PACKING IT IN: SAN JOSE'S FINAL
HARVEST
VESTIGE OF VALLEY'S AGRICULTURAL
PAST IS
LEAVING
BY GEOFFREY TOMB, Mercury News Staff
Writer
Just out of the cooker, the can
is warm to the touch. Sealed inside the
tin-plated steel, wet with sweet
juices, held in suspended summer
ripeness are small golden wonders of the
Golden State. It is a can of
apricots.
Only 23 1/2 minutes ago the contents
were part of 1,200 pounds of fresh,
whole fruit that had been
picked six hours earlier in Patterson,
southwest of Modesto.
For San Jose, this can is now part
of the past. After 82 years, the Del
Monte cannery will shut its doors,
the last of the large canneries
that once defined life in the Santa Clara
Valley the way high-tech defines
Silicon Valley today.
''This is the last of the old-fashioned
canneries, the last connection to
the past when they were still
processing things that grew on
Santa Clara County trees,'' said Joe Fahey,
president of Teamsters Local
912, which represents Del Monte
workers.
By Christmas, the cannery will be silent, its final harvest a part of history.
What will remain, however, is a legacy of work and the people who performed it.
For much of the 20th century, canneries
were king here. Mothers, fathers,
sisters, brothers, aunts and
uncles toiled there. Detroit had
auto plants, Pittsburgh had steel mills,
Chicago had stockyards and San
Jose had canneries. And Del Monte
had the best-known brand and the longest
life.
''That plant made a lot of doctors,
lawyers and professional people, kids
who worked in summers there
while they went to Santa Clara,
Stanford and especially San Jose State,''
said Martin Wormuth, who has
worked there for 36 years.
Before there were silicon chips
there was fruit, and since 1917, the year
Woodrow Wilson declared war
on the German kaiser, San Francisco-based
Del Monte has operated a cannery
at 801 Auzerais Ave.
Over the years as many as 2,000
people worked around the clock, canning
everything from spinach to
carrots to refried beans to a new
product line, installed only last year,
called Orchard Select. It packs
perfect fruit, like apricots, in
clear glass jars like grandma used to put up.
The final harvest of apricots ended
last week. Already workers are
dismantling the machinery the
company used for 'cots.
After the plant's main seasonal
product, fruit cocktail, is packed, the
whole operation will be shut down
slowly, having packed and shipped
over eight decades a grand total of 40
billion cans and jars.
Speculators are hovering over the
20-acre spot just west of downtown. The
midtown land is considered
ripe for housing, for another high-tech
campus or, some say, a baseball
stadium.
Yet unlike many plant closure stories,
Del Monte is not leaving town
because it got a sweetheart deal
somewhere else. The operations
will be moved to a retrofitted plant only
one valley away, to Modesto.
Many of the 1,454 full-time and
seasonal employees, who earn from $9.87 an
hour for entry-level sorters
to $18.91 for skilled maintenance
workers, will move, too.
The departure of Del Monte will
leave fewer than a half dozen canneries in
the area, including San Jose's
Stapelton-Spence Packing Co. which
specializes in prunes, and Santa Clara's
Diana Fruit Co., which
specializes in maraschinocherries.
In the post-World War II era there
were more than 200 such plants in the
fertile Santa Clara Valley.
The exodus is not something new.
Changing tastes, air-shipment of fresh
produce, higher taxes and the
high cost of waste water -- a byproduct
in canneries like Del Monte that
may use as much as 900,000
gallons of water a day -- all doomed
the canning business here.
But the biggest factor was the price
of land, said S. Andrew Starbird,
director of the Food &
Agribusiness Institute at Santa
Clara University.
''The land got too expensive. You
couldn't earn as much money per acre
growing apricots as you could
from manufacturing semiconductors,''
said Starbird, whose grandfather was
San Jose's mayor from
1954-56.
A look at Santa Clara County land
devoted to apricots, once a staple crop
in the valley, shows a constant
drop since the 1940s. Only 500
acres, the fewest ever, are in the county
this year.
''By the early '80s, all the food-processing
companies were starting to
look at moving. The cost of doing
business in the Central Valley
is much less,'' Starbird said.
''It's a concept most of our students would grasp immediately.''
Nothing underscores the basic economic
fact of life more than these simple
facts: California has the
largest food and agricultural economy
in the nation with a farm income
worth $26.8 billion in 1997. At
the same time, Hewlett-Packard
Co., Silicon Valley's largest manufacturer,
had gross revenue of $42.9
billion.
And Del Monte? The company is the
largest producer of canned fruits and
vegetables in the nation and
had 1998 sales of $1.3 billion.
Many say the reason Del Monte is
one of the last to go is due to its size
and deeper pockets. But talk to
the
Del Monte workers and you find
a connection to the community that goes
beyond money.
Martin Wormuth tells a story that, for him, is an unforgettable snapshot.
It was a July day in 1963 when Wormuth,
then a math and physical education
teacher at San Francisco's
Stuart Hall for Boys, was driving
along Auzerais Avenue when he spotted a
''Help Wanted'' sign at the
Del Monte plant. It was summer
vacation, and he wanted to supplement his
modest teacher's pay. This
was a San Jose tradition.
He got a job and came back every
summer. Eventually, he would quit teaching
and work full time at the
plant. His wife joined him, working
there for 25 years in the bookkeeping
department, a daughter put
herself through San Jose State
by working there, and two sons worked there.
One still does and will sell
his home and move to Modesto to
continue working for the company there.
''Del Monte has always been family-oriented,'' he said.
Those same words are echoed by Jesus
Carrasco, who is 81 and from Durango,
Mexico. He still works
part time at the plant, as has
his wife and nine daughters. And there are
the Serio sisters, twins Angela
and Rose and another sister, Marie.
They have 28 years each at the plant,
all done without learning to
drive a car. A co-worker on the
same shift -- who is also a neighbor --
brings them and takes them home.
People, like crops of fruit, return
summer after summer. The median age at
the plant is 50, and 75 percent
of the workforce is female.
Wormuth recalls that before he left
the plant to report for active duty in
the Air Force and to be sent to
Vietnam for 19 months, a supervisor
called him in.
''He told me that if a washing machine
broke or a water heater needed
fixing at home while I was away,
that my wife shouldn't call a repairman,
she should call the plant and they
would send someone over the
fix whatever it was,'' he said.
''You don't forget things like that.
To me, this is how a company gets
devoted employees. These
electronics companies today? It's
straight-out business with them.''
Knowing that this year is the final
harvest for the plant has caused a few
tears among the workers, many
of whom say they look forward to
each new season like a reunion. One of
those is Sofia Curiel, who
wrote a poem to mark the occasion.
The title is ''Adios Compania Del Monte'' and it concludes with this:
''Gracias a mis companeras, (Thanks to my female colleagues)
Gracias a mis companeros, (Thanks to my male colleagues)
Gracias a mis mayordomos, (Thanks to my bosses)
Que yo a uno que otro los quiero.'' (I love each and every one.)
The poem is circulating throughout
the plant, from the loading dock where
the fruit arrives to the
warehouse where millions of empty
cans await their fill.
Such a relationship has not escaped management.
David Withycombe, Del Monte's vice
president for Western Operations, said
the company had agonized
for more than a decade over whether
to relocate the San Jose operations to
the Central Valley.
''Delaying that decision as long
as we did,'' said Withycombe, ''is
directly linked to the outstanding
workforce and exemplary community
support which we have enjoyed for over 80
years.
''Leaving San Jose is difficult
for all involved,'' he said.
All content © 1999 SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS and may not be republished
without permission.