Densho Digital Archive - Alice E. Sumida Interview (denshovh-salice

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AS: And a time came where there was an over production of onions and potatoes. The people in business who shipped these to Chicago and New York and all other big cities, they couldn't move all the potatoes and onions that were grown there. I guess too many. So these beautiful sweet Spanish onions that we grew had to be dumped. And some people stored them, but the prices never came up, so eventually, they all had to be dumped. So my husband is a very avid reader. He loves to read. He's always reading. He read about in Florida, they grow gladiola, and they shipped the young cut flowers. They ship it to the West Coast in the winter when the West Coast has no flower. So he thought, well, maybe that might be something that we could get into. And there was a very kind grower in Florida who told us where we could go to get bulblets. You start out with the bulblets, very tiny bulblet that grow beneath the bulb. There's a lot of baby bulblets that grow. Those are the ones we grow for bulb. So, and then he was kind enough to let us know the seven basic varieties to plant because you don't know what to plant. There's so many, 60, 70, 100 different varieties. And after we found out what to plant, we, he said to go to Medford, Oregon. There's a very reliable farmer there that he will not cheat you. He will give you the real thing. So that's where we contacted the person, and we got the bulblets to plant. Well, the farmer, before that my husband sent these beautiful Spanish, six bags of these, sweet Spanish onions to Florida Chamber of Commerce and told them, "You know, we grow these beautiful onions here. I'm sure we could plant very healthy gladiola bulbs." And so the Chamber of Commerce let all the gladiola growers in Florida know what we sent them. They all got excited, and they came in their private planes to see us. They gave us a great big order, 100,000, 200,000, this and that, and we didn't know what they're talking about. But we thought, well, this is wonderful. We're getting order before we even plant them, you know. And so we planted them very carefully. Well, time to harvest. Here we had this great big order from, what, so many growers. Every grower wanted 100,000 of this, 200,000 of that, this grower, that grower. Here our plantings were so thin and so scarce, we couldn't even fill one quarter, one grower. It was very embarrassing and disappointing. Well, it took about five years before we were able to get the knack of how to go about it. And so finally, we were able to fill this party, that filled.

And they would come in their private plane, land right in our field. We had a big road, so the tractors and equipment could turn around, to work. So they would fly right into our field. And they see all, whether, what they are looking for is a, all the pink should be all pink, no red, white, or other colors mixed in there. That's what they're looking for, and that was my job to go up and down the row and pull out any mixture. That was hard work. At first, you have one, two, three. Before you come to the end of the row, I have a big load like that. Oh, my god, I have to dump it, you know. And that's the way we kept the field very clean. The growers like that very much because then when they plant, they know exactly what they are going to get. A pink is pink. Red is red. So we would get bigger orders every year. One called June Bell, that particular white, very popular. Everybody wanted that, and that variety was a weak variety. It died in the ground a lot. So we plant a lot, but we would lose a lot of that. However, I know that this particular grower was very unhappy. We couldn't deliver the full amount of the order. Well, we were getting along pretty well, but my nephew, who was our right-hand man so to speak, decided to get married. And we said, "Well, we will give you the farm if you will stay here, and we will help you, continue." But his wife didn't want to stay on the farm. She was a city girl, and she wanted to leave. And so we said, "Well, if he's going to leave us, I guess we will have to leave too." It was very sad after we had built this up to this stage.