In 1938, Frances West moved from Berkley to Fresno to go to Fresno State College. She majored in education. She met Frank Rowe Peters at a dance at the Marigold Ball room. Big band (more story here) After the wedding in Berkeley in 1938 they rented a house on Glenn Avenue for a couple of years and then a house on Cornell Avenue for another couple of years. In 1942 they bought a Victorian house with a somewhat run down vineyard from the owner who wanted to get rid of. It was a corner parcel located on the south west side of Chandler Airport. The address is 1240 West Kearney Blvd. at the corner of West Avenue. The Peters family converted the property into a flower farm and raised their family there from 1942 through 1976
Kearney Blvd. is a stately two lane road flanked by rows of tall palm trees and even taller eucalyptus trees in two long rows one on each side. Additionally, there are two more single lanes, one on each side of the trees. This boulevard was built by Mr. (first name) Kearney as his private horse and buggy road in to Fresno. His workers traveled on the side roads so as to keep the center lanes smooth for the boss man.
The flower farm was about 3-1/2 acres of mostly vineyard situated on fertile land that used to be a river bed, before the county dug the irrigation ditches. At this time I was about 3 years old and my sister Sara was a new born. One of the first tasks confronting Frank, was to pull out enough of the vines to make room to plant flowers. This as not an easy job as grapevines have a heavy, gnarly, tough and springy root system. When you chop a root with an ax, it tends to spring the ax back at you. I know this because I helped pull out more of the vines later when I was older. A horse team really struggled to pull one out. Only a Fordson tractor could pull a vine out and some times the chain would break.
The Fresno scraper. . .
Mr. Bully and the horse and plow.
The sound and sight of airplanes over head.
Originally my dad tried to grow gladiolus, zinnias and perhaps chrysanthemums but there was a microscopic bug called a nematode that caused a problems with the plant roots and bulbs. The Fresno County Farm Advisors Department would not let us sell flower bulbs because it could spread the parasite nematodes. Surprisingly, this came back to be a small advantage later on. Since we could not sell Dahlia tubers, other shops could not compete with us as easily as they might have been able to had they been able to buy tubers from us and grow their own Dahlias.
So my Dad tried new crops some of which consisted of Snapdragons, Dahlias and a few other flowers like Zinnias. However, in my opinion, the Zinnias really weren't that sellable at that time, although they used to sell quite well at Grandmother Alma Peters' flower shop on Van Ness Avenue. Maybe there was no refrigeration in the early days, and that's why the Zinnias Gardens Flower Shop did so well.
The dahlias were really the best thing going at the time. They have very large beautiful blossoms. They come in all kinds of wonderful varieties and colors. They makeup quickly into a funeral spray or a wedding design.
When I was old enough to drive, one of my jobs was to deliver the flowers, mostly to funeral homes and sometimes a rival flower shop. My dad eventually got into wholesaling flowers to these other flower shops. In order to do this he had to overcome their in reluctance to using dahlias. He would explain to them how buying dahlias wholesale from Peters Flower Shop would help their business and their profits.
I didn't mind delivering flowers to funerals and placing the reefs on the caskets with one exception. That was when a small child had died and I was to take flowers in a can and put them on this tiny little casket. That seemed kind of sad.
As our crops continued to grow, chrysanthemums was another large item. We called them "Mums" You plant them in the spring, I guess. After they had sprouted and were about 4 to 6 inches high, one of my jobs was to go down these long, long rows and nip the center bud out of each plant so that instead of growing one flower each one grows three of four. This was backbreaking work. I had to bend way over to do it. It was summerly, and it was Fresno (dry and hot). Later on when the plants grew larger, we put up posts, strung horizontal support wires and guy wires for war surplus military netting to keep them from geting sun burned pedals.
The same netting needed to be put back up on the wires in the wintertime to prevent the flower pedals from freezing. Our Chrysanthemums were usually not all sold by the first freeze of winter. My Dad had to keep track of the temprature at night. He had a thermometer outside the bedroom window and he checked periodically through the night. He would wake up in the middle of the night to check the thermometer to make sure it didn't get too cold and harm the plants. If it got too cold, sometimes my Dad and I had to go out in the dark and cold to pick the Mums when the forecast was for a cold snap. We had to protect our investment in the flowers
We would go out with a large curved knife (delete) linoleum knife. I would bend down low and reach around with my left arm and grab 5 or 20 stems under my arm and then pull the knife through the stems with my right hand, hacking off the whole bundle. We would place the bundles on the ground. Later we come along with a wheelbarrow and pick them up, stack them up, and trundle them back to the garage where there was a storage room that we called the icebox. In the summer, we used it to keep the flowers cool. In this case, we're using the icebox to keep them warm or at least frost free, rather than cold, the purpose for which we used it the summer.