The Valley Yesteryear : R.F. Orton: Proprietor of Canoga Park’s feed mill

One of Ray Orton’s fondest childhood memories is of hunting deer with a Spanish cowboy named Pancho Real in canyons north of what is now the town of Agoura Hills.

“Pancho used to ride a horse every Saturday into town from clear out there to get his supplies, and I got acquainted with him because I loved to speak Spanish,” Orton said.

Real, who minded the northern fences of the Agoura family’s ranch, taught the young Orton a love of hunting and fine guns that he still retains.

Today his collection of guns remains well-oiled, and he still takes his limit now and then, as he did at a dove hunt in September in Temecula. “It’s my greatest hobby,” he said.

Orton’s father founded the first feed store in Canoga Park, which was then called Owensmouth.

As a young boy, Orton first picked up a few words of Spanish working side by side with Mexicans in his father’s bean dryer before World War I. He practiced by speaking with descendants of the area’s early Spanish settlers, who began moving to the slowly growing community from homesteads in Las Virgenes Canyon and the Malibu Creek area. “We all got along better in those days than they did in later years,” he said.

At Owensmouth High School he took 4 years of Spanish with a demanding teacher named Lula Draper. At his 1923 commencement, Orton sang two early California Spanish songs--”La Paloma,” the song of the dove, and “La Golondrina,” the song of the swallow.

He later sang at Spanish fiestas and pageants at the missions at Santa Barbara and at San Fernando, raising money for the restoration of the latter in the 1940s.

Orton prospered in the family business and served as president of the Canoga Park Chamber of Commerce for two years in the 1940s.

He sold “Orton’s Growing Mash” (“It Makes Them Grow!”) to the 1-acre chicken farms that sprang up in the West Valley around World War I and milled barley and other crops for the large ranches that remained intact well into the 1940s.

But he could see that the future would consume such large landholdings, that the need for animal feed would plummet, as houses replaced pastures. He sold Orton Milling Co. in 1945, closing escrow the day after the end of World War II, and a few years later moved with his wife and three children to the western San Bernardino County town of Upland, where he lives now.

“I think that was pretty good timing,” Orton said. “I think I got out at the right time.”