California Kings
California Authors has an excerpt from "King of California," the new book coming out about one of the state's biggest and most secretive farming families - the Boswells. Very anxious to see what writer Mark Arax (a Fresno native) and another LA Times writer, Rick Wartzman, have come up with.

We had driven the equivalent of Washington to Philadelphia, though it seemed pointless to measure it that way, and nearly every road, field and irrigation canal belonged to Boswell, and every worker we passed and waved to was his worker and every truck, tractor and leveler for which he politely moved to the side of the road bore the same diamond–B logo. The goofy grin on a few of their faces made you wonder if they even knew who the old guy waving at them was.

He was the biggest farmer in America and the last land baron of California, and he saw no good in playing it up. His 200,000 acres in the middle of the state, just part of his domain, may have ranked as one of the biggest land grabs in the modern West but, to hear him tell it, the product of guile and vision it was not. A chance encounter here and a little seller’s desperation there and, presto, tens of thousands of acres just fell into his lap. The fact that he had built the most highly industrialized cotton operation in the world and had grown more irrigated wheat, safflower and seed alfalfa than any single farmer in the country and was aiming to do the same with onions and tomatoes, well, the fewer people who knew about that, the better. It was not by accident that Boswell had changed a 200–year–old American institution, altered the way cotton was grown, picked, ginned and marketed, and hardly anyone outside Kings County knew his name.

When I was taking Amtrak through the Central Valley with my grandma years ago, I remember her striking up a conversation with another passenger, who happened to be a Boswell. My grandma said that grandpa - who had his own crane business - had worked for "Mr. Boswell" for awhile. Apparently grandpa liked the man a lot.

My Grandma Collins died when I was in junior high school, so this train ride was probably around 1980. Even at that age, I recall knowing who the Boswells were and that they were powerful, but that's it.
- posted by Amy @ 10/02/2003 05:31:00 PM