youngster will always remember that wonderful trip he had on a wagon out into the country. I wonder who he was.

Early roads
The road from town was very dusty in the summer and in the winter it took two horses to pull a buggy through that sticky adobe.

In the early years when you attended Roche Avenue School, Mother could hardly get to town over our muddy roads with “Cap” pulling the buggy through that bottomless stretch opposite Boradori’s. In fact it was almost impassable during those first wet winters from our mailbox clear to town.

The neighbors would buy a carload of rocks and gravel each winter to spread on the worst spots, but it would just sink out of sight during the winter.

Water would sometimes be almost knee deep in the low spot around what is now Henderson and Plano, and of course, the usual lake would form every year at the Lang place along Lime Street.

After considerable pressure on Mr. Pfrimmer, our county supervisor, he finally agreed to furnish several carloads of crushed rock at the Beatie Packing house siding if the farmers would unload the cars and spread the rock on the road.

Most of the county road funds were going into cement roads to Springville, West Olive, Sunnyside and Strathmore and none was left for the dirt roads.

The sand and oil technique of waterproofing a road bed hadn’t been tried out at that time. They literally had to bury that crushed rock under a layer of decomposed granite before the graders could turn out a smooth road bed, but our adobe really needed all that extra ballast to finally make a decent road through “Ice Cream Flat.”

When that developer built the houses around Division Street people predicted trouble and sure enough they got flooded every year.

It seems foolish for the City Planning Commission to allow building in areas known to flood, but I guess greed comes ahead of common sense.

Henderson and Gravilla continue to flood every year and I don’t think the problem will be solved until the county provides some drainage for the area.

When you were in high school and willing to show off your strength, we hauled many wagon-loads of tailings from the Chromite mine north of us and spread them on the driveway and yard.
That was one of the best things we did.

It cut down the mud in the winter and the dust in the summer. That was right after they had paved the road to town.

When Mother got back from one of her stays in a nursing home in Santa Barbara she was surprised how much it improved life.

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