Published October 9, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
I had the privilege of taking a turn in the pulpit of the United Methodist Church in Lindsay a couple of weeks ago. I had been wanting to tell the people in that congregation about the involvement of their church in a conference 21 years ago that was life-changing for me and many others. But going through the old materials from that time, I discovered what brought me to Lindsay. It was the 1990 Freeze.
The conference was organized by a Methodist minister named John Pitney, who became a deep friend through the planning process and whose music I still sing whenever I get a chance. The conference was called the Forum on Church and Land, one of many he had organized in the western states for 10 years. The title for the one held in Fresno in February of 1992 was "Who is My Neighbor? Agriculture, the Common Good, and the Role of the Church in Truthtelling and Reconciliation."
At the first planning meeting in early 1991, I met many of the people who would contribute to the four-day event. One of them was Rev. Dick Pitcher, the Methodist minister from Lindsay. It was only a month or two after the crop-destroying, grove-killing, job-eliminating freeze of Dec. 1990. Dick was in overdrive helping to organize relief efforts for the farmworkers, and his stories were vivid. The Lindsay-Strathmore Coordinating Council was deluged. The Shropshires were hauling food from LA food banks in their empty trucks. The LoBues were storing the food in their empty packinghouses. Family farmers were mortgaging their ranches to pay farmworkers to pick the frozen-dead oranges up from the ground instead of from the trees. One month later, when I came to document these community efforts, church women were making lunches for the children in Tonyville during spring break who otherwise would have been missing their school lunches. Another month later I photographed three busloads of people from Tulare County who arrived at the capitol in Sacramento with signs beseeching help, signs in Spanish and English held in the hands of family farmers and farmworkers alike, side by side with government officials from all levels.
A year later at the conference we spent one of the four days on a bus ourselves, traveling across a divide wider than the Mississippi River: the emotional/socio-political divide between farmers and farmworkers. We started at a small-scale Mennonite farmer's tree-fruit orchards and vineyard to hear his stories of beauties and hardships from a lifetime on that land. We ended at a small church in Earlimart to hear stories of the farmworker families with children who formed the cancer cluster there. In between those two poles, which are much closer than most people imagine, we stopped for the afternoon in Lindsay. This is what it was like.
We got off the bus and ate sandwiches we'd ordered from Mr. G's Pizza and Subs in the Methodist Church's Maxwell Hall, while Rev. Pitcher told stories about the continuing relief efforts more than a year later. We walked down to the new Coordinating Council office on Honolulu Street and listened to Sarah Rodriguez tell about their harrowing efforts to help people still out of work, still hungry. And we bore witness to what a community can do when Mother Nature forces us to recognize how much we all really have in common.
There were many aspects of the conference that converted people to the need for involvement of the church in the questions we struggle with in agriculture. But it was the evidence of this bridge across the farmer-farmworker divide in Lindsay that brought me hopefully here. If you have stories about that freeze or the relief efforts that you would like to share, please contact me at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 3247 or leave a message below.
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Trudy Wischemann is a kindof wacko person who writes and sings in Lindsay.
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