April 13th 2009
The King Of California Has Died
J.
G. Boswell died April 3 as he would have liked it – quietly, without a blast of activity and attention that might reflect badly on Boswell Farms, the family farming empire in California’s Central Valley.
Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman chronicled Boswell’s life in one of the best books on recent California history, The King of California. It was a difficult biography because Boswell would have none of it, turning them down again and again when they attempted to interview him. In an obit that ran this weekend, Arax tells how they finally landed the interview:
He was 76 years old but still running the show when I first appealed to his sense of history, and then vanity, in the hope that he might talk to me and my co-author Rick Wartzman. Boswell was living in Ketchum, Idaho, but flying into Corcoran on a regular basis to oversee an operation that punched out 146,000 bales of the finest cotton a year – enough fiber to make 840,000 pairs of boxer shorts every day. For two years, he wanted no part of our book. Then during one phone conversation, I let it slip that the old-timers of Corcoran were portraying his father as the town drunk.
“My dad had a problem, that’s true, but you’d be wrong to reduce him to some stumbling drunk.”
So as a way to keep us straight with certain facts, he invited us out for a tour of the land where he hunted Yokut arrowheads as a kid. We piled into a beat-up Chevy truck and barreled into an immense engineered landscape where the earth hardly rose or fell an inch as it rolled out – the secret heart of California.
Araz and Wartzman soon found themselves bouncing along in a beat-up Chevy pick-up truck through the cotton fields that surround Corcoran, when they were smacked on the side of the head by the the realization of how profoundly important Boswell was:
At some point, it occurred to us that we had traveled half a day, a distance of some 150 miles, and never left his farm. Nearly every road, field and irrigation canal belonged to Boswell and every worker we passed and he waved to was a Boswell worker, and every truck, tractor and leveler for which he politely moved to the side of the road bore the same diamond-B logo.
Boswell used his power to dam and re-route rivers and – although he contests this – to stop the Peripheral Canal, which he must have regretted later as California’s need for a new way to get water to go south from the Sacramento Delta become evident. His was a life far grander than most, but lived with far less grandeur than most. I strongly recommend the obit for your reading, and if that piques your interest, by all means read the book.
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