The Grapes of Wrath, in Three Episodes Episode One: The International Grape Boycott of 1969 I was born on June 10, 1969. May 10, 1969, was International Grape Boycott Day. During her ninth month of pregnancy, my mother was craving grapes. César Chávez and his National Farm Workers Association (NFWA, later the United Farm Workers) had been supporting boycotts of California table grapes and picketing growers since 1965. Protests aimed at the Schenley Vineyards Corporation in 1965 and Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation in 1966 had drawn national attention (not least for Chávez’s legendary 25-day, 340-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, where he arrived with 10,000 followers) and earned the admiration of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. But while those early disputes had been resolved by contract negotiations, the 1967 attempt to take on the Giumarra Vineyards Corporation, the largest producer of table grapes in the US, was not going as well. Giumarra turned out to be a truculent adversary, printing fraudulent labels to disguise its grapes as produce from other companies, and using intimidation and violence against the pickets. In 1968, Chávez went on a 25-day hunger strike. The NFWA finally declared International Grape Boycott Day on May 10, 1969. The flow of grapes to the major US and Canadian cities was cut off overnight. On May 11, 1969, my father went in search of grapes. He found them to be in good supply at the Pioneer supermarket on 75th Street and Columbus Avenue (it’s still there) near our apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But, the produce manager warned my father, whatever inventory the store had was all that would be available for the foreseeable future. My father sheepishly carried two brown-paper shopping bags full of grapes down the leftist gauntlet of Columbus Avenue, carefully evading detection by packing bunches of carrots on top of the grapes. Five days later, when my mother had consumed all the grapes, my father went farther afield, first to the A&P in the West 90s and then pushing up into Harlem. Eventually, with two weeks left to go in the pregnancy, the grape supply in Manhattan had been exhausted. Near our country house upstate in Rhinebeck, New York, there were grapes aplenty being grown but the vines would not bear fruit for a couple of more months. The only grapelike fruit available that weekend in the countryside was a bag of frozen elderberries from the previous season, which my mother rejected because she thought they tasted like rhubarb. Back in Manhattan, my father was dispatched to Chock full o'Nuts. Those who grew up elsewhere in the US know of Chock full o'Nuts as a brand of canned coffee sold in supermarkets. In the New York City of the 1960s and 1970s, however, Chock full o'Nuts cafes were nearly as prevalent as Starbucks stores today. The signature food item at Chock full o'Nuts was a sandwich consisting of cream cheese on date-nut bread. The date component of the bread was raisin-like and raisins are made from grapes, so it took some of the edge off my mother’s craving. My father absolutely hated making these trips to the nearby Chock full o'Nuts, which was frequented by a motley crew of drunkards, fugitives and other marginal characters. But he’d do anything for my mother. On July 29, 1970, after five years, the protests against the California grape growers officially ended when Giumarra Vineyards Corporation agreed to Chávez’s terms. Episode Two: The Great Grape Disaster of 1978 Previously, I alluded to our country house in Rhinebeck, New York. My parents were city kids. They both grew up in Queens. Their rural experiences were limited to beach adventures on Fire Island, where they met as teenagers while employed as counselors at the local summer camp. Like many city folk, they had a certain idealized image of rural life. One day, as married adults, they decided to bring that fantasy to life. Two teachers’ salaries couldn’t buy much of a country house, even in the 1960s, so they expanded their search farther and farther north from the city (Rhinebeck is about a two-hour drive, if you’re lucky). Every house they’d looked at in their price range was minuscule, but finally in Rhinebeck they stumbled across the mother lode: a rambling old house, formerly a boarding house, with 12 bedrooms, two gigantic institutional kitchens, a barn, a pond and five acres of wooded land. For cheap. It was the Titanic of country houses. The house spent the entire time my family owned it slowly falling apart. But it gave my father the opportunity to do all the country stuff he’d fantasized about: mow the lawn on a mini-tractor, adopt two cats to battle the mice, fix the roof time and again, engage in extreme gardening and get to know our country neighbors. My father must have had a mental checklist of country things he aspired to do, because one day he announced that we’d be picking grapes and making grape jelly. A great deal of grape jelly. Given the size of our kitchen – either kitchen – we never cooked anything small. We drove the old blue Chrysler station wagon to a pick-your-own vineyard my father had learned about, likely through a conversation with a local cop or auto mechanic. My older sister and I were each given a metal bucket and instructed to pick grapes. The temperature was in the 90s, the humidity was in the 100s and the ground was wet from the last night’s rain. The Concord grapes we were picking had unpleasant, leathery skins and their flesh tasted as though it had been rejected by Manischewitz for being too cloying. Each time we filled a bucket, we were given another to fill. At age nine, I didn’t know who César Chávez was, but I sensed I needed his help. We arrived back at the country house with a station-wagon full of grapes. It was time to make jelly. My mother hauled out two 20-quart stockpots, which we filled with grapes after washing them in freezing-cold water that numbed my hands and then crushing them in a bowl with a potato masher. As the grapes cooked down, we added more. The stockpots seemed to be able to accommodate several times their apparent volume in grapes, and we kept them filled to the very top. The straining operation required the manpower of the Works Progress Administration. The grapes were already sweet, but the jelly-making instructions we had called for half a cup of sugar per pound of grapes. We had no idea how many pounds of grapes we’d picked, but my father came up with a theory – right or wrong – for estimating it. He went into the pantry to get the sugar and emerged with what looked like a small garbage can full of the stuff. He poured something like 10 pounds in each stockpot, where it was hungrily absorbed by the grape juice. Pectin also came into the picture at some point. As my mother prepared the jars for canning, my father declared that it was time for us to taste our creation. He distributed spoons full of grapey fluid to me, my sister and himself. We tasted. We spit it out. It was inedible. It tasted overwhelmingly . . . salty. Forensic investigation by my mother revealed that the white substance my father had retrieved from the pantry was not granulated sugar but iodized salt. Our day’s labor was poured down the drain, and we stuck with Welch’s from there on in. Years later, we sold the country house to a family with seven children. When they renovated the house, they made it smaller by removing one kitchen, a dining room and several bedrooms. Epidode Three: The Hoboken Grape Operation of 2005 Our son, PJ, was born on August 17, 2005. In her ninth month of pregnancy, my wife was craving grapes. There must be something about the male genetic makeup in my lineage that triggers grape cravings in expecting mothers, because my wife was at that time completely unaware of my mother’s past pregnancy cravings. The cravings were slightly different: my mother was partial to green seedless table grapes; my wife insisted on seeded red globe grapes exclusively. But it can’t have been coincidental. Ellen had been eating red globe grapes throughout her pregnancy, but as she came closer to term she became increasingly insistent that grapes always be on the premises. Not just any old red globe grapes would do. They couldn't be too pale (because the pale ones aren’t sweet and flavorful enough) or too deep purple (overripe with tough skins), and with each passing trimester the acceptable color spectrum narrowed to a range barely discernible by the male human eye. They also had to be in about the 90th percentile of size for red globe grapes. She never expected diamonds or other finery, as many women do. All she wanted in return for bearing our firstborn son was those colossal red globe grapes. In modern times, table grapes are grown at various latitudes, ensuring a steady supply during most of the year. But for some reason, in July of 2005, there was a break in the chain of supply of red globe grapes. There was not a red globe grape to be had in all of Manhattan, not at Fairway, not at any regular supermarket, not even at Dean & DeLuca where they always have everything. This is not exactly the kind of news you can bring back to a woman who’s nine months pregnant and craving grapes. And given that, in the summer of 2005, we were being treated to a steady diet of news stories about June and July being the hottest on record in cities across the Northeast, I felt it was my husbandly duty to locate grapes. Although I was unaware of the family history with respect to grape cravings – I only learned about that the next summer, while visiting my sister on Cape Cod – every facet of my moral education and my spiritual connection to my late father compelled me to do so. So I started to work the phones. I called places in Queens. Nothing. The Bronx. Nothing. Finally, in a last-ditch grape-locating effort, I called Han Ah Reum, the Korean mega-market in Hackensack, New Jersey. The first three people I spoke to didn’t have enough English to answer my question, but finally I got “Eddie” on the phone. “Red globe grape? Yeah I got like a million pounds just come in on a BIG TRUCK!” I bolted out the door. It was 9:15pm. Han Ah Reum was to close at 10pm. Under ideal driving conditions, it’s possible to get from our home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, across Central Park to the West Side Highway, over the George Washington Bridge and out Route 46 to Han Ah Reum in about 35 minutes. Ideal driving conditions, needless to say, have rarely occurred in the history of New York City. I got to the West Side Highway and there was standstill traffic, so I diverted to Riverside Drive. The upper level of the George Washington Bridge, according to 1010 WINS radio’s “jam cam,” had a tractor-trailer blocking one lane, so I took the lower level. The traffic circle where Route 46 intersects the Bergen Turnpike – the last obstacle on the trip – was a mess. The red and black signage of Han Ah Reum was in view across the traffic circle and I wasn’t moving. I watched the minutes elapse on the dashboard clock. I finally pulled in to a parking space in the nearly empty Han Ah Reum lot at 9:58pm. I barged into the store past a Korean lady scolding me, insisting that they were closing imminently. Over the loudspeaker an announcement in Korean blared, which I imagine was saying the same thing. I wheeled around the corner into the produce area, almost knocking over a display of Hello Kitty merchandise with my shopping cart, and stopped dead in my tracks. There, before me, was a mountain of pristine red globe grapes higher than my head. They were the most gorgeous red globe grapes I’d ever seen, each one the size of a small plum and possessing the ideal garnet hue. And they were on sale. I loaded bunch after bunch of the grapes into my shopping cart and made a bee-line for the checkout. Nobody was happy about my late checkout but I was allowed to pay and leave. By the time I got home and parked, it was 11pm. Ellen was sound asleep. The next morning, a switch had flipped in Ellen’s brain. She had no interest whatsoever in grapes. The grapes sat, unconsumed, filling most of the available space in the refrigerator for several days until she announced that she would no longer be eating grapes. For the next week, anybody visiting our apartment was required to take home a pound of grapes. To be continued . . .
