Citrus Memories
A post by Mike Kunert on the Facebook I Remember The Inland Empire group.
He comments:
The latest memory in my developing electric train town I call Sixties is bittersweet, but it deserves to be included.
I still remember the scent—orange blossoms in the spring, sweet and sharp, carried on the wind like a promise. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, the groves were everywhere in the Inland Empire. Grand Terrace, Redlands, Mentone, Riverside… You didn’t need a map—just follow your nose.
My grandfather owned a grove in Grand Terrace during the 1950s, though we didn’t live there. Then in 1960, he moved us out to a grove in Mentone—right on Crafton Avenue. Our house sat next to a giant oil tank that stored fuel for the smudge pots. Every winter, when frost threatened the crop, that oil would be pumped out and burned in rows of metal pots under the trees to keep them warm. The smell of that smoke—heavy, oily, and mixed with citrus—is still with me.
Every two weeks, we irrigated the grove. I can still picture those early mornings—opening the standpipes and watching the water flood down the furrows. That’s when the real work began: chasing the water between the rocks, scrambling to plug the gopher holes that swallowed it up. We didn’t use rags or tricks—we filled those holes with rocks, one by one, trying to force the water to stay where it belonged.
It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was honest. That grove was more than just land—it was our home, our rhythm, our way of life. You could walk out the back door and lose yourself in the rows of trees, each one with its own shadow and sound.
But even then, the groves were disappearing. From the late ’40s to the early ’70s, nearly two-thirds of the Inland Empire’s citrus groves were gone. The bulldozers came. The water still flowed, but the trees were not—replaced by houses, fences, and streets with names that tried to remember what had just been buried.
My grandfather never complained. He just kept tending the trees that were left. “They won’t be here forever,” he’d say. “But we were.”
I don’t drive down Crafton much anymore. But I think of it often—the smell of blossoms, the hiss of irrigation water, the stubborn rocks and gopher holes. And I remember. Because that grove, and that time, still lives in me.
Bob Chaparro
Moderator
Bob Chaparro