Peeling Back Layers
Vol. 1, Issue 8 — An Artichoke Runs Through It
In this issue, we take away from the Ozarks to the West Coast. We bring you a bushel of stories connected to artichokes, yes artichokes. First, the beginning of a four-part series by Ellen O’Neal about a missing girl, then an explanation of the best way to eat an artichoke from Alison Alison, and a look back at the Artichoke Wars by Charlie Alison. We also offer a dab about the little white dog and a last word.
Carol’s Tale
SHORT FICTION: PART 1 of a Four-Part Series
By Ellen O’Neal
1982, California
The little surly mob of bicycle travelers crowded onto the benches of the lone picnic table at the biker-hiker campsite of Sunset State Beach. They were back together again after a week of separate paths. Crompet rode down the coast from Half Moon Bay the previous day without mishap. Carol, Maggie and Salter crossed the San Joaquin valley together and then the coastal range to reunite with Crompet and Suarez. He had followed the same route as Crompet but a couple of hours behind. Lottie and Lara had ridden in from somewhere but no one was quite sure where.
Salter spread peanut butter and jelly onto white bread with his Swiss Army knife. Maggie, using her camp stove and a nested pot with a couple cups of bubbling water, steamed fresh artichokes she had bought at a farm stand. Suarez nibbled gorp from a bag of granola. Lottie and Lara ate saltine crackers with butter, making faces and laughing at whispered inside jokes shared between them. Crompet’s little brass stove hissed and sputtered but seemed to have enough heart to boil his rice. He had already pan-fried a piece of salmon that he purchased as he rode through Santa Cruz about midday. Carol popped another Big Bumble’s chocolate donette into her mouth. She read through her notes about the day’s ride.
There was enjoyable talk about the activities that had transpired during their period of separation, each filling the others in on what they had missed. Something in the conversation made Maggie ask Carol about the most important story she covered when she worked at the Port Angeles Ledger. “What was it about?”
Salter followed on, asking, “Did you ever interview the president of the United States?”
Carol laughed at the idea. “I was just barely born when President Truman first visited the edge of the Olympic peninsula,” she replied, “and only 3 years old when he came back through Washington state during his presidential campaign in 1948. He was the last president to visit the peninsula, so, no, I haven’t interviewed a president, or very many important people. I did interview a movie actor once, but I’ve mostly written stories about ordinary people.”
“Who was the movie actor?” Lottie asked.
“Maybe a little ahead of your time,” Carol replied. “He played Trampas in the 1960s TV show The Virginian.”
Lottie said that, no, she had never heard of the show.
“Ah now, Carol,” Crompet said, “you know better than most that there is no ordinary person; but, just in case, who is the most important ordinary person you interviewed?”
Carol looked down at her notes again as if she were trying to think back to a most important story. She helped cover the opening of the floating bridge across the Hood Canal, the launch of a new ferry for the Victoria crossing, three mayoral races, the escape of Lucky Eddie LaBoeuf from the Clallam County Jail. The real reason she looked down, though, was to debate for a moment whether to tell them about her most important story.
“I interviewed a mom,” Carol said.
“A mom?” Suarez asked. “Aren’t there tons of moms? I mean, they’re all important, sure, but don’t they pretty much do the same thing day in and day out?”
“First off,” said Carol, “they don’t. If you want to find an interesting feature story, interview a mom. Each of them will tell you a tale you’ve never heard before. Makes me almost wish I were a mom. Heck, what am I saying? Everyone I’ve ever met had an interesting story.”
“Second,” she continued, “this particular interview was wide of anything that might be called normal. Turned out to be the most important person I interviewed in more than 20 years at the Port Angeles Ledger.
“I started at the newspaper in 1962, when I was 16. They needed a high school student to put together the two school pages each week for the Sunday edition. I liked writing about school, getting out of classes for an hour each day, and learning the ins and outs of newspapering. After I graduated from high school, they kept me on as a staff member. I trained a sophomore to do my old job, and I started working as a full-time reporter without even realizing I had started a career.
“I worked every news and feature beat at one time or another while at the Ledger. Even some sports reporting whenever a weekend stringer got sick or drunk. After 20 years of that, I thought I knew everything about newspapers.
“Earlier this summer, the reporter on the police beat got a better job, or at least a better-paying job, across the Sound at The Seattle Intelligencer, and she was gone without even a two-weeks notice. I hate reporters who ditch a newspaper overnight. I had to fill in for her, running the cop shop, sifting through the police reports for personal-injury auto accidents, domestic disputes, a rare burglary and an even rarer assault — and by assault, I mean the real ones, not the high school boys getting into brawls over a pretty automobile.
“In late July, a woman named Sandy Merrick called the office. She was transferred to me and asked whether I would write a story about her missing daughter. You probably think my answer should be obvious. Of course, we’ll try to find your missing daughter!”
There were nods from Carol’s fellow travelers as they finished their meals.
“You would be wrong,” Carol said.
“At the newspaper, we had unwritten rules. One of them lay down the law on missing-children stories. We avoided writing about them unless the police asked us for help. Just too many weirdities and too much room for error on missing kids,” Carol said. “The most common was divorce and custody. One parent accuses their former spouse of kidnapping a child, reports the child missing and gets the newspaper to inadvertently do a smear job on the spouse. We didn’t know who to trust in those situations so we let them play out in court and then wrote about whatever happened via testimony given on the record. The other instance was when a child ran away from home because of a really terrible domestic situation, maybe physical or sexual abuse. In those cases, we knew that helping a parent track down a child might be as dangerous for the child as letting them roam the streets. We weren’t social workers, for goodness sake. We relied on the police to call us when they wanted publicity.
“So I let Sandy Merrick know our parameters for doing a story and was just starting to explain why when she asked if she could come by the newspaper office. She worked just a couple of blocks away and wanted to explain it in person. A few minutes later, Sandy was at my desk telling me that her daughter, Kelly, had run away from home. Sandy wanted my help. Could I write a story, and would the United Press International republish it?
“I almost laughed out loud, but choked it back, not wanting to seem crassly indifferent. To tell the truth, though, I was indifferent.
NEXT: In Part 2, Carol asks one too many questions.
Ellen O’Neal is a writer working on a novel about America, and “Carol’s Tale” will probably become part of it.
an aristocrat among veggies
FOOD
by alison alison
i had an artichoke to eat.
i ate it all by myself, slowly scraping off leaf after leaf. it was an enormous artichoke. i had melted butter to dip it in, but i ended up only using that for when i got to the heart. i cut the heart into bites, let them soak in the butter, then ate them one by one off my fork.
years ago, i moved to san francisco from austin. my future son’s father drove out to pick me and my canary gossamer up from my little garage apartment, and he drove us to san francisco by way of LA so we could see cyrus chestnut play piano. we stayed in thomas dolby’s house in the hollywood hills that night! science! poetry in motion! it was all thrilling, but the most exciting thing for me was driving through gilbert and seeing the garlic growing, and later driving past fields and fields of artichokes in full flower.
The Artichoke Wars
NONFICTION
By Charlie Alison
Early one morning in February 1931, a farmer named Pietro Petrucchi drove out to a section of his farm on the outskirts of Half Moon Bay, California. It was time to harvest the ripened artichokes in that section. Normally, Pietro met a half dozen fellow Italian immigrants, seasonal workers who gathered the artichokes from endless rows of plants covering acres and acres of the dark soil in that fertile crescent-shaped valley. When Pietro got there, though, he was astonished.
The artichoke plants were missing.
“They drive their fast trucks up into our fields on dark nights,” Pietro told a newspaper reporter. “We can neither hear nor see anyone, yet the next morning all of our artichokes are gone. The thieves are not farmers, for they do not know how to pick properly.”
Sometime during the wee hours of the night, men had indeed driven trucks into the farm field and yanked the artichokes out, threw mountains of them into Petrucchi’s crates, loaded the crates onto their own trucks, and left as quietly as they had entered, absconding with the artichokes.
Yes, artichokes.
It was the Depression, the era of rum-running bootleggers, gangland killings and mobsters looking for creative financial opportunities and then pursuing them aggressively, sort of the hedge-fund investors of that day.
By 1930, nineteen out of every twenty artichokes in the country came from Half Moon Bay. An artichoke selling for a nickel along the coastal cities of California would bring a dollar in New York City. If a person could control the flow of artichokes coming out of San Mateo County and into the Northeast, an unholy monopoly could be had.
One such person, a mobster in New York City named Ciro Terranova, made just such a calculation and began very aggressively cornering the market on artichokes. Their price doubled overnight in the big eastern cities. In capitalism, you might refer to that as demand.
On the supply end, of course, the skyrocketing price of artichokes caused thieves back in California to hijack artichoke trucks at gunpoint, steal railroad cars or lift plants straight from fields such as the one owned by Pietro Pettruchi.
To protect their product, the farmers hired armed guards. Vigilante groups formed to shadow any unfamiliar trucks. Police did what they could.
Soon there was shooting. Newspapers reported the gunfire, deaths and funerals to attend. The running battle between farmers and mobsters became known as the Artichoke Wars.
It took Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to break up the action in New York City. He announced laws prohibiting the sale or possession of artichokes.
Yes, artichokes.
Chronicles of the Little White Dog
By Mark Pennington
Before the little white dog came to us, she belonged to my mother-in-law. During a long period of time while she was recovering from post surgical delirium, the little white dog was pretty much my mother-in-law’s only topic of conversation, the only thing she thought about, her only interest in life.
After months of lock down I am approaching the same point. I find the decay in my mental facilities and my range of interests discouraging. The little white dog thinks it represents a gradual return to normalcy. If I become just a few degrees more impaired things will be about perfect.
The Last Word
Jerusalem artichoke | jə-'rü-zə-ləm 'är-tə-chōk
First, let us concede that the Jerusalem artichoke is neither from Jerusalem nor is it an artichoke. The plant, Helianthus tuberosus, is of North American heritage and looks a bit like the sunflower plant — tall and stalky with a spreading yellow flower — but the Jerusalem artichoke’s agricultural appeal is not a broad button of seeds but rather its tuberous root.
The roots grow as large turnips and look a bit like rusticated potatoes and in large part can be prepared in similar manners as potatoes. They have a slightly sweet taste due to their production of inulin, which also allows the Jerusalem artichoke to be used as a substitute for wheat in the production of pasta noodles. Be forewarned, though, that inulin can also cause copious amounts of gas.
The plant was widely cultivated by Native American tribes long before European infiltration, apparently starting somewhere in the Midwest and eventually spreading to both coasts. In British Columbia, the Upper Halkomelem word for the plant is x͟a'x͟akw', which roughly means “wedged in.” The Lakota word is Pȟaŋǧí. In Ojibwee, it’s ashkibwaa.
The present-day Anglicized name for the plant came from two mistakes during the peregrinations of the plant from America to Europe and back. During the 17th century, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain sent specimens back to Europe and said that the tuber tasted like artichoke, which led Europeans to think this “new world” plant was an artichoke. Because the plant looked a lot like sunflowers, Italians used their word for sunflower, girasole, when referring to the plant, and girasole was then corrupted on its way back into English as Jerusalem, thus creating a confusing, misbegotten name.
Back in America the plant began to fall out of cultivation during the early 18th century, but it made a small resurgence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries because Americans found everything French au courant and the French liked the tuber. When Thomas Jefferson recorded planting Helianthus tuberosus at Monticello in 1809, he referred to them by their French name, topinambours. And that’s the last word. CEYA
Have an interesting word? Send it to editor.ozarkhollow@gmail.com. Include your name and hometown as well as why the word is of interest to you and what, if anything, you know about the word.
