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A lemon packer was an extremely skilled worker. Most of them were women, who had learned their craft as their daughters were learning - by stopping in the packing house after school and helping their mothers. The packer had to know by look and feel whether the lemon went in a box that would contain 638 lemons, or 490, or any of the 9 sizes, up to a box containing only 210 large lemons. The lemon was taken out of a field box, or off a conveyor belt, wrapped in yellow tissue paper (which had the Sunkist logo and a recipe for lemon pie printed on it) and placed in the correct box. The San Dimas Lemon Association was incorporated in 1900 by James A. Johnstone and E. M. Wheeler of San Dimas, L. C. Meredith of Lordsburg, C. B. Sumner of Claremont, and E. J. Fleming of Pomona. It first operated on San Dimas Avenue just north of the Santa Fe track. In 1908 a new packing house was built at Bonita and Cataract, where the Machinery & Equipment Co. is now located. The packing house was cooperatively owned by the growers and did everything. It supplied labor to harvest the fruit,  processed the fruit, shipped it, and sold it. The Lemon House owned the trucks, and supplies — fertilizer, pest-control materials, orchard heating oil. The packing house was financed by charging a fixed amount to pack each box. Records were kept of the lot number, how much fruit was good, medium, or poor quality. At the end of the year, since it was a cooperative, rebates were sent to members if there was any profit. There were only four managers during the 63 years of the Lemon House’s operation: Frank Harwood, George W. Hosford, T. Roe Hobbs, and William Temple. The pickers were varied. A group of about 15 Japanese men riding bicycles, each with a ladder over his shoulder, were the first pickers that Mr. Temple remembers coming to his father’s grove in Covina. There were 2 Filipino camps in San Dimas, containing about 140 workers. |
Each camp was operated by a “Boss”, and the Filipinos were considered to be hard workers and honest. One of the camp managers was a well-known gentleman, Mr. E. J. Amplayo. Mr. Amplayo graduated from Bonita High School, and had perfected the most elegant style of handwriting in town. There were Mexican nationals who worked as pickers, and brought their families. For them, the Lemon and Orange Houses jointly built in 1922, what was known as the Mexican Colony — 36 small homes at the southwest corner of Bonita and Amelia. There were Hindus from India and Jamaican pickers. During World War 11, German and Italian prisoners housed at the County Fairgrounds in Pomona helped pick the fruit. In its heyday of the 1920’s, the San Dimas Lemon Association was the largest packing house in the world, picking 525,000 boxes of fruit in a peak year. It had many firsts - for many years, it had the tallest Flag Pole in Los Angeles County - 60 feet tall. It had a very large “SAN DIMAS” sign on the roof for the guidance of the early airmail pilots. Ours was the first lemon packing house to have full refrigerated storage. The first building was built over a wash, so that the large doors at each end could be opened at night to let the cool air flow through. Later, big blocks of ice were used with fans to cool the fruit. Then a compressor was developed which used ammonia as a refrigerant. San Dimas made “tons” of money the first couple of years after this was put into use, until other packing houses could copy the compressor. Incentive wages were introduced here, both in the packing house and in the field, and were most effective. However, this later had to be changed, and productivity went down to that of the slowest worker. The San Dimas Lemon House was the first to have automatic box-making machines, the second to have a moving conveyor belt. We started the stamping of lemons with the word “Sunkist.” It was first said that lemons were too small for this, but after it was pointed out that ‘Diamond” could be stamped on walnuts, “Sunkist” was stamped on our lemons! Because of these innovations, and the last manager, Bill Temple’s excellent leadership, ours was the last packing house in the area to close. Most of the building was dismantled and sold to someone in Mexico. Fortunately, the San Dimas Historical Society has acquired many of the old account books and records. |
