January, 1990

An address delivered at the August 1989 NAFEX meeting.

Long ago but not far away I had a fruit garden of 800+ varieties. It took me 20 years (about the years of NAFEX's existence), to whittle down the 800 to the approximately 200 varieties I think I like. I fondly look back to the years when the NAFEX influence changed me from a collector to a selector.

If you look back into the first issue of Pomona you see that this meeting is, in a way, a homecoming and an anniversary. Yes, the first Pomonas were published with a Gestetner duplicating machine in Toronto, Canada, in August 1967. Many in our early fruit hobbyist network had great hopes for the new venture but there was little tangible confidence in its success. Consequently two of the most vociferous promoters stuck out their necks and footed the bill. The other was Colonel Malcolm Kent of Round Hill Virginia. Later, when the subscriptions poured in we were reimbursed. At one point I realized that another printing of the first Pomona was unavoidable and I nearly fainted. Where were the stencils? The whole issue would have to be typed again. Fortunately, the girl in the church office, where I had run off the Pomonas, had kept the stencils, "just in case", she said.

Producing the first Pomona was like being a midwife for the first time. Milo Gibson and I had canvassed our acquaintances for manuscripts. But not since my teaching days had I corrected such diverse handwritings; never before had I handfolded 100's of sheets, designed a pictorial cover, heard of a saddlestapler, or done a mass mailing. When I took the Pomonas to the Post Office they were not accepted, because I had prematurely printed on the inside cover "authorized as second class mail". I had to take them back and lick stamps, pending this authorization process.

Later in September Walda and I took our vacation and started on a get-acquainted tour across the continent. Memorable meetings occurred on this trip. We had with us bundles of Pomonas and samples of about 3 dozen apple varieties. Our first stop was in a Detroit suburb, at Bob Nitschke's, the fruit connoisseur behind the South Meadow Fruit Gardens. He had to be away, but Mrs. Nitschke showed us around his fascinating fruit garden, spread over the backyards of several neighbors. There I saw an ideal fruit garden sprayer, a single axle Spartan machine with a John Bean pump. Now, after 22 years I still use such a machine only with a larger tank.

Farther West in Michigan we stayed overnight near Dowagiac at Isaac Hunter's with whom I had traded scionwood by mail. His many apple varieties and 100's of nut seedlings were sure worth the visit, but still more fascinating was his household of five unmarried middle-aged brothers and sisters.

Next we stopped to see a fellow named Plumb at Streator, IL. who had written for budwood; from there we headed for the Kurle's in Hinsdale, IL. At that time their home and orchard were on a country road; now they are surrounded by new housing. Since Bob Kurle had been proposed as secretary of NAFEX I wondered what he was like. The reception was heart warming and we took to each other right away starting a friendship that has survived various NAFEX crises. Bob, the born experimenter, jumps at every fruit or nut that is in any way intriguing. His dedication to NAFEX is almost religious and Mary is his cheerleader. They are the only ones of the charter gang to be here today.

Next we dropped in on Otto Redlich at Fort Atkinson, WI. He had lost his parents and was a lonely bachelor experimenting with fruit trees and strawberries, in addition to running a dairy farm. We had corresponded but never met and we talked fruit and fruit books into the early morning. We also agreed that Pomona deserved a better printing job than my stencilled sheets, also that much postage could be saved by mailing it in the U.S. where most subscribers lived. Otto showed me some excellent printing a local husband and wife team had done for his church. We went to talk to the Webers and they printed the Pomona from April 1968 to July 1986, except for a few issues when Milo tried a Portland printer. Soon after our visit, Otto moved to Oshkosh and made a 200-mile trip for every Pomona printing which he then addressed, sorted by Zip-codes and mailed from Oshkosh.

From Otto's we travelled to Villisca, Iowa, to deliver budwood to another of my fruit correspondents, Miles Roberts. As we drove up, a lady, crouching near the house got up and said "thank Heavens you are here, now I can stop sorting his beans". She turned out to be Mile's sister Blanche, a retired schoolteacher keeping house for him. Miles' life was filled with experimental agriculture and horticulture. He read a lot, never had a job, detested government in any form and believed in a barter economy. He traded his produce and services for needed goods. I could swear that he was unknown to the IRS! His specialities were apples of which he had about 375 varieties, open pollinated corn, and fancy beans. We drove around looking at, and tasting various apple foundlings in thickets and fence rows. The best of his finds he named McAlpine Red and Monocacy.

Our next stop was with Dick Tinus at the USDA Horticultural Field Station at Cheyenne, Wyoming. Dick had written that their collection of about 200 hardy apple varieties was being abandoned in favor of strawberries. We arranged to offer free scion wood to all Pomona subscribers. Later, Miles Roberts looked after the packing and mailing out.

Eventually we reached Portland, Oregon, and Milo and Imogene Gibson. After introductions Milo's first words were "Jeez, I thought you were much older". I should mention here that both before and after our first meeting, Milo and I were occasionally at loggerheads about the structure and direction of NAFEX. We were both committed but different in temperament and style. In spite of his immense pomological knowledge Milo was a loner. As a hobo in the 30's he had gone through a school of hard knocks and was apprehensive about involving himself at his age in a new venture. He was willing to be published but hesitant to publish. I was 20 years his junior, still blissfully ignorant of much of pomology, but fed up with the haphazard round-robin letter writing system.

The bottom line is, that we complemented each other enough to get NAFEX going. The visit was a great experience for me. I saw his fruit garden filled with fruits and varieties. For the first time in my life I saw and touched that famous fruit of Shakespearean and earlier centuries, the "Open Arse" fruit. Less vulgarly we call it Medlar. Many varieties were Milo's own finds and seedlings. There were espaliered pears and stools of apple rootstocks including his selection of Malus fusca which he promoted as a dwarfing stock for moist soils. Milo was an accomplished wood sculptor although he called it whittling. One of his tempting nudes I stuck up into a tree among pears; took a picture and called it "Portland Pomona". He got a great kick out of it.

One evening Milo and I visited Larry McGraw, a fireman turned beekeeper who often went fruit scouting with Milo in the countryside. At Larry's I saw another first, a fruiting Golden Delicious tree in a flowering pot. The following evening we went to a Fruit Fair staged by the local fruit hobbyist group, the North-Western Fruit Explorers; in Vancouver, Wash., just across the river from Portland. Another surprise was waiting for me: the Pink Pearl apple. It was cut horizontally and looked almost like glistening marble with an intricate design stencilled on it in red. By this time on our tour the apple assortment we had brought along had been shrinking with every visit. Walda told Milo "everywhere we went there were men rubbing noses with apples" and in the next Pomona, Milo quoted her verbatim.

There was one more friend to visit: AI Kulsar, a retired builder from Ohio now living at Atascadero, California. We had dropped off our car in Portland and travelled south by Greyhound. In the middle of the night someone walked through the bus, waking up everybody, to ask if there was any plant material on board. I figured that my apples were food, but Al later told me that fruit is not permitted to enter California. No wonder that our assortment was a rare treat for him. His fruit garden was a jungle and he complained that he was forever pruning since, left alone, his semi-dwarf apple trees would put on 45 feet of new growth. Al also showed me his grafting invention: a short scion is nailed vertically onto the cut end of the rootstock. He offered to build us a house in the area should we decide to move there, but we never took him up on it.

Sometime after our return, Colonel Malcolm Kent came up from Virginia to discuss the future and direction of NAFEX. He was quite impressed with my clean foliage and fruit. I told him that I sprayed with Imidan. He had never heard of it. We drove out to another retired military man, Captain Don Pallet, who was now a dealer in agricultural chemicals. They talked about army life and took so much to each other, that Malcolm became a member of the local Fruit & Vegetable Grower's Association of which Pallet was the secretary. A 2-dollar membership fee entitled Malcolm to 10% off all the Imidan he needed for the next few years.

Malcolm Kent was our first treasurer. He got great satisfaction out of paying NAFEX bills out of his own pocket, just so, as not to endanger the new venture or upset Milo Gibson with figures in red. Malcolm was full of anecdotes about his neighbour Prof. J. Russell Smith, the author of "Tree Crops", and breeder of persimmons.

Later, when I researched the life of William Coxe, North America's first pomologist, Malcolm was unbelievably supportive. Milo had shown little interest in this project and died soon after. I stayed with Malcolm and his wife Lil for a couple of weeks, commuting daily to the National Agricultural Library at Beltsville, Maryland. I had hoped to bring Coxe's fruit book out together with the never-published watercolours of fruit varieties by Coxe's daughters. Mal became so enthused about it that he offered to finance whatever I could not. He hired and paid a professional photographer to take sample pictures of the Coxe watercolors. Unfortunately Mal succumbed to a heart attack soon after and so the book was republished without additional colour illustrations.

The most memorable event in the early stages of NAFEX was its first meeting at the farm of John Moore in Crawfordsville, Indiana, on the 4th of July holiday 1968. There were about 20 people: many had been pomological pen pals but had never met. The interests of John Moore, the host, were many. He loved apples, was an outspoken liberal, a literary person, and had planted 5,000 black walnut trees to be used, he said, "for the bedsteads of future generations". The get-together was a congenial, unstructured meeting, but within a simple set of inspiring, individuality-respecting guidelines. A typical gathering of enthusiasts, uninhibited by a constitution. The participants were all individualists of different backgrounds. All were worshippers of Pomona, the goddess of fruit trees. All were fruit explorers in the purest meaning of the term. To sell fruit or trees or scions meant giving in to commercialism and was akin to prostitution. Fruit exploring was an avocation not a business. Apart from Walda and myself, there were the following, many with supportive wives:

MILO GIBSON, the former hobo, who has lost his silver spoon, but found his inspiration in pampering the sprouting seedlings around a cider mill in the Forties. He became the original fruit explorer.

MALCOLM KENT, the ex-colonel turned real estate agent, grafting expert, scout leader and persimmon connoisseur. He freely dispensed from a bottle labelled "Virginia Gentleman".

FRED BAKER, the quietspoken, softhanded entomologist who successfully scrutinized fruit trees for mutations: in his own fruit garden, his family's pick-your-own orchard and wherever he went.

BOB KURLE, the teacher turned chemist. His sleeplessness made him into NAFEX's most valuable, untiring resource person.

JOHN MOORE, the ex-sailor with a ring in his earlobe, subartic explorer, host of the meeting, but also professor of English, whose simplified phonetic spelling was valiantly defended by Milo. His wife Ruth is no doubt the world's foremost persimmon pudding maker.

HENRY CONVERSE, the son of the fruit variety collector. For decades he had been mapping the soils of the Midwest, one eye always looking up to find seedling fruits and nuts. It was he who launched me into the book selling by asking me to find a set of The Apples of New York. I was then also the librarian of NAFEX and found one for 3 dollars which I sold to him for four at the meeting.

JOE MCDANIEL, the botany professor so deeply in love with persimmons that none of us thought of him as an academic. He later co-authored NAFEX's only book publication, Persimmons for Everyone.

PAUL THOMSON, the Indiana born ex-marine and the first organic fruit gardener ever to be certified by the Rodale organization. He promoted NAFEX on the West Coast and, not yet satisfied, started the California Rare Fruit Grower's Association three years later.

As my reminiscing thoughts are also a requiem for the early NAFEX pioneers, I must mention:

FRED ASHWORTH, the frugal farmer who taught himself genetics, published in scientific journals, and collected hardy varieties of everything. Many a time he sneaked scion wood across the St. Lawrence border into Canada and mailed it to me from Prescott.

OTTO REDLICH, the bachelor farmer, who later married into a greenhouse. Because he worked for NAFEX when others just talked, he is probably its most unsung hero.

That meeting was 21 years and 84 Pomona issues ago. NAFEX evolution has been fantastic, far surpassing the dreams of us early birds.

What started as a group of hobbyists has now become a market force. Just think how many of us are doing what was unthinkable 20 years ago: selling fruit, fruit trees, or scions. The development from amateur to hobby farmer to commercial grower is tempting yet unfortunately it is also an aging process. A Pomona article featuring economic analysis, marketing strategies and profit profiles has become acceptable, and may be better than a wishy-washy article in the professional fruit grower's press. Are the amateurs who may sell their surplus, but do not produce fruit for profit, still in the majority? NAFEX cannot be aging that fast! Where are we headed? If in another 20 years POMONA is a respected trade paper and NAFEX an association of alternative fruit and fruit tree producers, one of the early seeds will have matured: broader recognition and culture of many of the valuable fruit varieties of long ago and, sometimes, far away.