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Fresno, California, circa 1915. "Auto tourists in Fruit Packing District." 8x6 glass negative by Howard Clinton Tibbitts, a San Francisco-based photographer who worked for the Southern Pacific railroad and its Sunset magazine. View full size.
(I keep wanting to spell it "Guggenheim")
This is located at the corner of Santa Clara and Santa Fe avenues on the south end of downtown Fresno. The water tank in the background has the correct name. The building in the foreground is the packing, grading and sulphuring house. Behind it is the fig packing house.
On the right side, just out of frame was the San Joaquin Ice Company, with a Creamery attached.
Now, this area is where State Route 41 goes over downtown, and where there's a parking lot. https://goo.gl/maps/iP1vQmdqSvu
It appears there are people actually smiling in this photograph. We don't normally see that from this time period. The photographer may have been the first ever to yell out "Everyone say Cheese"!
This is Guggenhime & Co. Plant No. 12, located on Santa Fe Avenue in Fresno.
A link to another image of the plant.
I worked at the Young Bros. Fruit Exchange (Newcastle, California) in the early 1950s when I was 12 to 15 years old. Prior to that I picked pears at 17 cents per lug box. At the packing shed the pears were packed by size: a size of 65 packed would produce a 52-pound box with 65 pears wrapped in tissue. Most of the workers were local, but many followed the fruit harvest in California from the south in spring to Oregon in the fall. I started out trucking (hand truck) lug boxes of pears to the sorter/sizer that then distributed the pears to the bins by size for the packers. I tried packing (more money); I am tall and the bins are low, so I barely lasted the season. I finished up my "career" at age 15 running the nailer putting lids on the boxes.
This is not the gastronomic tour I signed up for!
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