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City runs in family’s blood
Published 5/10/98
Editor’s note: This look at Ontario’s past, present and future will be
accompanied with an article each day following the family of one of its longtime
residents.
By Jason Z. Cohen
Daily Bulletin
Like childhood friends who remain close through years of change, Ray Aguilera
and his Ontario are inseparably connected.
They have followed parallel paths. In a sense, they have grown up together.
Ontario is in Aguilera’s blood he wouldn’t consider living anywhere
else and he is essential to her fabric.
Aguilera is not a community leader, at least not in the way the term is
usually used.
He has never run for City Council or served on a civic commission.
A modest man, Aguilera has lived his 69 years in relative obscurity, save for
one newspaper article hailing him as the fastest grape picker in Guasti.
His experiences may not be of particular interest to anyone but his family,
but perhaps they should be.
Aguilera represents Ontario as well as anyone. The changes in his life
represent the changes in his lifelong partner.
The events in her history have had a profound impact on his life, as they
have on the lives of all of her residents.
Ray Aguilera and his family are Ontario. Her prosperity is theirs; her growth
has enriched their lives.
A Very Fine Place
On a sunny fall morning 27 years before Ray Aguilera’s parents made
their way from Mexico, George Chaffey looked over the sprawling valley that
would later become Ontario.
“We came over here, drove up to the top of the mesa and looked over the
thing,” he is quoted in Ruth Austen’s “Ontario, The Model Colony.” “We
concluded that it could be made into a very fine place.”
A fine place, indeed. But the appearance of today’s Ontario is little like
the model colony Chaffey and his brother founded as a place to experiment with
irrigation and that new technology known as electricity.
And it’s changed much since 1909, when Pablo and Julia Aguilera arrived
from the Mexican state of Jalisco, after short stops in Texas and Ventura.
It was actually the Chaffey brothers’ dream to create a city based on
agriculture rather than a town of commerce. Their vision was one of endless
groves and vineyards, not of bricks and mortar.
But then the railroads arrived, connecting California to the rest of the
nation. The trains carried the state’s agricultural bounty to the East, while
returning with thousands of new residents. Fare wars helped create a Southern
California land boom, and Ontario was among the communities to grow.
It wasn’t only opportunists from the East the Southern Pacific brought to
Ontario. The railroad also recruited heavily from among Mexican rail workers to
build its growing rail empire.
Pablo Aguilera was one of the workers who had been convinced to come to the
United States for a job.
He found the working conditions north of the border to be better than those
he experienced at home, his son said.
In Mexico, “they used to treat them like slaves,” Ray Aguilera said.
Pablo Aguilera worked for the Southern Pacific until his retirement in 1958
at the age of 68.
The railroad moved its workers and their families along the line to places
where they were needed. Julia Aguilera gave birth to her first daughter, Rufina,
in Ventura.
A few years later, the Aguileras found themselves settling in Guasti, the
small agricultural enclave tucked between what is now Ontario International
Airport and Interstate 10.
In 1941, Pablo Aguilera became an American citizen.
“He was so proud. He used to practice all the time: ‘We, the People of
the United States, in order to form a more perfect union...’ ” said
Angie Prado, Pablo Aguilera’s granddaughter.
He earned his citizenship Nov. 10, 1941, the day before Angie’s mother,
Sally Piceno, was married.
Pablo Aguilera so wanted to assimilate that he took the Americanized version
of his name: Paul.
By the time Ray Aguilera was born, Ontario’s economy had begun its
transition from agrarian to industrial. The city industrialized relatively
quickly with the opening of the Hotpoint appliance manufacturing plant, which
made irons heated by that new marvel, electricity.
Earl H. Richardson was the man who invented the Hotpoint iron, so named
because of his ability to solve the problem of the iron’s tip, which initially
did not get hot enough to properly press clothing.
He added a second heating element, shaped the two resistance coils into a “V”
shape and the Hotpoint was born.
Richardson had been an employee of the Ontario Electric Co. He developed the
iron, then started his own company, Pacific Electric Heating Co., in 1906.
In 1933, he sold the company to General Electric.
“There’s probably 1,000 patents that came out of that plant,” said Bob
Ellingwood, a former mayor of Ontario and the city’s historian.
Among the earliest of those patents was for an electrical cord, circa 1902.
Instead of a plug, it had a screw-in end that attached to a light socket.
At that time, homes with electricity had only electric lights, not outlets,
so the only source of power were the light sockets.
Paul Aguilera made the best of the sparse living conditions in which he
raised his family by wiring his portion of a six-unit section house for
electricity in 1938.
“My dad put in electricity. He was smart,” Ray Aguilera said.
The cinder-block section house in Guasti the Aguileras and five other
families of railroad workers called home was just south of the Southern Pacific
tracks.
The Italians lived north of the tracks, and the Latino families generally
lived on the south that is now a parking lot for the airport’s shiny new
terminals.
In each unit of the section houses, before the arrival of electrical power,
the flicker of a kerosene lamp lighted the living room, where the entire family
slept.
Electricity gave the Aguileras a few perks other families didn’t have. They
had a radio and an electric washing machine in 1938.
“There were no sofas or anything, just the beds,” Ray Aguilera said. “Dad
had a corral out in back, and he had his bedroom in there.”
In the kitchen, a wood-burning stove provided heat for cooking and warmth on
cold nights.
When they wanted to go into town to see a movie, the Aguilera children had
two options: They walked, or shared a cab ride with enough friends to make it
affordable.
Ray Aguilera remembers getting 10 friends together in the 1930s with a dime
each in order to cover the dollar fare into town.
Just before Japanese bombers descended on Pearl Harbor, most Americans knew
the nation was headed for war.
Sally Aguilera was one of eight girls from the family to get married in
anticipation of the war.
Like thousands of American girls who faced the prospect of losing their
sweethearts to distant battles, she married Candy Piceno, who then went into the
11th Airborne.
She gave birth to her daughter Angie in 1942.
Sally Piceno has remained in Ontario all her life.
“Ontario and Guasti. I’m part of it because I was raised here.” |
