Market was a natural social gathering place

Can you remember a time when Salt Lake City had vendors coming into neighborhoods selling locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables door to door out of the backs of their pickup trucks, and when homes had vegetable gardens?

Our first homes had no grass, only vegetable gardens where my father made small trenches that allowed water to flow between the plants.

The crown jewel was the Growers Market located across from Pioneer Park on 400 South and 200 West (now 300 West). It had covered open-air docks where farmers came to sell their fresh produce. It was a veritable shopping mall filled with fresh vegetables and fruits.

People didn't worry about foods with chemicals. They were all homegrown. And, as I recall, there were not too many overweight people. It seems that despite the poverty that existed, people ate lots of fruits and vegetables. There were no workout gyms; rather the workout came from the end of a pick, shovel or hammer.

It didn't seem as if there were any meaningless regulations, just people who simply came and sold their fruits and vegetables. For many families, it became a social event to go to the Growers Market. If you got there early, you got the freshest vegetables. My parents would pull an old wooden wagon home filled with fresh fruits and vegetables that lasted throughout the week. The Growers Market became a gathering place with people speaking different languages, yet somehow they understood and enjoyed each other.

For us kids, between Pioneer Park and the Growers Market, it was the place to hang out, find jobs and, some might say, it was a breeding ground for budding delinquents. Some kids would climb on the docks or in railroad cars and "accidentally" trip over a watermelon that then fell off one of the cars and onto the ground and became our treat for the day. That was a living-on-the-edge, daredevil thing to do. It was almost a daily ritual during the summer. In between alternating boy/girl plunges in the Pioneer Park swimming pool, during our time out of the pool we went in search of the watermelons. Another daring adventure was to wait for trucks to come by with watermelons and for someone to nudge one off the truck. Fortunately we had parents to put a stop to such behavior, sometimes punctuated with a switch on the behind.

Pioneer Park became the employment center for us kids. Every summer we would show up early in the morning with our lunch sacks in hand and wait for the growers to come by in their tall, wooden-sided trucks and transport us to Centerville and Bountiful to pick cherries. We picked cherries from a ladder and put them in buckets, and probably ate more than we picked and came home with the runs. Part of the fun was riding in the trucks. All of this was before seat belts and child labor laws.

In the early days, there were no urban planners to design social gathering places. Growers Market was a natural gathering place to buy and sell fresh fruits and vegetables (without fancy display stands), argue about prices a little bit, and come home with good, healthy food.

What if we again started planting vegetable gardens instead of lawns? Given the food shortage, the high price of fruits and vegetables and our concern for pesticides, maybe it's time to re-create the old Growers Market. Maybe we'd have fewer illnesses and more natural places for kids to explore and have fun. And, just maybe, we would get to know each other and discover all the things we have in common.

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A Utah native, John Florez has founded several Hispanic civil rights organizations; been on the staff of Sen. Orrin Hatch; served on more than 45 state, local and volunteer boards; and filled White House appointments, including deputy assistant secretary of labor and as a member of the commission on Hispanic education. E-mail: jdflorez@comcast.net

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