Verdugo Views: Picking olives in the foothills

Memories of picking olives in the foothills came back to Mike DeSantis of Montrose when he read a Verdugo Views column about the Charles Bathey homestead at the top of Briggs Avenue.

“Here’s my story of that area,” he wrote. “I think it’s the same property.”

He went on to describe a citrus ranch at the top of Briggs where it turns right. Crescenta Valley historian Mike Lawler confirmed DeSantis’ memory.

“Yes, this would have been the Bathey ranch,” Lawler said. “Briggs turns right and becomes Shields Street right at the Bathey property line. The Batheys had a citrus orchard in the front. It’s still there!”

DeSantis, of Italian heritage, said that when he was growing up, his family used a lot of olive oil.

“When I was a kid during World War II, there was no olive oil coming from Italy, so my family used to come up to Briggs, where there were tons of olive trees,” he said. “The owner allowed us to pick the olives along the back part of the property, along the wash.”

Almost all the houses had olive trees, DeSantis recalled.

“There were olive orchards all along the foothills,” he said. “You still see some today.”

Charles Bathey, an early La Crescenta settler, homesteaded 160 acres at the top of Briggs (Verdugo Views, April 10). Bathey planted at least one olive orchard. It was for his neighbor Charles Gould, of Gould Castle, built in 1892. The Goulds lived there only a short time, then moved, leaving the orchards unattended. The olive orchards survived through the years only to be hauled away and replanted near new homes, according to Sources of History, compiled by June Dougherty in 1993.

DeSantis said his cousins often went along to pick olives at various places.

“There were probably nine or 10 of us in this big, four-door Dodge, a long ride in the 1940s,” he said. “When we stopped at a house, the men would tell the owner that we paid 25 cents a sack for olives.”

With the price agreed on, they began picking.

Olives ripen in late fall, and many mornings they arrived to find frost on the branches.

“We had to strip the small branches like milking a cow,” he said. “Our hand would freeze.”

They took a break at noon, enjoying “Italian salami, eggplant sandwiches, all that good stuff,” he said. After lunch, the kids played down in the wash. “When our folks called, we pretended we couldn’t hear them and just went on playing.”

They stayed until they had two full sacks, one for each family. Then they showed the owners the two sacks.

“The surprise was that they were not potato-type sacks; they were peanut and walnut sacks that were two or three times bigger,” he said.

“My two sisters and I still laugh about the looks from the owners when they saw those sacks. It took two men to lift them onto the front fenders, like a couple of deer,” he said. “That was in the day when 25 cents was still a lot of money. We took the olives to a place where they pressed them into oil, down around the produce market in Los Angeles.”

One year, each family got a five-gallon container of oil.

DeSantis grew up in what is now Chavez Ravine.

“No one called it that,” he said. “We called it Palo Verde.”

He graduated from Lincoln High School in 1944. He worked at Gateway Market for several years, starting out as a box boy.

“I got very proficient at picking out watermelons,” he said. “The ladies came in and someone would offer to pick one out for them. ‘No, no. I want Mike to do it,’ they would reply.”

DeSantis moved to La Cañada-Flintridge when he married, then moved to Montrose about 1964.