| It's lunch time at the Graber
Olive House in Ontario, and guess what's on the menu.
Sitting at a picnic table, Betty Graber grabs an olive from a ceramic bowl,
pops it into her mouth, chews it, then tosses the pit beneath a tree like a
practiced farm hand.
"Like this," the 80-year-old grandmother said, demonstrating the
proper way to dispose of an olive pit.
| It's a time-honored ritual at the corner of Fourth Street and Columbia
Avenue, where the Graber family has cured and canned olives since 1894, making
the C.C. Graber Co. Ontario's oldest business.
In a city booming in population and home to the region's largest shopping
mall and 77 movie screens, the Olive House is to some a paradise lost.
"It's so historic," said Arcadia resident Betty Hoffman.
"There's a calming sort of atmosphere. Older people like to go and see if
there are any changes, and they like it when there's not."
In the courtyard, lilting piano music rolls from hidden speakers and fills
the open air. |
Bob and Betty Graber and their son Cliff
stand in the vat room of the Graber Olive
House in Ontario. The trio is still active
in the family business. |
Oak, palm, loquat, olive, redwood and pine trees soften the hum of cars
traveling Fourth Street and create an exotically serene outpost in the middle of
a city abuzz with 150,000 people.
Once a 10-acre spread with rows of orange trees, the Graber plantation is now
less than a square block. It remains an authenticity not found on Web sites or
at shopping malls, visitors say.
Graber tree-rippened olives. |
A buyer in Casa De Olivo gift shop. |
|
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The staff offers tours of the historic barn, museum and lush courtyard
year-round.
Secretaries work inside the barn and log mail orders by hand. The canning and
labeling machines, built in the 1930s, are symbols of a pre-robotic age.
Bob and Betty Graber, bent by age but still active in the family business,
haunt the olive house with tales of family lore.
Hanging on the gift shop wall is Bob Graber's wooden-frame bicycle he rode to
Euclid Avenue each morning for a quart of milk as a child.
In a museum of family antiques is the wagon cart his mother once used to
carry olives to customers when they knocked on the door during dinner time. |
The olives are grown 450 miles away in the San Joaquin Valley but are still
processed here October through December. The quality of Graber olives is
well-known, as is the careful method of hand picking them one by one.
From the road, a wooden fence and dense vegetation obscure the site. The
Grabers placed a sign outside only three years ago. Its understated design
remains true to the family's quality-not-quantity paradigm, Bob Graber
said.
"No matter what happens, it's going to be kept like this," Graber
said. "The future is what you see." |
