Leaving Dunsmuir

Published Sept. 13, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It wasn’t easy leaving Dunsmuir, but it was time.  The crisis in my brother’s life had downgraded to a tropical storm and my own life was calling me back.  Respectful of the distance yet mindful of the responsibilities I’d left behind, I said my goodbyes, packed the car and started home.

     For days now, scraps of Dunsmuir’s scenery have floated through my mind: the historic railroad yard perched on a half-moon disk of floodplain along the upper Sacramento; the late sunrises and early sunsets over steep mountains confining the canyon; the curving main street and laterals contouring town.  The sweet stores and the people running them, working to make a living by creating a community where people can enjoy each other.  I barely had time to tap that fountain.

     One potential benefit of living in Dunsmuir is that the landscape makes you humble.  My sense of self-importance, often overblown, was diminished by the scale of the landscape.  I came to understand the value of mountain-man culture there as a way to keep at bay the constant reminder of human insignificance.  Once you adjust to it, though, there’s a kind of freedom in that, permission to operate in the present without trying to exert too much control over the future.

     Scraps of scenery from the trip home have also run through my mind.  The descent through dense forest to Lake Shasta, nearly full again, ended quickly, followed by a brief run through foothill oaks to Redding.  From there to Red Bluff on I-5, the beautiful views of the river valley were intermingled with hills of grass- and oak-covered volcanic rock.  I took Hwy 99, still two-lane, through Los Molinos, where small farms predominate and Lassen’s plateaus extend in the distance, to Chico, where the dominance of  historically large farms is interlaced with newer sustainable efforts to produce food.  Tree fruit orchards took over around Yuba City, followed by miles of rice fields waiting for harvest.  From Sacramento through Modesto, the urgency of traffic congestion clogged the view, but from Turlock onward, the old familiarity of 99 was comforting.

     Being in Dunsmuir made me homesick for Lindsay and Exeter.  My first few days here, however, have been complicated by mental exhaustion and the clear evidence of domestic neglect I left behind mentally as well as physically.  Home is where you make it, and my home in Lindsay is in serious need of reconstruction.

     But I think I’ve come to recognize a kind of homelessness in myself as well.  My family used to take Sunday drives to go “househunting,” an activity that got serious when my mother got pregnant.  It seemed my father was always looking for a nice place to live, even after he settled in Sebastopol, certainly as close to heaven as it gets on this planet.  My eyes were searching the landscape for potential homesteads all the way up and all the way back, and that made it harder when I pulled into my driveway.

     Some of Dunsmuir’s beauty is that it is a place to call home.  Lindsay and Exeter have that beauty, too, but it’s not until you apply that name to an address that you can learn all the work – and sometimes the hardship - that goes with it.  May we, by enjoying each other, remind ourselves of the beauty as well.

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Trudy Wischemann is a semi-retired nomad who writes.  You can send her your longings for home c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Beyond Dreaming

Published in abbreviated form June 21, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This morning I woke with a dream that was more like a backward vision.  I was in the old Lindsay Gazette office on Honolulu St. awaiting the bad news (for me) from Reggie Ellis (who was still the editor) that I was being laid off, even though in the dream (as in real life) I was not an employee.  The paper simply no longer could afford to give me these column inches, he said, because “no one reads anymore.”  The paper’s fate was looking grim.

           

     I know the dream was in the past not only because the Gazette had not yet merged with the Exeter Sun, but because the town still had two hardware stores.  I had just written about one of them, a beautiful piece (I thought) about how the community gathered not only its goods there, but also a sense of well-being and purpose, as well as a portion of its local news (sometimes known as gossip.)  A good hardware store is even better than the grocery for reinforcing our domestic claim to this place and each other, since there we tend our homes and not just our stomachs.  Pipe fittings and curtain rods, nails, nuts and bolts; seedlings in spring, lawn rakes and leaf bags in fall; tools for the garden and garage, picture hangars and furnace filters, flags to fly on the Fourth of July – a good hardware store is really the hub of town.           

     Lindsay had two hardware stores when I moved here in 1993.  Then Western Auto closed, followed a couple of years later by Race and Landers’ True Value.  For several years we had no hardware store at all, until Art Serna re-opened the True Value across the street from the Race and Landers building, which remains empty to this day.  In my dream this reality was just a trajectory, the future foreseen but yet to be fulfilled.

           

     For someone in my research area, small towns are like canaries in the mine.  When they start to die off, it’s a sign that something toxic is in the air, figuratively speaking.  It’s easy to blame our small towns’ disintegration on the growth of Visalia, Tulare and Porterville, with their medical facilities, big-box stores and other worldly attractions.  But what’s really crumbling is the ground beneath our feet:  the smaller, resident, owner-operated farm system built by the agricultural cooperatives of Sunkist and Lindsay Olive, sustained locally by the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District distributing the waters from the federal Friant-Kern Canal.

           

     Remnants of that system remain, but giant chunks have been replaced by urban investors and the fruits of industrial agriculture.  This does not bode well for the town, much less the remaining hardware store - or the newspaper, for that matter.  Yet these towns we live in – Lindsay, Exeter, Farmersville, Woodlake, even unincorporated Ivanhoe and Strathmore – are critical to the well-being of our region and nation.  They are the incubators of citizenship and the seedbeds of our humanity.

           

     There is much we can do to conserve this social resource.  We can protect the remnants, and use them to generate the new, sustainable agricultural system we need.  We can learn from them how to build churches and civic organizations, support the schools, and generate new businesses with the wisdom from their experience.  We can “buy local” and grow our own rather than put our money where the ravenous corporate mouth is.  We can rebuild sustainable towns by rebuilding sustainable farms that raise families who know where food comes from and communities connected to their source of livelihood.

           

     “Impossible,” you say? Not according to my Methodist songwriter-friend John Pitney, who has spent his entire ministry singing and preaching that reality back to life in rural places across the country.  John’s work has brought to life the theology of land in the Judeo-Christian tradition in places like Idaho, the Great Plains, Washington and Oregon.  He even planted a mustard seed of hope here in Fresno in 1992.   It’s not impossible, John says, because we’re being called to that work by our Creator.  In the last verse of one of his songs, “If You Want Your Neighbor’s Land,” he writes:

 

 “Now it may be beyond our dreaming

when we see the land divided

and re-familied by the neighbors

who can keep the world from fear. 

 

But you should know it’s not our cleverness

that keeps the land reforming,

but that Wisdom beyond dreaming

that returns our children here.”

 

           

     And all the people say “Amen.”

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Trudy Wischemann is a once-nomadic researcher who came home to write. You can send her your land & kitchen reform ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Jessup's Tire

Published May 17, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “I’m really going to miss this place,” Sallie McDonald told me last week as we sat in what used to be Jessup’s Tire.

           

     I’d come to find out how I made the terrible mistake in my column two weeks ago, implying that the new owner of the building was being unreasonable about the date to vacate the premises. “Let’s just say he was understandably eager to begin work,” she corrected me.

           

     We looked around at the walls and floors, the windows letting in morning light, the beauty of the past preserved in the present use of the building by the Lindsay-Strathmore Coordinating Council in their modest, but critical offerings to the community.  I realized that I’m really going to miss this place, too.  It will be demolished by the new owner.

           

     The thrift store’s counter is in the same place where I first met John Jessup in the last years of the tire shop’s operation.  I went there with the excuse of wanting to know if I could still buy tires for the 1947 Dodge flatbed I’d acquired in August, 1994, hoping to use it as a parade vehicle for my rural advocacy work.  I looked around as he thumbed through the catalogs of tires, finally delivering a certain “yes” to my question.  The years of serving this community showed in the photos of Lindsay High football teams and class pictures displayed on the walls, the ads for cars and tire companies, the word “vulcanizing” prominent.  John Jessup held his place in this town with dignity and respect.  I felt privileged to be there to witness it.  On the shop’s last day of business, I photographed the interior, wall-to-wall.

           

     “Who knows the history of this building, how the City came to own it?” I asked Sallie.  She said “Joe.”

           

     Joe Mohnike sells insurance two doors down from Jessup’s Tire, so I passed by his open office door, saw him sitting at his desk, and went inside.  It turns out that Jessup’s Tire had once been his grandfather’s livery stable, one of two in town.  The stable had a place for dipping livestock in creosote to protect them from vermin, and Joe’s first sentences of concern were that the soil contamination there should prevent the demolition of the building.

           

     Another reason appeared.  “John Jessup gave that building to the school district for educational programs and some kind of museum,” he followed.  “They didn’t want it, so they sold it to the City for $2,” he said, correcting another mistake I’d made two weeks ago.

           

     But his concern about the building was trumped by his concern for LSCC’s efforts.   “It’s sickening,” he said, “the one thing this town really needs – the Coordinating Council - is being pushed aside.  No one’s getting rich from it, and it brings people downtown.  Nothing else does that but the hardware store – what does that tell you?”

           

     Both Joe and Sallie view the large number of empty run-down buildings in town as part of the problem we face in revitalizing our community.  These buildings are the town’s anchors, like the root of a tooth.  The historical knowledge and caring needed, which seem to be missing at City Hall, are here, waiting to be tapped.  May we find another path than the one we’re on.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rapt listener to Lindsay’s stories.  You can send her yours c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to my editorial board for keeping this story straight.

Mayday Mayday

Published May 3, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Circle the wagons, folks:  here comes another City of Lindsay sneak attack on our culture and history.

           

     I stopped at the Lindsay-Strathmore Coordinating Council’s thrift store last week hoping to find some kind of large saucer to put under a pot of wildflowers.  The shop was nearly empty of people and goods, much reduced from its normal stock.  I saw Sallie McDonald sitting at her desk in the next room, so I stopped to talk.

           

     “We have to be out by June 10^th and I can’t find another place to rent,” she told me.  I looked at this woman I first met during the Coordinating Council’s heroic efforts following the 1990 Freeze:  feeding people, helping them find clothes and work, keeping the children in school, keeping the lights on.  It was an emergency effort that grew into a sustaining effort:  making sure there was some place to go for help when employment flagged, when bills toppled family budgets, when eviction notices and red-inked shut-off letters arrived.  I went there myself one year when plans collapsed.

           

     When I first encountered LSCC in early 1992, they were located in two empty shops in the 200 block of West Honolulu, one across the street from the other.  It was difficult, but the spaces were donated, a temporary arrangement in tough times.  A few years later, when Jessup Tires closed their doors and the building was donated to the City in hope of preserving it, LSCC was offered the space.

           

     A tire shop is not necessarily the most hospitable environment for a food distribution effort, but it has one necessary feature:  no steps.  The food is delivered by Food Link on pallets with fork lifts.  Storing it until it the pallets can be broken down and redistributed into family sized bundles requires space for tables and refrigeration units, not to mention the volunteers who man that operation.  One year I dropped by with 100 bags of Fred Smeds’ Ruby Red raisins to donate for the Christmas food baskets, and it looked like Santa’s Workshop.  Elves everywhere.

           

     Sallie told me that the City has offered to “let” them use the gravel parking lot behind the current location for distributing food.  That would mean the whole operation would have to be done in one day, rain or shine, including clean-up.  That idea ignores the reality of what is needed by either LSCC or its clients and the entire community it serves.  It is offensive.

           

     When I called Sallie two days later, I learned that the new owner wants them out in ten days.  I don’t know whether he has legal grounds for that demand, but this entire episode needs more public airing and input, or we will be a community without caring before May ends.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer in Lindsay.  You can send your ideas for LSCC relocation c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Come High Water

Published Feb. 22, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Storm warnings, high wind advisories, flood watches, evacuation orders pending – what a week.  For some, this week’s weather is foreboding and dreary, perhaps even a sign.  But for me there’s something holy, even righteous about it.  It’s been a long time since I felt this at-home in California. 

     At first, when it was just the prospect of full reservoirs for the first time this decade, the water watchdogs warned not to get too hopeful that our five-year drought is over.  “There’s still the groundwater table in overdraft,” they chided, reminding us that the big boys’ long straws have been oversucking from it so long there might be no replenishment possible.

     Then the reservoirs had to start releasing water just to keep the bounty from breaking the dams and to maintain some semblance of flood control.  Oroville, one of the newer dams in California’s massive water development system, reminded us that facilities age and that infrastructure must be maintained to be of true value.  Then levees broke in the Alpaugh Irrigation District as the flood flows of multiple creeks in the Tule and Kern River watersheds accumulated and ended up where they belong, in the old bed of Tulare Lake, which they do every once in a while, come hell or high water (literally.)

     To the north of us, levees along the length of the mighty San Joaquin are promising a similar replenishment.  Old valley communities like Vernalis, Stevinson and Tranquility are likely not so tranquil right now, as the attempt to keep flood flows off the farmland threatens to drown out the farmworker communities.  It’s a trade-off we still haven’t found a way to make correctly.

  "It’s too bad,” a friend who grows olives told me Sunday, “all this water going to waste.  LSID cut us off completely the last two years, and yet now, here’s all this water….”  His voice trailed off into the mystery of the moment.  “It’s not going to waste,” I wanted to cry, though I kept my protest to myself since I don’t farm.  In fact, when it spills out onto the land, it brings life to the soil as well as improving the groundwater supplies.  In fact, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do in God’s holy hydrologic cycle.  Here all this time we’ve been praying for rain, and now we’re going to complain about where He puts it?

     Down in Alpaugh, when the levees broke this time, the big boys hired helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags on the break, stemming the flow for now.  But it’s kinda like working on old cars:  installing a new part often puts pressure somewhere else, causing another part to break.  The history of farming the Tulare Lake bed is full of stories about heroic flood prevention efforts by the large landowners causing storm water to take out some small guys’ operations.  At least that water’s not wasting to the ocean, right?

     This drought-flood pattern is part of California’s natural cycle, at least so far.  I’m comforted by the return of the wet half of our true nature, glad we haven’t yet reached the point where the rains are always meager, the snowfall non-existent, where the floods never come.  We would do well to plan for this pattern, to accommodate the extremes, not the averages, and then try everything in our power to keep from altering it.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who once wanted to be a hydrologist.  You can send her your favorite high water stories c/o P.O Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

News from Oroville

To be published February 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Driving home Sunday night, I heard the voice of urgency through the radio, issuing an evacuation order for low-lying areas below Oroville Dam.  Earlier that day, I’d heard the opposite news:  that no danger was present despite spillway problems and full-to-overflowing levels of the reservoir.  The change in the news put me into emergency mode.

     In my early thirties, while at Berkeley, I’d studied dam failures and a phenomenon called “reservoir-induced seismicity” for a class on earthquakes I was taking as part of my preparation for environmental planning.  An earlier class, “Hydrology for Planners” taught by a nationally-famous hydraulic engineer, Luna Leopold (one of two sons of environmentalist Aldo Leopold who both taught on that campus,) had focused on floods and flooding, particularly with respect to urban areas.  Reservoirs, unfortunately, are where those two subjects sometimes converge.

     Eight years after Oroville Dam was completed, the city of Oroville (located just downstream from the dam) experienced a 5.7 magnitude earthquake embedded in a series of foreshocks and aftershocks that were caused by the reservoir itself – specifically, the rapid drawdown and refilling of the reservoir.  The damage from the earthquake, which involved no flooding because the new dam remained intact, was estimated at $3 million dollars.  Had the dam failed as a result of those earthquakes, the costs would have been astronomically higher.

     As I write this, the failures on both the main and emergency spillways, which prompted the evacuation of almost 190,000 people, are being managed.  Even if they succeed in lowering the reservoir in time for the next downpour, however, the costs of the evacuation to those shuttled away from homes, jobs, farm animals and implements could easily top the $3 million suffered in 1975, even when number is recalculated for inflation.  Add the costs to the state and multiple counties for providing emergency services, then the costs of repairing the dam’s spillways, and what we have is a portrait of one of the things that’s wrong with building large reservoirs:  the total costs of these projects are never computed in the cost-benefit studies.  They aren’t calculable.

     Oroville is an interesting town, especially considering that the majority of its vast water resources is shipped well beyond the lands surrounding it.  With a population of 16,000 it has much in common with the towns in our readership area.  The first olive processing plant was built there; the original “Mother Orange Tree” still resides there.  Located at the last spot on the Feather River where boats can go, it began as a service center for gold miners in the foothills when the state was still in diapers, then developed small-scale farms.  It has a small downtown with half-empty brick buildings like most of our towns have, and serious challenges for survival.

     Unlike Lindsay, however, it has many people working to preserve its historic quality and stimulate its economic development in sustainable ways.  My friend and attorney Richard Harriman has been following and assisting in these folks’ progress, and has brought me stories of hope even as we ponder how to help something similar come into being here.

     So I’m praying for the folks of Oroville right now, and the future of their downtown restoration.  The Feather River would like to go right through those streets and buildings right now and carry the fruit of many peoples’ efforts all the way to the Sutter By-Pass just south of Nicolaus.  Pray that the Department of Water Resources can stay on top of water under the tremendous force of gravity.  Pray that weighty water doesn’t trigger another earthquake.

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Trudy Wischemann is an environmental planner who writes.  You can send her your favorite flood stories c/o P.O. Box 1374 or leave a comment below.

The Big Picture

Published October 19, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the fourth report from the Reedley Peace Center’s Speakers Series “In the Struggle.”  Interested readers can learn more about the series by visiting www.reedleypeacecenter.org.

            In a piece I wrote for the Bee last month, I started with the fire at the Suntreat packinghouse in Lindsay, describing the loss of jobs and income for the community.  I speculated on the problems for rebuilding that plant due to the changes in crops and land ownership occurring on the land surrounding our town.  And I lamented the problems I’ve had since I came here getting city leaders to realize there’s a connection between the problems our farmers face and the economic difficulties inside the city limits.  

            Dean MacCannell was the fourth speaker featured at the Reedley Peace Center’s forum. Dean was full professor of Applied Behavioral Sciences at UCD when I moved to Davis to work with him in 1985.  For almost 10 years he had been conducting statistical studies on the relationship between farm structure and rural community development using techniques called “macrosocial accounting” developed at Cornell.  I hoped his knowledge and support would help me finish the more qualitative study I had begun at UCB under Paul Taylor’s influence.

            In different ways we both were updating Walter Goldschmidt’s seminal study of farmland ownership and community development in his comparison of two towns, Arvin in Kern County and Dinuba, here in Tulare.  That study documented the positive socio-economic contributions of smaller, owner-operated farms to the quality of rural communities, as well as the negative impacts of large-scale, absentee farm operations.  Goldschmidt published his study in late 1946, followed in 1947 by the publication of his book As You Sow, which described his first study in Wasco as well as two brief chapters on Arvin and Dinuba (although the towns were not identified by name.)  

            The book was republished in 1978 under the title As You Sow:  Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness.  It contains the full Arvin-Dinuba study as well as a chapter describing the political history of the studies, which was marked by suppression in the early years, repudiation in later years.  That story included the success of the large growers in killing the plan for a follow-up study of many communities in the San Joaquin Valley, which would have removed all doubt about the negative consequences of large-scale, absentee-owned farming operations on the development of rural towns.

            MacCannell began that study shortly after he arrived at UCD in 1975.  Telling that story in Reedley, he described the academic hindrances to that research, as well as some of the miracles that helped him avoid being stopped.  He described some of the difficulties building a data base that incorporated farm size and structure variables with social, economic and political data, and his efforts to ensure the scientific validity of the research.  

            The stories people appreciated most were about his encounters with Westlands growers.  His UC superiors had advised MacCannell that these folks had intense interest in suppressing the evidence he’d uncovered, and went to some length to shut him up.  He also mentioned the “one bad thing” he did in his entire career, which was to release a study he conducted on Westlands to the National Farmers Union, which helped preserve the acreage limitation provisions in a battle to eliminate them in 1982.   But in one of my favorite anecdotes, he told of his first field trip into the Valley when he realized that anyone could see the differences between small-farm and large-farm towns with their own eyes.

            MacCannell’s conclusions from an academic career spent swimming upstream and sharing his results with audiences mostly unfriendly to the notion of public policy supporting the small farm were these:  The science is done.  Goldschmidt’s Hypothesis has been proven correct, and those who contend otherwise are simply waging war on the truth to keep their own interests intact.  “It’s time to organize,” he said, even knowing the limitations of previous efforts to organize when we had many more small family farms than we have now.

            This Friday we’ll hear about organizing from one of the premier academic practitioners of that art:  Isao Fujimoto, also retired from UCD’s Applied Behavioral Sciences, beloved friend and advocate for the power of diversity.  Please join us at 6:30 for the potluck in the First Mennonite Church’s fellowship hall, followed at 7 pm by Isao’s empowering presentation.

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Trudy Wischemann is a researcher-in-residence who writes from her outpost in Lindsay.  You can send her your reflections on small town life c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Town and Field

Published Oct. 5, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the second report from Reedley, where the Reedley Peace Center at First Mennonite Church is sponsoring a public speakers series called “In the Struggle.”  The speakers are presenting information about past and present attempts to promote a better agricultural system in this valley, and will conclude with prospects for the future.
 

     The second speaker in our series (Friday, Sept. 30,) was Dan O’Connell, whose doctoral dissertation forms the core of the series. His research covered the public contributions of 6 California scholars who examined the social, economic and political costs of our industrialized agricultural system.  Friday night he discussed three of those scholars, now deceased:  Paul S. Taylor, Walter R. Goldschmidt, and Ernesto Galarza.

           

     Paul Taylor, professor of economics at UC Berkeley, began his academic career researching farm labor, and ended it documenting the ways agribusiness giants prevented the enforcement of the acreage limitation and residency provisions of federal reclamation law.  He also advocated for enforcement of the law and worked politically to prevent its demise.  He supported research efforts demonstrating the importance of the acreage limitation, such as the studies documenting the community development impacts of large-scale farms and the positive contributions of small-scale farm cooperatives.  He also supported non-profit groups such as Fresno’s National Land for People, led by George Ballis and individuals like Ben Yellen, M.D. in Imperial Valley, who were working politically and through the courts to get the law enforced.

     Paul’s early efforts documenting Mexican farm labor in Imperial Valley (1920’s) transitioned to documenting the in-migration of Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930’s.  Like their Mexican predecessors, the Okies were former farmers-turned-farm laborers when they were swept off the land.  With his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange, Taylor documented the terrible conditions of these refugees and then helped create government labor camps and resettlement programs to begin to alleviate these conditions.

     Paul’s work in the field of farm labor was followed by the heroic efforts of Ernesto Galarza, who documented the Bracero Program and worked to organize a union for farm laborers.  Through this work Galarza recognized first-hand that the Bracero Program, which was begun during WWII to provide Mexican farm laborers for California’s farms while Americans were away at war or occupied in the arms factories, was being use to prevent union organizing efforts from succeeding.  Galarza’s efforts to create a union failed, but he succeeded in bringing the Bracero Program to an end in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of WWII.  Shortly thereafter, the United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta began, as well as efforts to provide the legislation needed to make union protection of farm workers possible in this state.

 

     Paul Taylor’s research on farm laborers, Mexican and Okie alike, took him to his work on the acreage limitation provisions, which, if enforced, could have provided the doorway for those laborers to return to their real occupation as farmers.  During the battles in Congress to authorize and make appropriations for the Central Valley Project, which California’s large farmers claimed should be exempt from the acreage limitation provisions, he helped construct and then supervised the examination of the effect of farm size on rural communities, which became known as the Arvin-Dinuba Study.  The study was conducted by a young anthropologist, Walter Goldschmidt, who determined that small farms created communities that were much healthier economically, socially and politically than the towns surrounded by large-scale (and often absentee) farm operations.   Goldschmidt, whose career as an anthropologist included studies of multiple indigenous tribes and cultures on three continents, was called back to testify at Congressional hearings on the results of this study from the beginning of his career until a few years before his death at age 96.

     What we see, looking at the active, engaged scholarly careers of Taylor, Goldschmidt and Galarza, is that the hidden impacts of our industrialized agricultural system cover the entire range of concerns in this valley, from the development of the towns to the conditions in the fields and back into the towns again.  In the next two talks, we will see how other scholars have continued this work, from Don Villarejo’s research to document the increasing agricultural concentration of power and wealth and farmworker advocacy (Oct. 7^th) to Dean MacCannell’s extension of Goldschmidt’s community research at the macrosocial level, examining the influence of farm size on 70 San Joaquin Valley towns (Oct. 14^th.) 

     Come join us. For more information on the series, visit www.reedleypeacecenter.org and click on “calendar.”

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher and advocate who writes.  You can read last week’s column below.  Many thanks to Chris Brewer for his lifelong devotion to the history of our region.