Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change

Nick Pavlina: From Fruitstands to Software

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Nick Pavlina is a semi-retired software engineer who grew up in the Santa Clara Valley north of San Jose. He saw the area change from a patchwork of fruit and nut orchards into Silicon Valley. From childhood work selling fruit from his grandfather's orchards at roadside stands and working summers in the canneries to a career as a software engineer and system designer, his 67-year life has reflected some of those same changes.

Nick has lived in Santa Cruz county for nearly 25 years.

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Nick says gleaning is a natural extension of his longtime support for Second Harvest Food Bank. He started gleaning last year and always carries the baskets for other folks instead of gleaning himself, so I asked him why.

Nick says that Santa Clara Valley where he grew up was once called "The Valley of Heart's Delight". A relative's cherry orchard was his occasional day care and sometimes muddy playground while their mother was doing part-time work in the packing house on the property.

Nick's paternal grandfather and his cousins came from Croatia around the turn of the century and all became fruit farmers: apricots, pears, plums, and more. Orchards lined the El Camino Real in those days. Nick's grandfather had lost his land by the 1940s, but other members of the family kept theirs, and Nick worked in their orchards.

His mother's side of the family were Volga Germans from Russia, who also arrived not long after 1900. They settled near Fresno and became table grape farmers. His mother's parents gave up farming to move to Sunnyvale and work in the Santa Clara Valley canneries in the heart of what was then the largest fruit growing area in the world.

By the 1940s, Nick's grandfather was sharecropping fruit orchards, leasing the land and selling the fruit. Nick sold the fruit — over 20 kinds of apples, plums, peaches, and other fruits — for his grandfather during the summers when he was 10 to 13 or so. No scales; he sold the fruit by the box or basket. His grandfather would harvest fruit in his orchards and bring more in through the day, sometimes building a little fire to roast a hotdog together for lunch.

In a story that resonates with too many contemporary farmers, Nick's grandfather had been tempted into buying more and more prune orchards in the 1930s by government supports, and lost his land when the bottom fell out of the market just before WWII.

Nick picked apricots and harvested prune plums when he was in elementary school, before the years when he sold fruit at his grandfather's roadside stand. The prune harvest was hard; the pay was small. Kids worked right alongside adult day workers. Cutting and pitting apricots for drying was even harder. When Nick got a little older, he got a paper route and did less in the orchards.

Some owners may have called it stealing, but the kids went into nearby orchards ... cherries were Nick's favorite ... to get a little eating fruit. Since all of the residential areas were built by tearing down orchards, there was usually an apricot tree or two left in each yard and at least the remains of an apricot or cherry orchard nearby.

When Nick's grandmother died, his grandfather sent the kids (including Nick's father) off to friends and relatives to live. Nick's father left high school and had a number of jobs that didn't pan out the way he'd hoped. Like many in the family, he always worked in the canneries during the summer harvest season. Driving a fork lift during the summers eventually turned into a permanent job, and he worked at the same cannery for the next 20 years.

Eventually, developers came to the area, and the orchards disappeared. The canneries began trucking in fruit from farther and farther away, until they finally relocated out of the Santa Clara Valley to be closer to the fruit they were canning. That ended Nick's father job, and he joined Nick's brother in his gardening business, but soon split off to run his own operation, which he continued until four years ago when he was 82.

Like most families in Sunnyvale in those years, Nick's had extensive gardens and chickens in the back yard. His mother was the gardener, and Nick remembers following her around when he was very young. Nick remembers collecting eggs from the ramshackle chicken coop, but it was his father cutting the heads off the chickens on a stump that made the most lasting impression.

Nick talked about the changing business of canning in the valley. He worked summers in the canneries for several years, doing maintenance, working in the box shed, and more. Work was highly gendered, and most of the hand work like slicing and pitting had already been turned over to machines. His union wages made it the best summer work Nick could get.

After his mother died, Nick's father sold their home and never owned a home again. It wasn't until Nick had his own home that his own gardening career started. He's built raised beds and done French intensive gardening, but the dream of a little vineyard never materialized.