Peter Leibert's Page

Things have surely changed since the days when I was a kid. When I was young, we walked a lot. The youth of today seldom have to travel more than a mile or two to get to and from school, or to and from a store. Even with these types of short distances, a lot of the young children who today pass by my home each day are riding in Mom’s SUV, and the older ones are driving their own personal cars or riding a bus. There are a few of them walking, but on our street it is only a couple of dozen or so. At times, some of them seem to be testing new ways for breaking their necks as they jump curbs and other things with their skateboards, scooters, or other similar devices.

Back when I was a kid, we had to walk miles and miles to go anywhere. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, Arlington, the part of town where we lived, had about 5,000 to 6,000 people living in the area. It was, and still is, a part of the city of Riverside and Riverside had a huge population of 33,000 - as of 1940. The population number in the year 2002 is about 275,000 residents within expanded city boundaries.

With a few exceptions, getting to and from school was totally a walking affair during the 1930’s. The elementary school was about 3/4 mile away and every kid that lived near where I lived, walked it – even those attending kindergarten. In the winter months it was still quite dark when we started out each morning, and often it was very close to being dark by the time we got home. My Junior High (Chemawa) was located over on the other side of Arlington - a distance of 2 miles each way. Of course, this distance wasn’t long enough after I learned that girls are actually nice. At least, that is how I remember it.

Not only did we kids walk to and from school, but also a lot of us, especially the boys, walked it barefooted during warm times. For any rich urban descendents of mine, “barefoot” means “not wearing shoes”. Just think about it, I was a young kid during the “depression time” and my parents certainly did not have any spare money to be buying unnecessary things like shoes and certainly would never buy NEW shoes.

I am sure that the seven kids within the Leibert family each owned a pair of shoes. I do not remember this as a fact, but I have concluded this as I have pictures showing us with shoes. But I betcha my shoes were always hand me downs. You do understand that my brother John was two years and one day older than I. Two years and his shoes were mine.There were exceptions to our walking everywhere. One key memorable happening in my early life was being transferred from Liberty Elementary School to Saint Francis De Sales Elementary. Saint Francis School was located at Tenth Street and Lime Street near downtown Riverside. Downtown was 6 or 7 miles away from our Orange Grove farm. This change occurred during my third and fourth grades, and it did make it necessary for me to learn to use a new mode of travel – streetcars.

As an adult, it is easy to look back and describe the surroundings where we grew up. As a kid though, it would have certainly been subjected to a different measure. When I was a very young kid, I quite clearly remember when state highway 18, which followed Magnolia Avenue in front of our house, got a major improvement. This occurred during 1938 and was a project of the WPA.

During the “depression of the 1930’s”, the WPA was one of the major publicly financed programs designed to employ people. This I can tell you now, but at the time when they were doing that work, all I could say is the things they were doing were new and exciting to me. I remember the workers tearing out the old street and pouring a cement curb. It was a rounded curb – not the square kind. We never had any type of curb before.

At first, we had to watch that activity from a distance, as Mom would not let us get very close. Later, I would sit on that brand new curb in front of our house and watch the workers by the hour. The workers were using a lot of very big machines to do their work in the street. I mean, really big machines. Huge trucks would get loaded up with dirt. There were always about 8 or 10 workers with shovels doing that work.

Later some people would guide their team of horses down the street making a lot of dust and leveling out the dirt. Then some other big trucks dumped white rocks onto the roadbed. As soon as the truck moved out of the way, a swarm of workers would move over and shovel those rocks around and eventually get them leveled out too.

Then a REALLY big machine would travel up and down over those rocks. These machines went CHU-CHUG, CHU-CHUG, CHU-CHUG, and they had a BIG wheel on the right side of them. They had real large, all metal wheels that pressed the rocks into the ground. Then some other trucks came and poured lots of black stuff on the white rocks. Again, the workers moved in and smoothed the black stuff out.

Now those things were exciting. But there were other things happening on our farm. Most of the acreage was used to grow fruit trees or nut trees. We had about 4 acres of juice orange trees, 3 acres of “Washington Navel Orange” trees, and 3 acres of “English Walnut” trees. We also had one plum tree, three Cling Peach trees, a couple of freestones, three Apricot trees, and few of this, and a few of that. We also had a single “blood” orange tree. The fruit was not that great, and in hind sight the juice was often sour, but it was a “blood orange tree” and my buddies always wanted to pick some of the “blood oranges” off of that tree. The oranges I really liked were from our Washington Navels.

Of those trees had fantastic oranges. They were large fruit with beautiful color, they had a thick rind, and they were very easy to peel. The slices seemed to fall apart when peeled, and they tasted GREAT! You seldom find oranges like them in any store today.

Behind my grandparents house was a big old barn. That is where the horses were kept. Dad would only use one of the horses when he plowed area for our garden. When he cultivated the orchards he would use two horses. I can remember riding on the back of one of the horses and having the orange tree branches hit me in the face. When I got bigger, Dad would let me sit on his lap and hold the reins while we plowed the furrows for the oranges and walnuts.

On the west side and the east side of our orchards were rows of some very tall trees. Most of them were Cypress trees, planted during the 1880 era, and had grown to be about 75 feet tall. One of the memories from my youth involves a strong windstorm that tore through our area and lifted one of these trees out of the ground by its roots.

But there is a bright side for this story. Cypress trees make great places for young kids to build tree houses.

All you had to do to make a tree house was to gather some 1-by-4’s, cut them into four-foot lengths, and then nail them up the side of the tree using as big nails as you can find. It was sometimes hard to find those really big nails. When you got those steps in place, you could then climb up to where the limbs branch out. That was at about 20 to 30 feet level. Then you could pull up some bigger wooden planks and attach them onto the horizontal limbs of the tree. A little wood and a few nails and you have built yourself a little tree house.

The view was fantastic from up there in those days. The orange trees, averaging about 15 feet tall, formed a sea of green beneath you. You were way up above the orange trees and a kid could see forever, even further than Poppy Hill. That hill had to be over a mile southeast from our house.

And speaking of Poppy Hill, it was one of key attractions for the young folk of the area. As the name infers, the hill was covered with the beautiful orange California Poppy’s during the March and April months of the year. When I was very young, it was a solid orange color during the spring. As I grew older, people would build some new homes on parts of the hill. From then on, there weren’t as many poppy’s growing there.

But one thing that did not change is the attraction of that large Kumquat tree located on the very top of Poppy Hill. Kumquats, Loquats, Pomegranates, and other types of fruits would cause young people to walk a mile and sometimes more just to have a single taste.

To the north of our home in this sky, we could REALLY see forever. On almost every day, a person could see the peak of Mount Baldy, as well as the entire San Bernardino Mountains. These peaks are over 40 miles away.

Back on the ground beneath us, we had a lot of farm animals on our Leibert ranch. We raised chickens, geese, bantam hens, rabbits, goats, and of course, a variety of cats, but no dogs. At the time I sat down and noted the key items that I could remember about my youth, there was one item that kept recurring. The sign on the power pole! We had a sign mounted on the pole that carried the power lines into our house. The pole was right next to the alley. FOR SALE! FRYERS! EGGS! RABBITS! If I recall correctly, a picture of a “Rhode Island Red” chicken was in the center of the sign.

Scouting out the surrounding area required a lot of the walking I was telling you about. There was an irrigation canal about a mile south of our place. This canal came down by the base of Poppy Hill and was used to carry all the irrigation water. The canal twisted and turned and meandered round the area. There was a dirt road going along on its side so you could easily walk along it for miles. One of the stops along the way was an Indian cemetery located in a grove of Eucalyptus trees about 3 miles away.

A target for a longer stroll was to hike up to Mockingbird Canyon. It was located near another canal, the Gage, and was even further away from our place. In the opposite direction, to the north, we had a hill covered with big rocks which was always available for us kids to explore. It also was about a mile or so away over behind the county hospital.

There was one major problem with this wandering around barefooted. Stickers! The soil was just great for growing things like oranges and walnuts, but it also was great for growing stickers. There were a number of places that never got visited by us kids since the area was loaded with these stickers and they were hard on your bare feet.

Life was not only wandering around, but also involved doing “chores”. I see that my dictionary defines “chore” as meaning “a small routine task, such as a housekeeper or farmer”. Since I was a farmer’s boy, I do not agree that chores are small routine tasks. My definition is that a chore is “a hard and unpleasant task”. You would think so too if you had to get up before six in the morning and go out in the cold to do them every day.

Yes, that is correct. Not everything was “all play” during my early years. When our feet hit the ground in the morning, my brother John and I had a number of assigned chores to perform, every day, seven days a week. The first thing that had to be done was to water and feed the chickens, the rabbits, the goats, and any other animals we had at the time. Then we would proceed to gather eggs, and clean the rabbit coops.

My brother and I seemed to have had our morning routine down to the point where we always seemed to finish our morning chores just a minute or two after Dad had left for work, and then we would go in for breakfast. If we went in early, we would always undergo a litany of questions about how sure we were that the chores were all done.

After school we had a different “chore” routine including milking the goats. We had five nannies, as I recall, and one billy. When we had customers for our fryers or rabbits, one of the older kids, Theresa, John or I, would be expected to do the skinning and preparation of the rabbits. We mounted the rabbit skins on a rack to dry, as they were sold to the feed store whenever we had a dozen skins or so.

Chickens were another story. You had to prepare some hot water, catch the chickens, cut off their necks, and then place them in the bucket of water to soften the feathers. After a while you would take one out and pluck the feathers off of it. That was a portion of the guy’s chores. The gals usually had to finish cleaning them.

On a farm like ours, there were always a variety of chores that needed to be done. The irrigation of the groves was typical of those small routine tasks that the dictionary refers to. Mom or Dad would contact the “sanjero” in order to request irrigation water for a certain day. Before that date, we would spend many hours preparing the field for the upcoming irrigation. We had to make sure the flume was clean and clear, that the water gates were opened in the correct sections, and to make sure that the furrows were connected correctly and not broken down.

During the selected day for watering the groves, we would spend much of that day going throughout the field checking the water’s progress, fixing any furrows that were not holding the water, and altering the furrows and water controls at the flumes whenever a row or section was found to be thoroughly irrigated.

There were some chores that allow me to earn some money. For me, catching gophers was my specialty. I would scout the groves looking for fresh mounds of dirt, which were a telltale sign that a gopher was working the area. If you spotted any new workings, you dug a hole around the gopher mound and locate their tunnels. In each tunnel hole you would set a trap. The next morning you checked your traps, and voila! I almost always had a gopher or two.

The traps I used were very similar to the type that you can buy in a garden store today. We added a three-foot length of bailing wire to the end of each trap, and connected the other end of the wire to a stake. In that way, if a gopher tripped the trap and was still able to move back down its hole, you wouldn’t loose your trap or your gopher. For every gopher I caught, I was paid 5 cents. It was big money in my mind, and whenever I needed 10 cents to go to the Saturday matinee movie, I would eagerly go set some traps.

Every fall, about the time that school was restarting, it was time to harvest our walnuts. Here we made big money. I would guess that we had about 45 or 50 big English walnut trees on our piece of property, and a similar number next door on Grandpa’s and Grandma’s place.

Under the house, we kept a number of long poles (20 to 30 footers) each with a hook on the end. They were used to shake the walnut tree limbs in order to get the nuts to drop to the ground. It was rather difficult for me to handle the real long poles, and when I was really young I always seemed to need my brothers help. But later I became a pro, like John was. Shaking the tree was the fun part of the job and I would even shake a tree for my sisters for free.

The overall job was to knock all the walnuts to the ground, pick them up and put them in a burlap gunnysack. For a sack of walnuts that were not peeled, we were paid 75 cents. If we peeled the walnut husk off the shell, then you could earn another 25 cents a sack.

That wasn’t too good of a deal since it then required a lot more walnuts to fill a gunnysack. These “field sacks” of walnuts were then dumped into one of our 4-foot by 8-foot drying trays and spread out in order to dry. A week or so later, when they were finished drying, the peeled walnuts were then put into a sack, stitched closed, and then taken to a walnut cracking plant which was located about 1/2 mile west of our place where the nuts were sold.

One of the ways you could spot a family that grew walnut trees was to look at their hands. During the months of September, October and November, almost everyone in the family would have dark stains on their fingers. Of course, the ladies of the families might fool you sometimes as they often wore gloves when peeling these nuts.