Pepper's Market

Published in slightly edited form (sans photos) Dec. 18, 2013
in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Last week a woman stormed up to my cash register at RN Market where I work and burst into this sentence:  "I want to thank you for saving those two buildings!  I'm on your side."  She is someone who has served this community in various capacities for decades, so her support means a lot.  But even more important were her stories about what used to be in the oldest building the City wants demolished.

     I had thought it once held Nation's Grocery.  "I never heard it called that," she said.  "It was Pepper's Market.  Mr. Pepper ran it, and Mr. Jessup ran the meat counter, I think.  I traded there.  It was a wonderful store."  When I asked a friend about my name confusion, he said "Oh, no.  Nation's Grocery was on Honolulu near the Gazette building.  They left their produce out on the sidewalk at nights, had a grill they closed down over it...."

     It turns out his grandmother also traded at Pepper's Market.  "When I was just a little boy, she would take me with her.  Mr. Pepper - his name was Al, I think - was behind the meat counter.  He was always in a white apron and big white hat, and he would entertain me with magic tricks to keep me occupied while she shopped.  He had a two-sponge trick where he would put a sponge in each of our hands, and pretend to blow the one in his hand into mine.  And I'd say 'How'd you DO that?'"  My friend also remembered that Mr. Pepper's son Steve and daughter Anna worked in the store with him.


Pepper's Market behind the Lindsay Junior High School Band,
Orange Blossom Parade, early 1960's.

Wider street view showing relation to other downtown businesses.  Lindsay's
High School band is behind the palomino.

Also called Pepper's Cash Grocery, showing 7-Up ad on north wall and
Orange Blossom Court float.  Photos courtesy of the Bastady Family, Lindsay.

     He also said that it became Beverly's Bargains sometime in the 1970's.  It was run by Beverly Chapman, wife of Lester Chapman who owned Chapman's Welding and also the orange ranch where Roosevelt Elementary was built just a couple of years ago. When I moved to Lindsay in the early 1990's, the building was still occupied by various businesses trying to make a go of it at that important corner.  But then it became vacant and boarded up, used temporarily for the cyclists' mural in honor of the Amgen Tour flying by it through the roundabout.

     This building is the one the City has used to ridicule the issue of historic preservation we have raised in the lawsuit currently pending against them.  In meetings they show photos of broken doors and missing sections of roof and say "THIS is what they want to preserve," as if we were lunatics from beyond the fringe.  I have pointed out that what they are showing makes a good case for landowner neglect, and that if they had done the survey of historic resources 20+ years ago required by the general plan, there might have been funds to help maintain and restore the more valuable places in this community's memory bank.  The real issue is that many of the community's residents are part of the history of this place, whereas the City's administrators are not.  How to get them to protect what they don't know or appear to care about is the question.

Old Pepper's Market building with Amgen mural, May 2013.
 

     My attachment to the building is to learn its role in the town's development, but my attachment to the land beneath and around it is much greater.  The soil is sandy loam, delivered by Lewis Creek a century or more ago free of charge, precious and rare in this town built mostly on Tertiary clays.  It's a perfect site for a community garden.  The two-plus bare lots on that block could be growing fresh food for the Lindsay-Strathmore Coordinating Council, or for the benefit of families in need of some extra income, plots which the organizer for the Dolores Huerta Foundation asked the City for help finding two years ago when the park plan was being finalized.

 

Empty lot next to Pepper's Market showing good soil tilth, May 2013.
 

Open ground behind Pepper's Market with good grass cover crop, May 2013.

Additional open lot half a block away, July 2013.

     The building could be used to store tools and garden supplies, hold meetings and hand out gardening information, and even to market the produce if that was the goal.  They could leave it out on the sidewalk at night and pull a grate down over the fresh lettuce and corn, melons and squash, tomatoes and peppers....  Perhaps it could become Pepper's Market once again, selling hot peppers this time.



Side of Pepper's Market with 7-Up advertising still visible, July 2013.

(Author's note:  In late Sept. 2013, California passed a new state law allowing municipalities to lower the assessed valuation on urban parcels under 3 acres for owners dedicating them to growing food for five years, for the purpose of stimulating community gardens and small-scale urban agriculture. See "Cultivating urban agriculture," Fresno Bee, Oct. 4, 2013.)
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Trudy Wischemann is a garden-variety dreamer with rural roots who can often be found with dirt under her fingernails.  You can send her your stories of Pepper's Market, Beverly's Bargains or other memories of Lindsay's places and times % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

From Nazareth

Published in slightly edited form Dec. 11, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     This past week has me thinking of Bethlehem.  From dusk till past dawn, the whirr of the propellers on the wind machines put me in another place.  The cold, the danger of damage to the citrus crops, the vulnerability of people, animals and plants to this arctic air delivered free of charge by the jet stream's meanders overhead - it all just re-adjusted my priorities without warning.

     At the market where I work I see the cold's effects on the faces of the pickers when they come in at dusk for groceries.  They're working overtime to bring in the fruit before it gets frostbite.  I hear the sounds of congestion building in their voices, feel the roughness of their hands as I drop their change into them.  The women packing the fruit come in just before closing for tonight's dinner, tomorrow's lunch, determined to get through it.  A man who runs wind machines through the nights shared the prayer he offers each time he starts a machine, standing directly below the blades.

     Why Bethlehem? you ask.  The need for shelter on a cold night for people not from here, sojourning thanks to some imperial force, whether that be Herod or the free market - that's one reason.  But the Christ who was brought into this world, whose birth story is triggered by the name of that little town in countries around the globe, is another.

     He was brought into the world to upset the apple cart between rich and poor, where the rich put their apples into the cart and the poor haul them to the cider mill, where the fruit will be turned into juice for export.  At least that's what some people think.  Most people like to think he was brought into the world to save us all, which he was:  he came to tell us about the eye of the needle and the problem of getting through it if you're a camel.

     One author, Reza Aslan, in his new book Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, makes a pretty sound case for that point of view.  Unfortunately for me, he also suggests that the Bethlehem story was created by the writers of Matthew and Luke to cinch Jesus' identity as the Messiah to the Jewish prophesies in the Old Testament.  The Bethlehem story, where we get our notion of Christmas as being about the gifts of God doing the impossible in a world much in need of repair, may be like the creation myths of native peoples, where we explain as best we can what we believe but will never know.

     So Jesus was probably born in Nazareth, a village occupied by illiterate rural peasants and day laborers serving the construction cravings of the urban Jews and Romans.  As a place, Nazareth has a distinctly different feel than Bethlehem in our minds, as in "What good could come from...," disparagement earned by the low class and vulnerability of its residents.  Try replacing Nazareth with Poplar or Plainview or a hundred other little Valley settlements, and that all-too-human geographic prejudice won't be hard to recognize.

     It is against this prejudice that Christmas was born.  May we feel its true spirit this year.

(Author's note: This piece was written the morning after a night where I caught myself  being judgmental, arrogant and rude to a customer because of her new-immigrant appearance.)
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Trudy Wischemann is a soul-seeking writer in Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts on Christmas % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Back in the Saddle

Published in slightly edited form Dec. 4, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Juni Fisher sang for us last Wednesday night at the Lindsay Community theater.  I was there because I had to be, though I didn't know why other than that I love her music so much it hurts.  I love her songs, I love the way she sings them, the way she plays her guitar.  But mostly I love seeing her stand up on the stage all by herself and tell us, through songs and stories, why she does what she does.  Why these things are important.

     Partly I went to hear her new song, "Listen," which just won the Western Music Association 2013 Song of the Year award.  On stage there was a life-size photo of Juni in the saddle on the back of a beautiful bay horse with a white blaze down his face and nostrils flaring.  She is patting his neck with her left hand and holding the reins in her right, smiling approvingly.  After all these years of hearing about horses through her songs, it was really wonderful to see her actually astride one, confident.  It is the cover photo for her new album, Listen ... to the horse.  (Visit www.JuniFisher.com to learn more, see photos or order CDs.)

    As the concert progressed, I noticed something slightly different.  She was more herself, more relaxed and a little softer, more matured, perhaps, by these many years of performing solo onstage.  When something fell to the floor in the audience, clattering loudly during "I Will Miss Ireland," one of her most hauntingly beautiful ballads about Irish immigrants to America, she actually giggled with the rest of us who were laughing from embarrassment.  She broke into laughter several more times between singing the somber, serious phrases.  What balance.

     Early on she mentioned that she has a new horse named Silk, and that Silk has 7,000 friends on Facebook, while she herself has only 5,000, one of the charming jokes she likely has used in many concerts.  Later I noticed she had on jeans underneath her long coat and scarf, tucked into her custom cowboy boots, more authentic somehow, nearer to the Western heroes she was singing about.  And then the real reason I had to be there became clear.

     She's gone back to riding.  I didn't really know she'd left, or why, or how much being a horsewoman had been her lifelong goal and passion.  From the stories in previous concerts, I'd heard traces of it amidst the stories of how music had always been there. In 2006, when I wrote a long review of her three CDs, I titled it after one of the songs that pierced me most, "Silver Music," (on Cowgirlography,) which is about the vaquero horse training process and the relationship that develops from it between horse and rider.  I wrote that the song describes "a working partnership as real as any marriage and suggests that in these partnerships are where we become whole," ignorantly prophetic.

     And I think that's what's happened to Juni:  she's become whole.  She has the missing part of her life back.  We can pray that she won't give up music or get killed on the highway driving between music gigs and rodeo arenas.  We can praise God that music got her back to the life she loves, and that we have this model of a triumphant career to give us all encouragement and joy.  But at this moment I'm just grateful for every song she's ever written and every horse she's ever known.  I'll never again listen to "Who They Are," the song she wrote with cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell, and wonder what writing a poem and riding a horse have in common.
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Trudy Wischemann is a lifelong horse lover who writes.  You can send her your thoughts on Juni or horsewomen in general % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment here.