FEATURE My Roots John has watched Brentwood change over the past seven decades, or so. He notes that the changes have been remarkable. And for the most part they have been good. April 2007

John Slatten

I was born on our family farm in Brentwood on the location of the present day Slatten Ranch Shopping Center in the year 1929.

Life on a farm in those days was a good experience for a young person. We were near the edge of cultivation. The Jacuzzi Ranch was the only place between us and the mountain. After that you could go for miles and be out of the sight of civilization. A farm boy was able to go out with his .22 and shoot varmints. I didn't hit much. We would usually just go hiking. I remember how beautiful the wildflowers were and how lovely the views over the valley. I remember how quiet it was. There weren't any people around because everyone was out working. Of course, most days I was going to school or working myself.

School Days

I attended Lone Tree School when it had eight grades meeting in two rooms with a single teacher. Lone Tree School started in 1880 and served kids from all around East County - as far north as Marsh Creek, halfway to Antioch in the east, almost to Oakley on the west, and clear down by Highway 4 in the south.

We attended school with the kids from Pruett Ranch and the other area farms and ranches.

When I was a student, Lone Tree School was meeting in its third building. The first burned down within a decade of being built, the second fell down, the final schoolhouse was built in 1906.

The school had two teachers for a number of decades, each teaching in one of the rooms. Students began leaving to attend the other, more modern, grade schools that were being built in Byron, Oakley, Antioch, and Knightsen. As a result, the Lone Tree teaching staff was eventually reduced to a single teacher for the final years of the school's existence. I was part of a graduating class that had only seven students.

And I still wasn't Valedictorian!

Lone Tree School's last teacher was a woman named Florene McFarlan. She retired in the 60s. Her son, Joe, is still an Antioch resident.

Before venturing out on Lone Tree Way for my three-quarter mile walk to school, I would look east and west to see if there were any cars. There almost never were.

Three cars going 30 miles an hour might pass us during the 15 minutes we walked along that sleepy, countrified road.

Back in the early 1940s farmers might move 200 head of sheep right down the middle of Lone Tree Way. Cowboys would move livestock down the road from one field to another.

The Burroughs Ranch on Sellers Avenue, for example, had pastureland out in Deer Valley and twice a year they would move those cows between the two ranges, herding them right down the middle of the road.

Cars would simply stop and let the livestock pass. This was not a problem! Nobody ever got excited or wrote angy letters to the editor about the practice. Everybody had a business-as-normal attitude towards such things.

Harvest Time

When I was young, Brentwood was a little town with a population of about a thousand residents. The economic center of the city was six or seven packinghouses.

Oakley had five or six packinghouses, with another large one located on Bixler Road near present-day Discovery Bay.

Harvest time would convert Brentwood into a large city because workers would set up campsites all over the place. A family of pickers would set up a tent with a little kerosene stove and take up residence among us for three months.

The Bracero Program started when I was 14. There was a shortage of help because everyone was going into the army, so in 1942 the government began to bring Mexican laborers in for the harvest.

A camp for these people was set up by the intersection of highway 4 and Marsh Creek. You could request a certain number of workers.

I would go in the car and pick up four or five workers. None of them could speak English and I couldn't speak Spanish. I would take them into the harvest and show them by gestures what to do - what color the fruit needed to be, etcetera.

Then I would haul them back to the camp in the evening. We got along just fine! Those people were really great workers! Slatten Ranch encompassed about 35 acres when I was young, which were planted in apricots.

We did quality control right on site. The apricots would roll across a portable slanted sorting table where a team of women would cull out overripe or bruised fruit.

We would send the good fruit to one of the packinghouses, but the big harvest tasks were reserved for processing the discarded fruit.

Workers would cut the discarded fruit in half, pit them, and set them on a tray, cut side up. Each tray was 30 inches wide by eight feet long, and made out of thin redwood slats.

We made tracks out of 2x4s and stacked trays 20 high on little wheeled frames with flanged wheels (to keep them on the 2x4s), and ran them from the cutting shed into the sulfur house, which was like a smokehouse.

We would burn the sulfur and leave the trays of fruit overnight. The sulfur would preserve the color of the fruit and keep the ants away.

The next morning we would bring the fruit out and spread the trays out in the sun.

We would leave the trays for 4-5 days, stack them up, and then scrape the sticky fruit into boxes, which we would send to Rosenberg Brothers or to the California Prune and Apricot Growers Association.

A field manager named Wilbur Bryson was the man who oversaw the operation. Mr. Bryson would come every year to set up the sulfur houses and trays. He would supervise the picking and sorting, and manage the harvest crew.

In a good harvest our 35 acres would produce 180 tons of fruit. I don't know how much additional dried fruit we would process, but we would do a seven-foot stack of trays five days a week for three weeks. So it was a lot!

There was a tremendous amount of dried fruit in Brentwood back in those days including apricots, peaches, etcetera. The little hill by San Jose and the Bypass had a tremendous dry yard with 90 cutters. Another was located behind Valley Oak Nursery.

A great thing in those days was that kids could spend a couple of months cutting apricots and peaches and get enough money to buy their school clothes. My wife did that when she was young. Kids could make spending money for the whole year by stamping boxes or lifting and hauling in a packinghouse.

Life on the Farm

There were no irrigation pipelines on our place; we would flood an entire field using the tractor to pull a "V-ditch ridger" to create a series of furrows and ridges that permitted us to control the water flow.

In two passes down the field we could create a vee-shaped ditch banked on both sides to supply water that could flow into the furrows. We interrupted the channels at regular intervals with canvas dams to regulate water flow so it would flood the whole associated grid.

We called the system Amos and Andy for a reason I never learned.

I started working in the fields in 1941 when I was 12 years old. My dad had a day job as Supervisor of the Knightsen Water District.

I told him, "We don't need to hire anyone to drive the tractor. I'll do it."

He said, "You can't."

However, I had watched my dad operate the old McCormick-Deering 1530, with its spiked wheels, long enough to know how the thing worked.

So I just climbed aboard and went to work.

By age 13 I was doing all the irrigation following school every night and on the weekends.

Mastering the operation of the tractor was a challenge that I faced up to and met.

That was the way all of us lived back in those days. You did what you could as part of a matrix of life going on all around you. It felt good.

I also did a lot of pruning, plus hauling off brush and cuttings from the trees. We would make a fire and feed the cuttings into it with a pitchfork.

In later years we got modernized and would pull a mobile burning unit hauled on a sled behind the tractor.

Eventually life got even easier when we fitted a brush rake on the back of a Ford tractor.

When the tomato harvest was ready, we would get a call at the high school asking if anyone was available and willing to pick tomatoes.

The teachers would excuse us from class. I went a couple of times to pick.

Forklifts didn't come into general use until the late 40s, so everything was done manually with 50-pound tomato boxes. It was hard work!

I can't remember if we even got paid. We just thought it was a good thing to do.

When I was in the eighth grade I started working for Fred Heidorn. My job was nailing lids on boxes of grapes. Fred paid me 35 cents an hour, which was good pay. Later I got a raise to 50 cents per hour.

I was on the way to wealth because in those days you could buy a nice home for 3,000 dollars.

I graduated from Liberty High School in 1947. I had met Carol Clark in 1941 at a 4-H gathering that was held in Concord.

Mrs. Ballard was taking some girls over there from Knightsen. They were coming down Lone Tree Way, and asked me if I wanted a ride.

The other girls all said, "I don't want any boy sitting next to me." Carol, however, said, "He can sit next to me."

I really got to know Carol in high school. We went to a school dance and ended up getting married in 1950. Six months later I was drafted into the army.

I had worked at the steel mill in Pittsburg as an Electrician's Apprentice for a while. When the military saw that I had some experience with wires, they sent me to Field Lineman School at Camp Roberts, which was located between Salinas and Paso Robles. It was a huge facility!

In the Army Now

I shipped out to Korea from Camp Stoneman, in Pittsburg June 27, 1951. It was dreary but I was resigned to serving my country. Back in those days we just did what we were told.

We went to Fort Mason in San Francisco and boarded a ship for Japan. I spent a day-and-a-half in Japan and then took a ferry to Pusan, Korea. This was followed by a ride on a coal-burning train into the Korean interior.

Fortunately for us, we got on scene the week following the last major battle of the war. I was sent there for nine months, but was actually there for almost a year. Our company commander was a captain who had been in World War II and had been recalled for the Korean "Police Action."

A large group of us were scheduled to rotate back to the States.

"When the truck comes to take you, don't get on at once," the captain told us. "I don't want the Regimental Commander to see you because we will be way under strength. But I don't care! I want you guys to get home."

While we were on the ship coming back we heard on the news that a monsoon had hit Korea, dropping 18 inches of rain in three days right on the base that we had just left - washing out everything. I was thankful to miss that!

I remember GIs washing their jeeps in the water of a creek that ran through one of our encampments. The trees were all dirty eight feet up their trunks. I couldn't figure how the dirt got there but then realized it was from the monsoons.

That must have been awful!

I got home in June 1952 and went to night school on the GI Bill at Humphry's College in Stockton where I majored in Accounting. Then I went to work. I became a Life Insurance Agent in 1961, and started my own company in 1985.

Developing Slatten Ranch

In the 90s land speculators began talking about buying an option on our land and seeing what they could do with it. Some of them were homebuilders. A couple of them seemed sleezy. One of them said, "We'll give you 100 thousand for an option?" When I said, "How about 200?" he said, "Sure."

My two brothers and I were hesitant. "What's the matter with you guys?" he said. "Money doesn't mean anything to you?" Another speculator called me nasty names when I wouldn't sign a form.

I told my brothers, "I don't want to do anything that we won't be proud of. Let's just wait until something good comes along." I was chairman of the Brentwood Economic Development Commission for five years. One of our members, John Houck, was with Equus Group. He said to me one day, "I want to talk to you."

I had a few conversations with John and with his partner, Brent Aasen. They were good people. I liked what they had done.

"I propose that we form a partnership to develop the ranch," John said. "We will build it correctly. We'll do something beautiful. We'll get the right tenants. We'll manage it and keep it."

It sounded like a good partnership. We had the ground; they had the expertise.

Property development turned out to be a whole new world with a separate language. The Equus guys knew things like where to get the best architect in the state and how to get approvals.

I like what Slatten Ranch has become. One lady has written nasty things about me - accusing me of destroying habitat. However, we're all part of a natural progression that can't be turned aside or stopped, but only managed.

If a person came here in 1840, riding over the hill on a horse, they would see grass growing as far as the eye could see.

The same rider in 1880 would see barley and wheat growing with trails running everywhere. "Where did the grass all go?"

Driving over the same hill in a Model T in 1930 he would see orchards and roads! "Where did the barley and wheat all go?"

In 1970 he would come over the hill in his Camaro see all the houses, and ask, "Where are all the orchards?" A natural progression is continually transforming our land.

Development didn't kill the orchards. Time killed them. Market conditions changed. The canneries are all gone; we buy fresh fruit shipped in from Chile.

You can't hold change back. All you can do is manage it wisely - or not.

Of course, changes don't come in all at once like one of those Korean monsoons sweeping everything away. We still have some thriving orchards and farms that are successfully hanging on in the midst of all the change. I wish them well. Also, I can still walk up into the Diablo foothills behind the old Jacuzzi place and walk among hundreds of thousands of acres that are unchanged from when I was young.

The wildflowers, the impressive views all remain as they were long ago.

What's next, I wonder? What will Brentwood be like in 30 years or 100 years? Will high rise apartments be lined up along Lone Tree Way?

Who knows what will happen? Not I! I do know for sure that I'd like to come back and see it!

I expect that it will be unimaginable. I imagine that it will be good.