Egg Ranch

By William Englander I grew up among avocado groves in a rural area east of San Diego in the 1950s. My Uncle Stuart owned and operated an egg ranch, which held many more attractions for a young boy than a bunch of old avocado trees. The egg ranch was a place where many hens laid many eggs that were sold to markets and eventually wound up on breakfast tables, accompanied by ham or bacon. Uncle Stuart was an amazing man. He was descended from Dutch royalty. Among many jobs over his lifetime, he served as personal assistant to A.P. Giannini, founder of Bank of America. At one point, he measured the hottest temperature ever recorded in California in Death Valley. He was so good at reading people and situations that he easily made money in real estate, even during the Great Depression. My uncle’s real passion, though, was hard work — really hard, physical work. And anything agriculture-related involves plenty of it. Uncle Stuart started the egg ranch with about 5,000 hens and increased it over time to about 20,000. He operated the entire egg ranch with just four people: himself, my aunt, my grandmother and a worker named Ramon. As a child, I occasionally got to stay on the ranch for a week or two and “help.” I loved to drive the electric cart among the hens’ cages and deposit the grain that they so eagerly consumed. I also got to stand in front of the egg-sorting machine (in total fascination) and pack the eggs that remained unbroken into large cartons for shipment. It was really fun when the baby wanna-be hens would arrive at the ranch. They were cute little balls of yellow fuzz that you could hold in your hand and listen to them utter “peep peep.” Ramon, who spoke no English, took a liking to me. Once in a while, he would let me join him when he went up to the hill where he and his fellow workers from other ranches and farms spent their evenings sitting around a fire and swapping stories. At the time, I didn’t understand a word of Spanish, but I had a wonderful time, hanging out with the guys. In my youthful ignorance, I thought working all day on the fascinating ranch and then sharing a campfire with your buddies in the evening was the ideal life. Little did I know that Ramon had asked my aunt to mail his entire wages to his family in Mexico each payday or that the stories that they were swapping were often about how much they longed to be with their loved ones. I also didn’t realize that if you counted up all the hours that my uncle worked each week, it was probably in the vicinity of 100. As an adult, I’ve reflected on how incredibly hard everyone connected with the ranch worked and how my naive, blissful, child’s-eye view of things bore little relationship to reality. On the other hand, my Uncle Stuart, who loved hard work and reveled in the satisfaction of “a good job well done,” died a very old and very happy man. William Englander is a retired computer programmer/consultant. He lives with his wife, Alice, and their two Maine Coon cats in Carmel-by-the-Sea.