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A young Hass Avocado sprout |
Last week I overheard Jimmy telling a customer about
Hass Avocadoes and how they all came from one tree: a tree planted by a mailman
in La Habra Heights, whose name was Rudolph Hass. Hass was a simple man, born and raised in
Milwaukee. He dabbled in the ministry and
moved to Pasadena in the early 1920s. The
story told by his grandchildren is that he saw a newspaper article
demonstrating the money potential of raising avocados. Since he was making twenty-five cents an hour
as a mailman, he took a flyer and bought an acre and a half avocado grove. The trees were Fuerte avocadoes which were
much in fashion among the wealthy Pasadena population.
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The original Hass Tree |
In an effort to get his grove more productive, he
cut many of the older trees and bought about a hundred seeds from A.R. Rideout,
a professional grower. Mr. Hass had some
success grafting but felt the need for professional assistance, which he got
from a professional grafter, Mr. Caulkins.
It took three years, but eventually all but one of the trees was
producing Fuerte avocadoes. Caulkins
advised Hass to “wait and see” what that tree might do. Within a few years the tree began bearing
fruit, but not Fuerte fruit. The Hass
family found they preferred the new avocado, and began selling it from a roadside
stand. Soon, chefs were interested and
eventually the tree itself became valuable.
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Hass's Fallbrook Grove |
Hass patented the tree in 1935, but purchasers soon
found a way around the exclusivity of the sale of the tree and began grafting
to their own trees. By the 1970s the
Hass avocado became the most popular and now accounts for more than 95% of California
sales, only a few still come from the Fallbrook grove that started their commercial success.
I used to tell people in Iowa, where I grew up, that
avocados had no taste. I now know that
they were shipped way too green and my mother was unaware that they should
ripen before we ate them. Like many
foods, the flavor comes from the oil content, which needs time to develop. When
I first moved to California as an adult, a family friend and his wife became
surrogate parents for Mary and me in San Diego.
I remember Thelma Neff showing me her avocado tree, growing in a
wheelbarrow and producing delicious avocadoes.
I have tried on several occasions to grow from a
seed that had begun to sprout and subsequently I now have a six-foot tree on my
deck that is healthy, but not fruit-bearing.
I also have two commercial Hass trees in varying degrees of health. In spite of Thelma’s success, I am told avocadoes
need to be in the ground. I am in the
process of replanting the largest and oldest tree across the street where my
son lives. Maybe then I can get some
fruit.
In the meantime I buy from Jimmy, who picks and
packages groups for me that allow me to have perfect fruit almost every
day. I read where Rudolph’s wife ate
whole wheat toast with sliced avocado every day for breakfast, and she lived to
be 98. Longer than the original tree, which
perished from some malady after 72 years.
Are any of you strong fans of avocadoes? Drop me a comment and let me know.
My next post will share with you my meeting of a recently
passed writing icon, Ray Bradbury, who I had the pleasure of seeing just a few
years ago.