When Apricots Bloomed in Los Altos

It was 1947 when engineer Ashley Chapman came to the Santa Clara Valley for a new job at Ames Aeronautical Research Center. He and his bride had only been married for three years then, and one of those years they had been parted by the Battle of Okinawa. Captain Chapman served there as a commander of "C" company, 1902 Engineer Aviation Battalion, US Army Corps of Engineers.

Housing was hard to find after World War II and real estate was pricey in Palo Alto. The Chapmans decided to buy a lot in nearby Los Altos and build their own house. The engineer figured he could do it on weekends, while continuing to work full time at Ames. "Gee, I don't know if I want to live this far out in the country," said his wife, Faye Chapman, looking around at all the orchards. 

But they went forward, and during the two years of weekends it took to build the home their first daughter, Kimberly, was born.

Kimberly is my sister. Ashley and Faye Chapman were my parents. I came along, I'm happy to say, shortly after the house was finished. My parents loved the Santa Clara Valley and lived on that same street in Los Altos until their deaths, just three months apart, more than six decades later.

After they died, I began to think a great deal about life in the valley as I had known it growing up. About the apricot trees that filled all the surrounding orchards in the valley and the fresh fruit that came off our own trees. I'm a journalist by trade, and all my pondering led to my new book: California Apricots: the Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley, scheduled to be published by the History Press in April.

In my research, learned that it was the Franciscan padres who brought the first apricot seedlings to California. A century later, the Santa Clara Valley became the largest fruit producing valley—not just in California, not just in America—but the largest fruit-producing valley in the world. 

Of the many wonderful prunus fruits cultivated in the valley, it is the apricot that has inspired enormous affection: from tech giants like Steve Jobs and David Packard to hometown kids like me.

I hope you'll enjoy this work of love I've produced about this golden time in California. And, about this peachy colored, wonderfully tasty, exotic fruit from Asia that found it most successful home in a wild valley in the West.

(You can pre-order the book on Amazon through this link)