Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The Olive Rediscovered

?Olive Outline
??Intro:
???Few trees are as deeply rooted to human culture as the olive. Domesticated long before we'd learned to put words to paper, the olive holds tremendous symbolic power: for peace, strength, ressurection. But in California, producer Guy Hand found it can also symbolize something else: the distance we've put between ourselves and our agricultural past.
??Sound of olives falling on ground Tape 7 9:40:13 9:44:10 3:37
??That's the sound of olives falling. The days are short, the air crisp, and olives clustered in olive trees all over California are turning deep black, dead ripe. Some will be picked and pressed into olive oil or cured for eating. But many will be ignored. They'll fall like black hailstones. They'll bounce off cars and peoples' heads. They'll slicken sidewalks, clog gutters. They'll leave chunks of wintertime California awash in unwanted olives. Guy .50
??Sound of traffic on Olive Street Tape 7 11:38:31 11:47:38 9:07
??And there are sections of the sidewalk up here that are just impassable because there are so many olives on them. And the sidewalk is completely black in stretches where people have just given up on the olives. Jack Reed
??Jack Reed grew up on Santa Barbara's aptly named Olive Street, one of the places where homeowners and olives have been at odds for years. His mother, Gertrude, was just a young girl when the City of Santa Barbara planted an olive tree in front of her families' new home, the house she still lives in today. Guy
??We moved here in '22 and the tree was planted in '23. And if we had known what olive tree were going to be like we'd have pulled it up?and probably would've been fined for doing it! (Laughing). Gertrude Reed
??In the '20s, the City of Santa Barbara planted olive trees all along Gertrude's street intending to harvest olives for oil while making a profit for the city. Gertrude remembers the olive pickers coming every year until the '50s, when the market fell and they quit harvesting the trees. Guy .45
?? But then it's been a big nuisance ever since with the olive droppin'. And it's a constant rake, rake with the olives. Gertrude Reed
??In 1993, Gertrude had had enough with living in a neighborhood that felt as if it was slipping away on a sea of salad dressing. She and a neighbor decided to act, gathering names on a petition to make the city cut the olive trees down. Guy
??I did, I canvased the whole street from Olive Ave to clear down to Ortega and turned it in but it didn't do any good at all. (Do you remember how many people were interested in signing?) Around 100 people. (Would you say most of the people in the neighborhood were in favor of getting rid of the trees?) Yes, they were. Gertrude Reed 7:10
??All Gertrude has to show for her work is a dining room table covered in newspaper clippings generated by her failed petition drive. In one photograph this sweet, silver-haired woman stands defient, petition in hand, next to her olive tree. Guy .20
??( You and that tree sort of grew up together.) Yes, we sure did, we sure did. (Laughing) 77 years. . . Gertrude Reed
??Irony clings to these unwanted olives. After all, for millenia the olive tree was not reviled but revered. To ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, Muslims the olive was an integral part of daily life. Mourners placed cured olives in the tombs of Pharaohs. Olive oil anointed the brows of kings, greased the axles of chariots. Olive wood gave strength to both palace walls and humble homes Guy 50
??(Fade in with olive picking sounds) See, first of all olive oil itself has been historically very, very precious. Certainly in the churches experience it goes all the way back to the time of Christ and before. Father Bush 1:52:14: 1:53:49 1:35
??Jesuit Father Bernie Bush?that's Bernie as in Bernard, by the way?stands on a ladder?in staw hat, suspenders, and work boots, looking more like an Iowa corn farmer than a priest. He's picking olives from one of the 100 trees that grow at El Re-tear-o San In-yee-go, the Jesuit Retreat House in Los Altos California where he works and lives. Guy 20
??The olives were first brought from the Mediterranean to Mexico and to Latin American by Jesuit missionaries. And then the olives were brought north from Mexico into the California missions by the Franciscans. Each mission had its own olive grove and that oil was very precious, used it for lubricating wheels, they used it for cooking, they used it for light, they burned the oil. It was a mulit-purpose oil. Father Bush 1:55:03 1:57:26 2:23
??Spanish missionaries harvested olives from San Diego to Sonoma until 1834 when, with secularization, most mission orchards were abruptly abandoned. The culture of the Mediterranean quickly gave way to that of Northern Europe. These new immigrants had no practical or cultural experience with the olive. The Sacramento Bee, at the time, mentioned that "not one American in ten thousand had ever tried olive oil." Ralph Waldo Emerson described olives like life at sea--both exotic and distasteful. Guy 45
??(Ambient sound of olive picking) Father Bush only recently started thinking about olives: Tape 7 12:57:22 1:04:21 7:00 Run this as sound bed
??About five years ago we started doing a monthly healing service here and we'd take olive oil and we'd bless it and we have people come and pray and we annoint them. And that original one we did by buying a can of oil from Safeway. Then one day not long after that I was sitting in my office and right outside my office door is an olive tree and it was loaded with olives and I looked at those olives and I said to myself, wouldn't it be fun if the olive oil we use in our healing service came from our own trees. And I knew we had a grove down here, but I hadn't been down much, I didn't know how many trees there were here. So I said well lets look into it. I had no idea how to get from olive to olive oil, nor did I have any idea how to get an olive off the tree. Father Bush 1:45:35 1:48:20 2:55
??So Father Bush did some research and found Dan Sciabica, a member of an Italian family with a commercial olive oil business in Modesto, California. There was only one hitch: To work, the company's machinery needed a ton of olives. Guy
??And I said, a ton of olives!... and he said ya, that'll make you about thirty gallons of oil and I said thirty gallons of oil is not the scale and magnitude I was thinking of. I had more in mind a pint. And I said geez how do I get a ton of olives? So Dan Sciabica came over here and looked at our grove and we had a lot of olives here and he said you pick these olives and I'll leave a box off and he left off one of those fruit bins. He said you fill these up and we'll make the olive oil for you. Well as it turned out that first year we had no idea what we were doing, we were down here in the orchard without tarps or any of that kind of thing and didn't know how to pick very well. But as it turned out in the 3 days that we worked on the Thanksgiving weekend we picked a thousand pounds, a half a ton, took it over there and they made us 27 gallons of oil. Father Bush
??So the next year Father Bush refined his technique, got rakes, tarps and buckets, and asked friends and neighbors to come to the retreat the day after Thanksgiving to pick olives. (There's an instruction sheet. Sign in . . .) In this, the sixth year, whole families are on ladders, picking by hand or raking olives off the trees onto tarps. Guy 10
??Sound of people picking olives
??And as the sun fades, a crate fills to overflowing with 1000 pounds of bright green and irredecent purple olives. While tired, muddy volunteers haul their last bucketfuls up from the grove, another volunteer, Chelsea McNeil, a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, composes an impromtu olive picking song in the parking lot. Guy
??. . . For one small bottle of olive oil on the hills of El Retiro, I broke my back before lunch break. Away, let me get away . . . to my chriropractor! Chelsea McNeil 3:47:59
??Clapping and laughter 3:47:59 3:48:15
??At about the same time Father Bush and his volunteers were refining their picking skills, Gabrielle Leonhard was wandering the old mission groves, doing researching for a book about olives. Guy
??And when I went to the missions they really could not tell me about the history. When I looked at the trees, many of them looked like scare crows or dense thickets that I couldn't even look through. They weren't trees any more, they were bushes down to the ground and I said my gosh, this is a living legacy, it is a culinary heritage for California, and we're losing it. Gabrielle Leonhard
??Gabrielle was stunned enough by what she saw to form the Mission Olive Preservation, Restoration, and Education project. She and a group of volunteers contacted the northern and central California missions and began working directly with them. Guy
??The Soledad mission was very interested in restoring their olive history and they harvested two years ago and made an oil. The Santa Ynez mission has harvested now for the 3rd year. The Sonoma mission has harvested their olives for three harvests now and that oil is being sold . . . Gabrielle Leonhard
??Sound of Mariachi Band
??Today Gabrielle is attending the Blessing of the Olives festival at the Sonoma Mission in Sonoma California, an event organized to pay homage to olive history?and perhaps to help secure its future. Guy
??Mariachi music ends with clapping
??Good morning. I'm Daphne Derven and it's a real privilage to be here again. This is our 3rd Blessing of the olives here at the Sonoma mission. . . . Daphne Derven
??On this Saturday in December a hundred some people gather in the mission's adobe-walled courtyard, standing under the gray-green canopy of olive trees. Guy
??And now it's a real privilege to introduce Father Aurelio Villa of St. Leo's Church Daphne Derven
??Oh God, from the very beginning of time you commanded the earth to bring forth vegetations and fruits of every kind. Grant, we pray, that these lands and these trees enriched by your bounty and cultivated by human hands may be fertile with abundant crops. Father Aurelio Villa
??Father Aurelio, dressed in vestments, white beard, and beatific smile, sprinkles holy water on mounds of freshly picked olives. It's as if California's past has rematerialized before our eyes. Guy
??Thank you for coming and I hope you enjoy the olive and the oil that we produce (clapping) Father Aurelio Villa
??A surge of interest in Mediterranean food and the well publicized health benefits of olive oil, have people all over California looking with a newfound interest at neglected olive trees. Some are planting new ones. Others are building olive oil presses. Ten years ago there were only half a dozen presses in California. Now there are at least 24. Guy
??One of those presses is located in Glen Ellen, just north of the Sonoma mission. Today it is offering to process olives for anyone who wants to bring them by. Peggy Loar, Director of the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts: Guy
?? . . . One of the wonderful things happening here is that people who are planting 50 or even 30 trees or fewer will actually pick there olives, go into a community olive press, and then they get their percentage of oil on the other end and it just brings the whole community together . . . Peggy Loar
??Sound of machinery and people talking
??People stand in line, harvest in hand, waiting to have it weighed, combined with other olives, and , dumped into a hopper (sound of olives being dumped into hopper) to be crushed, then pressed into olive oil. Some bring large crates of olives, others bring just a bucket or two. Some children bring olives cupped in their bare hands. Guy
??(Did you guys pick olives?) Uh, huh. Off our tree; it's in our front yard. Young girl
??(How many trees do you have?) One. But it makes a lot of olives. Young girl
??(Do you like olive oil?) Uhm, I've never really tried it. My mom and dad usually eat it the most. (They just make the kids pick em?) Yea, (laughing) Young girl
??Coming to California from Sicily, Mike Troia is here with his brother Sal and their 83 year old father. None of them could believe that here olives were left to fall to the ground and rot. Guy
??In Sicily, having an olive tree is like having a little reserve in the bank. Mike Troia
??The Troias don't have their own olive tree, but they've found plenty to pick in the neighborhoods where they live. Guy
??If you see usually the olives on the tree you know that people don't use them, so all you gotta do is knock on the door and ask can we pick the olives and they are more, more than willing to say yes. Mike Troia
??Sound of olives being dumped into the hopper and a cheer going up
??One group is elated to hear they've picked nearly 300 pounds of olives Guy
??(Did you guys pick these olives?) We did, we did. And had a great time pickin'. . . . We worked the hard trees first and then we went down below and worked the easy trees and that seemed to work much better than when we worked the easy trees first and all we did was gripe about the hard trees, you know what I mean? It was much easier this way . . . Some trees have a lot of olives on one side and the other side is totaly bare and they don't have any olives on them. We've kind of learned the nature of the trees and . . . and we kept some back for pickling?I'm going to pickle some, youre going to pickle some. Yea. Group of pickers, various voices 5:06
??It's not much cheaper than buying the olive oil, but it's just much more fun and it's great to give it away and say I made this . . . It's a whole new respect for every drop of olive oil, yea, yea, You know you go to the restaurant and they slop that stuff in the bowl for you to dip your bread and I'm Iike every berry was picked by hand and you just know it, cause there's no other way to do it . . . Group of pickers, various voices
??I don't know if this resurrected interest in olives will stop them from staining the sidewalks around Gertrude Reed's Santa Barbara home, but the glee I hear in the voices of those crowded around this olive press makes me optimistic. It's as if these friends and families had discovered something new and wonderous in the olive grove: agriculture. In one sense, their enthusiasm simply shows how far we've removed ourselves as a culture from the act of growing things. Yet it also shows just how hungry we are to get back to it.
??Sound of laughter (So are you going to do it next year?) Yea, absolutely. There's a second harvest in January if there's berries left we'll do it again. . . She's always ready for the second harvest the moment after the first harvest, but tomorrow and the next day when our muscles are really sore, she might not be ready for the second harvest. . . Group of pickers