353 West 11th Street
Claremont, California
January 17, 1940 [sic; should be 1941]Dear friends,
I don't mean to write these letters to you at too frequent intervals but I keep seeing things which seem to me interesting in either little or larger ways - probably mostly the former - and I seem to want to tell you about them. Also it is quite possible that I shall not take my typewriter with me on my next migration so perhaps I had better tell you now about some of the things I have seen here in Claremont and in the neighborhood.
Of course you know the town is in the citrus belt, but I was not quite prepared to have all the vacant lots in the town filled in by orange or lemon groves, nor to have all yards provided with a personal tree or two. Grace Berry for example has the following fruit trees, plums, peach, avocado, lemon, orange, persimmon, apricot - and I may have left out one or two. They all bear in profusion, and what is not now ripe we eat as jam. The avocados are coming along just fast enough for us to eat, and likewise the lemons. The oranges are almost ready - I hope to have my picture taken picking one, according to custom in photography, but I may choose avocado.
One thing I saw almost at once as we drove about the town was the smudging stoves. They sit between the rows of trees, almost one to a tree, with great tanks below them, to hold several gallons of crude oil. The chimney thing goes up to perhaps six or seven feet usually. I have not seen them in operation as there has been no frost yet. There is a weather bulletin each evening which tells the growers just the temperatures to be expecting and the hour of the night at which they will be due. This is given for each town in the region, since the temperature picture varies in the different places by several degrees. So the man goes to sleep until. let us say. 2:30 and then gets his stoves ready for a four o'clock drop below 29° which they seem to endure successfully. Another aspect of this smudging proposition is the presence of very large oil tanks in the groves, large meaning perhaps thirty feet or more high and 15 - 20 feet in diameter, with tops like half spheres, all silver painted like our water towers. They hold the oil for quite any area, each, and the height must give quite a pressure.
Under the trees the surface of the ground varies, sometimes an under crop to be ploughed in, sometimes just bare ground with the marks of the plough. The soil around here has far more stones than any New England hillside which I have ever seen - yet nobody talks about it! They pile the stones up for walls or just in heaps, or just let them stay in the soil. I suppose the difference is in the nature of the soil between all those stones, for the crops do not look like those in New England. There may be under the trees a perfectly beautiful stretch of clear yellow, mustard, to be turned in later, but just now so lovely with the golden fruit on the trees. The grass is growing fast in this rainy season, but the rains come no oftener than we expect them in New England at any time. Today for example is just crystal clear.
This matter of rain seems to be very uncertain and also very local. There may be a flood at once [sic] place and a few miles away scarcely any rain at all. In this region a few years ago there was a major flood. The mountains rise above Claremont beginning at about a mile from the edge of the town, or even nearer, and going to the north to the height of 10,000 feet in Baldy, at a distance of perhaps 10 - 15 miles. Up into these ranges stretch steep-walled canyons - they call any valley a canyon as far as I can see. We have been up two of these to a distance of some 10 - 15 miles, and a height of at least 6,000 feet, and on well-paved roads. But for long stretches those roads go through an abomination of torn soil, huge and miscellaneous boulders, and up-turned shrubs (few trees, for they come up higher). Some roads have not been replaced, but we went on perfectly good roads for miles through these stretches. Down below this flood tore out on the plains and over-flowed the ususal channels made by usual rises of the no-account streams running in the dry seasons, or they may be even entirely absent there. These broad and stony channels are called "Washes" and long bridges cross them. This particular flood - called "The Flood" - rampaged all over the place and was kept out of the town only by the hardest effort, sandbag ramparts still occasionally seen, and so on. In some places the streams tear out the bridges over these washes so often that the people have given up having bridges at these points. In such places you see a sign beside the road, conspicuous and shining at night, "Dip". This means that momently [sic] you will come to a considerable depression, really the Wash, but to a New Englander just a little hollow. I do not see how the roads are passable, however, when the floods come down, for the water must often be a foot or two deep in these dips. In the towns the gutters are continuous over the intersections to the water can run. The whole town looks flat, but there is really a gentle grade away from the mountains and you know when you walk against it. There is a charming story of a town just a little way from here where there used to be a horse car which ran along between two rows of pepper trees, a most lovely vista. The car was drawn by two mules from the bottom of the town to the top. Then the mules stepped neatly on a little platform behind the car and they all coasted down the grade together. Perhaps that word "grade" was not properly used for it has a technical significance out here. Then you go up a road which has some several hair-pin curves you find it is called a Corte Mesa Grade, or something like that. I don't know just how much slope it has to have to be a grade, but all the worst places have special names of that sort.
Along the roads now the signs are abundant, "Orange Juice - 10 cents - All you can drink".. And they mean it. The procedure at a place where we stopped yesterday was this. The woman poured out a big pitcher full from a pail and set it before the three of us with three glasses - and we drank it nearly all up. The highest score was five glasses - they weren't very large ones. Some place[s] sell it for 5 cents but I have not tried those. Also they have another "large" thing in the shape of drinks - innocent drinks - "Giant Malts" - these being malted milks, but I have not tried those yet.
We have had two canyon trips this week since the weather seemed good. One was up the nearest canyon, the one which made the bad flood I spoke of, San Antonio. There is an excellent surfaced road up to over 6,000 feet, wide enough for two cars to pass almost everywhere, perhaps all the way. There is no fence except in a few little stretches, but a low bank of earth prevents you from falling over too easily. The s-curves are abundant of course. I told you of the wild desolation of the lower part, but up farther the trees come in and it is very beautiful. There are camps up there and near the top is a good one where we had lunch, and where there are cottages where Grace and Ruth have spent several spells of time, housekeeping, coming down every two or three days for supplies. It is not more than an hour from the town. As you go up you see the mountains at close range, bare of trees in the main, except for the canyons, but not grassy. There is a covering of bushes over most of the slopes, though erosion is very evident and the edges are sharp. They cut down this sage brush (?) and make broad fire breaks along the edges of the various mountain spurs, looking like trails or ski runs at a distance - but they are not either. They can be used as trails but are mostly ghastly steep. However, there is a good deal of climbing on the mountains.
The second canyon trip was up a deeper canyon, San Gabriel, which has two or three dams in process of construction to help in flood control and perhaps to furnish better water supply. One is done, another nearly so. This canyon, too, showed the signs of flood damage in its lower stretches. There were few camps, but we came out into a most beautiful and rather broad valley up about 6,000 feet, with just gorgeous trees, one kind a close relative of the northern Douglas Fir I enjoyed so much in Washington. There were huge Yellow Pines, and unknown firs and cedars. These last drive me to distraction because I can not seem to tell one from another. There were two lovely birds which we saw finely, a very blue jay with a high blackish crest, no white but two little light blue streaks on its forehead, and a chick-a-dee which ate crumbs on our table over and over again.
No Pasadena Parade, no Rose-Bowl, No Hollywood as yet. I think I may stay a few days in Los Angeles so as to take two or three sightseeing tours, one to Hollywood, but I'd rather do another canyon! I have seen a little of Cal. Tech. in Pasadena on a call on Willoughby of the measuring method. He is young, rather, and stunningly built himself. He is a self-made man, crazy about anthropometric measurements and their mathematical relationships. He is officially an illustrator in the department of vertebrate paleontology and draws just beautifully. He needs a college education to lick himself into effective shape, but he may be a genius. Dr. Shelton, the other one o[f] the method, is a most successful physician in the field of endocrinology, but ill at present. I had a most delightful call on him and his wife and he took me all over his clinic which is very elegant aI guess very expensive, and with splended sets of illustrations of pieces of work he has done. Cal Tech. is an institution which seemed to me on a par with Mass. Tech. but more elegant in outward form. Edith Wallace whom some of you know took me to lunch in their Atheneum, a faculty club kind of place. By chance I met the wife of the one man I know in physiology or biochemistry in these parts, met her in the Huntington Gallery and shall see them when I go to Los Angeles. He is at U.S.C. Medical School. Vera Goddard I also hope to look up, at the U. C. L.A. If you don't know those initials use your wits - they are what you expect! Florence Peebles takes me to an A.A.U.W. luncheon on Saturday next at Pasadena. She has not yet retired, but is working harder than ever adding a department of bacteriology to her institution, a small denominational college, Chapman College. There is to be a Mount Holyoke meeting on February 8, and I shall stay around until after that. Meantime I go to visit Miss Anne Young for about a week beginning Jan. 22, and Martha Hackett for another week, beginning Jan 28. Grace Berry will forward my mail during these short stops for there is no use in trying to have too many addresses. After Feb. 8 it is now my thought to go south along the coast, stopping perhaps at Laguna Beach which I liked the looks of when we drove down there, at LaJolla so as to see it and Scripps, and at San Diego perhaps, though it is said to be overflowing with army and navy men. I may come back to Clarmont [sic] and stay at the Inn a while because it is a nice town, though pretty small. I know it from end to end as far as its streets go. There are a good many interesting thigns happening, Milstein and a Symphony concert so far for music, with the Messiah on Sunday, postponed from Xmas when it was omitted because of flu. There are also miscellaneous things like a China Rice Bowl the other night for Chinese aid, embellished with quantities of elegant Chinese clothes in a fashion show, and a League of Women Voters luncheon to which I go with Grace next Monday.
Some of you may like to know that I have had quite a long letter from Dr. Benedict from Florida where he is with his wife at Sarasota. He is recovering and hopes to begin lecturing again in April, but I am not sure from what he said that he will be able to do it.
I have left out our trip to the Huntington Library and Museum, one of the perfectly satisfying places to go, of course. They have a brand new art catalogue of which I am sending a copy to Florence Foss and perhaps some of you will like to see that. The Library has a special exhibit of 500 years of printing, and in the list of elegant examples of printing down through the centuries is included the new Vesalius from the old plates which we have and enjoy so much. There were also binding by Cobden-Sanderson and I could hear the tones of his voice when he lectured at Mount Holyoke though the words, alas, were missing! No one has ever told me about the wonderful gardens at the Huntington place, and those I found as exciting as the Library and Museum, palms, cacti, many other things including a pink pom-pom tree which was just luscious.
With my best to all of you -
Abby H. Turner