Photo by Craig Carlson

Everyone wheels and deals here, six and seven days a week.

About those tomatoes in your salad: somebody in downtown San Diego got up very, very early in the morning so you could eat them fresh tonight.

Jon Maniscalco had just parked his Porsche 924 and was opening the door of his business when a shadowy figure crossed Sixth Avenue and confronted him. It was ten minutes after four in the morning; overhead the sky was black but Maniscalco made out the figure to be Matt, the son of the produce dealer across the street. “I got some good news and some bad news for you,” Matt muttered, once within earshot.

Maniscalco reached inside and flipped a switch that filled the inside of his warehouse with light. Outside, a fluorescent spotlight mounted to the wall of the building lit up the pavement and the fagade; the two young men huddled in the illuminated doorway. Matt disclosed that he had gone in search of chili peppers to the giant produce market in Los Angeles. He had found them. That was the good news. The bad news was they had cost Matt $2.30 a pound. Maniscalco gasped.

6th and Island, 5:45 am

Photo by Craig Carlson

But a moment later Maniscalco had agreed to pay $2.90 per pound for a carton. As Matt scurried off, Maniscalco explained that two of his customers, both Mexican restaurants, need that particular type of chili (the long, slim, green “Anaheim” variety) for the preparation of chile rellenos. “Normally, they cost maybe sixty cents a pound. But for some reason, they haven’t been available recently at any price.” Rumors were flying: that the Mexican growers were temporarily withholding them as a protest against troublesome importation procedures; that something had damaged the Mexican crop. In the interim, Maniscalco’s two Mexican restaurants had turned in desperation to (far inferior) canned chilies. They would pay more than three dollars a pound for the fresh ones, Maniscalco was confident.

Matt reappeared with a wooden carton, laid it on the concrete floor of the warehouse, and reverently unfastened the lid. “So pretty!” Maniscalco breathed, inspecting the glossy emerald vegetables within. Proudly, Matt explained how he had had to stand in line to buy them; how he had then sorted through the peppers by hand, rejecting the many bad ones; how he had encountered one wholesaler asking three dollars per pound. He raced off. By this time Maniscalco had cranked up his folding metal front wall, opening the warehouse to the street. In the night gloom, Matt could be seen skittering from one neighboring produce wholesaler to another. “Matt’s doing a little wheeling and dealing,” Maniscalco commented, bemused.

George Manos: “We can get better prices if we buy direct.”

Photo by Craig Carlson

Everyone wheels and deals here, six and seven days a week. This little patch of downtown around Sixth Avenue between Island and L streets is perhaps the closest thing in San Diego to the stock exchange in New York or the commodities market in Chicago. Here hundreds of different types of fruits and vegetables arrive daily from the abundant fields all over San Diego County; from the apple storehouses in Washington State; from the San Pedro wharf where ships arrive bearing bananas from Ecuador, raspberries from New Zealand, cantaloupes from the Caribbean. From here they fan out to a wide variety of outlets.

All this action takes place not in some single, cavernous facility the likes of the one to be found in Los Angeles. Instead, San Diego’s produce “market” makes its home in small storefront facilities that have stood on the same spots for almost a hundred years. Once, virtually all of the city’s fruits and vegetables funneled through here. The advent of chain supermarkets over the years has restricted that flow. As the chains grew, they eventually became big enough to bypass the wholesalers, and began instead to deal directly with farmers and shippers. Today Safeway, for example, gets more than ninety percent of its produce from such direct sources, receiving the items destined for its San Diego outlets at a regional distribution center in National City. Big Bear has a similar warehouse here, and Vons reportedly is in the process of moving its distribution center for this area down from the Los Angeles area (where the rest of the chains still maintain warehouses).

Gonzales warehouse

Photo by Craig Carlson

However, even the supermarket chains turn to the Sixth Avenue produce district for some items. Safeway, again, buys many of its greens from one wholesaler on the street who carries a wide enough selection to simplify the buying process for the chain store. In addition, whenever Safeway unexpectedly falls short of a given item, it turns to one of the big wholesale houses to make up the shortfall. “Say we have a load of potatoes booked up in Oregon,” offers Safeway’s San Diego produce manager. “Say it’s scheduled to come here on a Thursday, but something happens to the truck or something and it doesn’t get here until Friday or Saturday. We’d be short of potatoes, but instead what we do is to get them from the produce market.” The other chains also buy such “short” items in the produce district. And the supermarket chains are hardly the only food markets in town; independent growers rely heavily on the wholesalers, as do restaurants, hospitals, fast-food chains. When you add up that demand, it accounts for a healthy percentage of all the fruit and vegetables eaten in San Diego. The wonder is not how much this part of town has changed, but how little it has, in this age of geographic diffusion.

One of the things that haven’t changed is the nocturnal nature of this world. Jon Maniscalco began this morning by chiding himself for being late. Normally, he likes to arrive at his warehouse by no later than 4:00 a.m. during the middle of the week; by 3:00 a.m. on Fridays and Mondays, the busiest days for the produce pushers. And Maniscalco’s fledgling San Diego Produce Company is still small. Big wholesalers on this street start working at two in the morning, sometimes earlier. If you stand in the middle of this part of Sixth Avenue before dawn, the darkness and the parked trucks make it difficult to see all the activity, but you can sense it. The sweet smell of thousands of pounds of fruit hangs in the air. Diesel engines rumble, fork lifts whine. Here and there the shouts of hustling men break into the machine sounds.

Jerry Gonzales: “People in California do not realize the luxury they have!”

Photo by Craig Carlson

When Maniscalco checks his phone answering machine, he stops fretting about his late start. Only two customers have called in with orders; this is a Thursday and business promises to be slow. Maniscalco is twenty-five years old, and he is so helpful, so ingenuous, that you wonder how he managed to get through a quarter of a century without becoming a bit more guarded. He and his twenty-nine-year-old brother, Mike, own the business. Both brothers began working as laborers on this street as teen-agers, helping out their father, who entered the produce business in San Diego in the mid-Fifties and now is a partner in one of the biggest wholesale houses just a few doors down the block.

Family ties are the rule in this business; first names ring out when men pass each other on the darkened avenue, giving it a homey air. In fact, Jon and Mike Maniscalco say they wouldn’t have started their business without the personal connections. Their opportunity arose when their father’s company renegotiated a labor contract and suddenly found it unprofitable to continue delivering fruit and vegetables to about ten restaurants and small grocers. When the two brothers told other wholesalers on the street that they intended to begin servicing those accounts, “they immediately gave us credit. They knew us. If they hadn’t known us, it would have been strictly on a cash basis. ”

Jon and Mike Maniscalco: "If they hadn’t known us, it would have been strictly on a cash basis. ”

Photo by Craig Carlson

So almost exactly three years ago, the brothers were in business, functioning in the classic role of middlemen. In those first days, the brothers rarely talked to an actual grower, instead “shopping” from other wholesalers on the street for the goods with which to fill the orders of their customers who ran restaurants or markets. Like everyone else, when the brothers needed mushrooms, they bought them from the only mushroom specialist in town, American Mushroom Company at Fifth and Island (wholesalers who in turn obtained their mushrooms from a farm on the Rincon Indian Reservation, northeast of Oceanside, for years the only mushroom farm in San Diego County; and from a variety of northern California growers). The only alternative, Jon explains, was to drive up to Los Angeles and buy mushrooms there, but any wholesaler who did that resigned himself to wildly varying quality.

Then one day about two years ago, a mushroom grower who had worked here years before returned to San Diego County and opened a farm in Escondido. When he talked to American Mushroom about handling his produce, he was enraged by the firm’s offer to pay only fifty cents per pound year-round (even though American was charging more than twice that price to other local wholesalers). The new mushroom grower stormed over to Sixth Avenue, where one of the two Maniscalco brothers happened to hear him say he was looking for someone (besides American Mushroom) to sell his crops. The brothers volunteered.

Sixth Avenue

Photo by Craig Carlson

“It was really hard at first,” Jon recalls. Mushrooms grown in long cement “houses” in which the climate is painstakingly controlled so that the fungi grow at a steady rate and thus the grower can harvest some every day. That’s the ideal, but Jon says the Escondido supplier at first made mistakes which all too frequently left the Maniscalcos with no mushrooms to sell to their new-found mushroom customers. “It took a long time for the [other wholesalers on the street] to have faith in us,” Jon says.

But gradually things improved. The supply from the Escondido mushroom grower became less erratic, and last fall another new mushroom farm opened up at Mount Palomar. Today the two brothers also handle that farm’s output. Selling mushrooms to other wholesalers probably constitutes about half their business now, the brothers estimate. Even though San Diego Produce’s mushroom sales still are only a fraction of that of American Mushroom’s, Jon says that he and his brother “use mushrooms to kind of get in the door with customers and sell them other kinds of produce also.” He adds that his company’s business doubled from its first to its second year, and promises to see forty-percent growth in this, its third year.

San Diego Produce

Photo by Craig Carlson

There’s still not enough work to keep both brothers busy between three and six in the morning, so the older brother helps his father down the street while Jon scrambles at the San Diego Produce warehouse. This morning, Jon’s first move is to open up the warehouse’s walk-in refrigerator. Inside are ten-pound boxes of mushrooms stacked waist high, five separate grades of quality ranging from the snowy “jumbos” (priced today at $2.10 per pound) down to the lowest-grade “number two” mushrooms (a potpourri of sizes and shapes which can be slightly discolored and open, revealing the brown gills under the mushroom cap). In addition to the mushrooms, the refrigerator is stuffed with dozens of other items: cartons of lemons that the Maniscalco brothers now buy from a Rancho Bernardo orchard; alfalfa sprouts brought in daily from Lakeside; zucchini that Jon obtains from an Imperial Valley shipper who trucks the squash directly from Holtville to downtown San Diego; cases and cases of tomatoes. “Normally, I only buy maybe fifteen to twenty lugs of tomatoes at a time. But Sleeper [one of the biggest wholesalers on the street] had a good deal [$6.50 per lug] so I bought fifty-five lugs.”

This is a place where men prosper by sniffing out the deals and seizing them; the wild ascents and dives of produce prices create daily opportunities. Consider just a few examples among thousands: one recent Monday large zucchini was selling for between nineteen and twenty-six cents apiece. Yet the Friday before, the price had leaped to thirty-eight cents apiece. (The explanation: rain on Thursday had interfered with that day’s zucchini harvest.) Another example: in a recent eight-day stretch, celery dropped from seventy-three to fifty cents per bunch. Still another: in the beginning of January, romaine lettuce was selling for seventeen to twenty-one cents per head. By the last week in March, it was going for sixty-seven to seventy-five cents per head. The very next week it had dropped to forty-two cents per head.

Photo by Craig Carlson

Jon says that mushroom prices normally aren’t that volatile because of the artificially controlled growing conditions. But exceptions occur. He says a few months back the wholesale price of number-two mushrooms suddenly soared in one week from sixty-five cents per pound to $1.05. The cause was canneries that created a sudden demand and ‘ ‘pushed the price right up into the buttons.” Now, at last, Jon has heard that the mushroom-canning season will be ending in about two weeks. Reflecting that, prices of the number-twos on the L.A. market have begun to drop, presenting him with a dilemma. He paid his growers eighty-five cents for the mushrooms he received Tuesday night. Wednesday he had charged a dollar for those mushrooms. Now on this Thursday morning, downward pressure from the L.A. market dictates that Jon ought to cut his price and charge only ninety-five cents (for the mushrooms he bought for eighty-five). He vacillates, then resolves to wait to Friday before cutting his price to ninety-five cents — whereupon he also plans to inform his grower that he’ll only pay eighty cents per pound. ‘‘He won’t like it, but he’ll go along with it,” Jon asserts.

As Jon sorts boxes of mushrooms, the phone rings sporadically, bringing more orders from wholesalers on the street. By 5:20 a.m., he’s ready to fill the first one, loading 170 pounds of various types of mushrooms into the back of a pickup, then driving it to a larger wholesaler two blocks away. In any given week, the brothers probably sell to a half dozen different wholesalers, who, in turn, will sell to their restaurant and grocery-store customers.

Sixth and Island

Photo by Craig Carlson

This is a business where individual personalities make a big difference, and quirky unwritten rules shape the interactions. For example, Jon says there’s the expectation that if you sell produce to someone, you should buy items from him in turn, and petty jealousies surface whenever imbalances are perceived. For the last few days, for instance, one of the Maniscalco brothers’ mushroom customers, a wholesaler in the same block, has been berating Jon for buying zucchini from the Imperial Valley-based shipper instead of from the wholesaler’s warehouse (even though Jon, in turn, protests that his neighbor’s zucchini doesn’t meet the size and shape requirements of Jon’s retail zucchini customers.) Strawberries present another sore spot. Jon gets a deal from a little “jobber” who brings the fruit from the North County fields down to Sixth Avenue, and who also takes back any excess berries that Jon can’t sell. It’s an arrangement Jon can’t pass up, even though he knows it irritates George Manos.

Jon doesn’t need to climb into his truck in order to deliver mushrooms to Manos Brothers Produce; it’s located directly across the street from the Maniscalco brothers’ enterprise. This morning, like almost every morning in the spring and early summer months, a pickup truck parked in front of the Manos operation is stacked high with shallow boxes of strawberries. These are berries which only yesterday clung to stems growing in the fields of Carlsbad. Mexican farmworkers plucked them and transferred them to the boxes throughout the day, and George Manos helped load them onto the pickup a little after 3:00 a.m. this morning.

Manos is a tall, burly man who favors wearing a baseball cap emblazoned “George Bros,” and no-nonsense, heavy-framed eyeglasses. He’s more than seventy years old, but not only does he look a decade younger, he also shoulders cartons of produce as vigorously as his young laborers. He makes light of the chore of driving up for the berries every morning, but then again, he’s a fellow who still occasionally relishes hopping in a truck and driving to Indio or Coachella before dawn to pick up a load of grapefruits or lemons or tangerines.

That’s one of the clues to the zest which Manos still seems to feel for this business. He’s not a man to romanticize his work, but Manos almost crows when he talks about where all the dozens of fruit and vegetables come from; he knows how the salad gets to his table, even if most folks think the lettuce grows on the shelf of the produce department. Other produce wholesalers say Manos takes a special delight in occasionally gambling with his knowledge and experience; he’s known for stocking up on items which he suspects are going to be short and on which he can profit big.

Even his warehouse betrays a unique sign of pride. The building itself is dingy. In comparison with the young Maniscalco brothers’ whitewashed facility, Manos’s place harbors dirty plywood boards tacked up over crumbling bricks; the lighting is gray. Manos family members ring up transactions on an antique cash register inside a booth decorated by a dusty wreath made of straw. Nonetheless, this is the only business on this street whose portal is filled with boxes of fruits and vegetables displayed thoughtfully, their contents tipped forward as if to entice passers-by.

A man who’s worked for the Manos brothers for twenty-eight years arranges the display in the wee hours every morning, showcasing the various specials. This day the veteran employee has set out a box of twenty-five plump, furry kiwi fruit next to red and seedless green grapes that were cut from vines in Chile a week and a half ago. (Mexican grapes will start to show up on this street about the third week in May, with California grapes appearing about the first week in June.) Next to the grapes are light-green summer squash grown in Holtville, dark green bell peppers from Mexico, lemons picked in Indio, bananas from Chiapas (Mexico). Surrounding the display are column after column of the glowing strawberries.

Asked about the display, Manos shrugs his shoulders and says that his fruit-arranging employee “likes nice things . . . he’s done it that way all his life.” Manos himself can remember when aesthetics played a much bigger role on this street. Manos’s father and two uncles left Greece and in 1906 settled down into a storefront at Sixth Avenue and J Street, and by 1920 eight-year-old George was helping out. “I used to pick up empty boxes on the street that the peddlers used to throw away. I’d sell ’em to farmers, to anybody I could, for ten cents a box. Just like people collect cans today.”

He says back in those days household consumers bought their produce from peddlers who drove daily routes in the manner of milk trucks. In the early 1920s, the time of George’s first memories of the produce center, some of the San Diego peddlers still used horse-drawn carriages, although others already had switched to trucks, and all would throng Sixth Avenue in the predawn hours, up to 200 at a time. “Some of ’em displayed their produce beautifully. They’d have fruits on one side, all arranged just like you see in the supermarkets now. Some of ’em had beautiful mirrors and flowers. It looked just like a picture.”

George says the county also was home to a multitude of small farmers then, who would bring in their daily harvest every night. In fact, the original Manos brothers owned a produce farm in Bonita in addition to their wholesale business; every night George’s father would start loading the family’s horse-drawn cart about 11:00 p.m., arriving at the downtown warehouse about 3:00 a.m. —just in time to begin selling to the peddlers and to assorted markets.

But by the late 1930s, the frantic, early-morning bustle of the produce market already had begun to abate. Gas was cheap in those days, George says, and housewives didn’t seem to mind driving to the brand-new supermarket chains rather than waiting for the daily rounds of the produce peddlers. Today the Manos business, medium-size by San Diego standards, occasionally sells one item or another to the local supermarket chains at those times when the chains fall short of some particular good. But for the most part, the company sells to other wholesalers, hospitals, schools, restaurants.

Manos buys the majority of his fruits and vegetables directly from farmers, disdaining the intermediary step taken by some local wholesalers of sending buyers to the Los Angeles produce market.

“We can get better prices if we buy direct, ” George says. Some of his goods travel in the semitrailer owned by his company; independent truckers transport other produce for him. This preference for direct links to the fields tends to complicate the business; it means that every month George and his brother and partner John must talk with dozens of growers and shippers all over the country.

Furthermore, that list of growers and shippers changes from one day to the next, from one season to the other. As an example, John Manos points to the iceberg lettuce that has arrived at the warehouse this morning. It was picked just yesterday in Bakersfield, where the lettuce harvest began in early April. Soon, however, the harvest from the south San Joaquin Valley will begin to slacken, to be replaced by iceberg lettuce from Oxnard, Santa Maria, and Salinas farther north. That will continue through about November, whereupon lettuce production shifts to desert fields around El Centro and Blythe, and throughout Arizona.

Even though a huge volume of tomatoes (a third of the nation’s supply) is grown here, the tomato crop nonetheless undergoes a similar migration. John Manos says the San Diego County tomatoes don’t even start to reach ripeness until about May 15, and those earliest local tomatoes are grown under plastic tents, with their numbers supplemented by Florida tomatoes for a month or two. The harvests in the local tomato fields will only begin to peak in July and August, and will go strong until the fall, continuing even into December in the best years. At that point, tomatoes will begin to arrive from Mexico, first from the rich fields from Sinaloa on the western Mexican coast, then shifting to Baja in April and May.

Tomatoes are by no means the only crop that flows into the Southwest from Mexico, though they’re one of the biggest, along with bell peppers, string beans, cucumbers, and eggplant. In addition, the Mexicans export a cornucopia of other produce in the months between November and June: watermelon, honeydew melons, cantaloupes, English and Chinese peas, asparagus, fresh com, broccoli, garlic, bananas, a variety of peppers and squash. From late May through September, mangoes, seedless grapes, and red grapes come northward.

The bulk of those products flows through Nogales in Arizona, more than 450 miles from San Diego. Yet George’s brother John is casual about the distance. He says the same semitrailer that just hauled in the lettuce from Bakersfield will hit the road again about 9:00 a.m. this morning and reach Nogales by six this evening. It will pick up a full load of Mexican produce, then it will turn around and by early tomorrow moming will be back at the loading dock at the rear of the Manos property. Minutes later that food will begin moving — carton by carton — out the front door.

That moment, George Manos is standing in that front door and bellowing to a worker within, “Hey, cinco naranjas for Abdul! ” The five cartons of oranges whiz past and are gone. This is a place where hillocks of food suddenly materialize and then disperse. Cartons of Nicaraguan bananas appear where Arizona oranges stood an hour before; in the meantime Mexican watermelons have emerged from some side storeroom. Here the transactions between buyer and seller transpire faster than those in any convenience store. A young man will trot through the doorway, grab a carton of zucchini, and yell, ‘Hey, George!’ over his shoulder as he disappears out the door. Across the room, Manos notes on an invoice that so-and-so has just bought a carton of fancy-grade zucchini; he’ll be billed for it later.

Many of these interchanges between the wholesalers represent instances where someone has unexpectedly fallen short of a particular item. “No one man can handle everything,” says one of the biggest wholesalers on this block. Indeed, this ability literally to run next door for that extra satchel of carrots explains why the produce market has remained geographically concentrated throughout the years. No one seems to like the Sixth Avenue facilities; everyone agrees the warehouses for the most part are too small, too poorly equipped, too close to the Gaslamp District. The talk of moving has gone on for fifty years, and increased in intensity as downtown redevelopment has driven up land prices in this neighborhood. The wholesalers say it’s inevitable. And yet they roll their eyes at the thought of finding a place where the two dozen or so separate businesses could agree to resettle, to preserve their physical proximity.

This morning, George Manos takes advantage of that proximity during a brief lull by sauntering over to say good morning to Jon Maniscalco. Somehow the chitchat turns to the North County strawberry fields and the Mexican workers who harvest them. “If it weren’t for those Mexicans, this country would starve to death!” Manos exclaims; he describes watching the pickers collect fruit from a 200-foot-long row of plants and “then they run with the box to the truck. Those people work hard! This morning I asked one of the top pickers how much he makes and he said it’s $110 a day. The poorest picker makes forty. It’s not true that farm workers don’t make good money!” Manos whoops.

Then he’s gone. Daylight has broken by now, and Jon Maniscalco has completed delivering mushrooms to his fellow wholesalers. Now he’s turned his attention to his retail customers who’ve ordered items to be delivered later this morning. Today the Tierrasanta Wine and Spirits deli needs eight bell peppers, one bunch of celery, six cucumbers, one lug each of tomatoes and avocados, six apples, five lemons, and five limes. La Petite Cafe orders even less. “I could practically eat that much produce myself!” Jon snorts as he peruses the sheet containing the Hillcrest restaurant’s requirements. The amounts are small because the restaurant has a tiny refrigerator and thus must order daily; despite his comment, Jon is patient because his livelihood at this time depends on his willingness to offer special service. Over the course of a week, the small orders add up, he says.

Now, as he compares what he has in his refrigerator against what the restaurants and small markets need, he discovers that he must purchase only a few items: eight leeks for the Catch of the Day restaurant in Loma Portal; thirty-five pounds of bananas for The Big Kitchen in Golden Hill; one sack of red potatoes; a few other odds and ends. Because he needs so little, he figures he’ll do most of his shopping at one place, Sleeper/Snyder Produce, the business where his father is a partner.

Before he can get out the door, however. Matt, the chili vendor, bounds into the warehouse again, looking worried. “Hey, do you think it’s possible that Sleeper somehow got chilies for only ninety cents?” he asks. Sleeper has been taunting him with the claim that he [Sleeper] was just selling chilies for only a dollar a pound — a disaster for Matt if true. But Jon soothes the youthful operator. “No way! Sleeper doesn’t have any chilies for ninety cents. He’s always sayin’ stuff like that.” Relieved, Matt once again disappears.

Indeed, there’s no sign of green chilies when Jon backs his pickup truck into Sleeper’s large loading dock, at the south end of the 400 block on Sixth Avenue. This is one of the largest and most prosperous wholesale produce firms in San Diego. By the time Jon arrives at a little after seven, most of the firm’s eighteen trucks are out on the road. Yet still the dock is bustling with men toting cartons of food, and in their midst stands Andrew Sleeper, a sixty-eight-year-old bantam renowned for the saltiness of his tongue and the lascivious twinkle in his eye. When the phone rings, he snatches it off its cradle and honks, “Hello! No, Mr. Sleeper’s not here. This is the janitor! What the goddamned hell do you want to know for?” He jokes briefly with the caller, then slams down the phone.

Jon slips away to select the items he needs. He seems as comfortable in these quarters as he is in his own shop. When the contents of one carton of bananas draw his scorn, he roots around until he locates a better carton, then critically examines each bunch of the yellow fruit for the telltale shadows that reveal bruising. After maybe ten minutes of such shopping, he needs only a few cartons of greens. For these he’ll turn to Jerry Gonzales.

Gonzales’s warehouse — appropriately painted a faded kelly green — stands catty-corner from Sleeper’s busy load dock, and is special for several reasons. For greens, almost everyone on this street relies to varying degrees on Gonzales, plus Gonzales’s warehouse also supplies the local distribution centers for the Safeway, Big Bear, Windmill Farms, and Frazier Farms chains. Greens have always been the Gonzales specialty, says forty-seven-year-old Jerry, ever since his father started the business about 1940. Thus Jerry Gonzales can boast that any time a leaf of mustard green or collard green is eaten anywhere in San Diego, there’s probably a seventy-five percent chance that it first passed through this warehouse.

In the case of mustard and collard greens, in fact, the chances will be excellent that Gonzales not only distributed those vegetables but also grew them. Today Gonzales is the only man in the produce market who’s also a farmer; he leases about 200 acres on Otay Mesa where he employs a foreman and a crew of eight to ten workers to grow romaine, red leaf, green leaf, and Boston lettuce; red and Swiss chard; mustard, collard, and turnip greens; cabbage, spinach; celery; beets; and some squash. Every day, year-round, from 300 to 600 cartons of those vegetables shuttle between the South Bay acreage and Gonzales’s downtown facility.

When you see all those varied foods stacked up in the warehouse, it’s hard to imagine how a patch of earth could yield so much. Out in Gonzales’s fields, however, all becomes clear. This is a section of San Diego County few people pass through, yet the location is curiously urban. The Tijuana airport is clearly visible to the south across Otay Mesa Road. Just to the west of the farm, on this side of the border, planes take off from Brown Field. Only the rugged mountains to the east seem to defy human encroachment. The produce farm itself has a cozy, civilized look to it: the fields devoted to each crop are small, fitting the gently rolling land like a quilt. You see a long strip of red-leaf lettuce, maybe twenty-five feet wide, adjoining a twenty-five-foot-wide strip of green-leaf lettuce, adjoining a similar path of red chard, and each looks to be bursting with vegetables, more vegetables than one could conceive of counting.

Gonzales’s foreman, a Japanese who’s farmed in San Diego all his life, says some of the crops tend to bum in the summer heat, the chards and the lettuces and the cabbage, for example. “We lose some things,” the foreman says, “but we still plant them year-round.” He says Gonzales doesn’t fool with iceberg lettuce because “it’s a bit trickier to grow and they say the flavor isn’t as good as it is in the Imperial Valley.” In the warehouse downtown, Gonzales adds that his own crops constitute only about half the produce he sells; the rest he buys from other local growers. He gets parsley from Oceanside and cilantro from Mexico; radishes and green onions he brings down from the fields around Hemet and Perris. He supplements his own spinach crop with other spinach produced in Oxnard, Oceanside, and selected other locations in the northern San Diego County.

“It’s a for-granted thing, the produce business,” Gonzales says philosophically. A roly-poly man who’s usually puffing on a Jamaican cigar, Gonzales boasts that he first made his acquaintance with that business forty-seven years ago on the way home as a newborn from Mercy Hospital. “My dad brought me here to show me off before he took me home!” Eighteen years later, he dropped out of Cornell University after a year of study to return to the produce center full-time. “I knew what I was going to do,” Gonzales explains.

He usually reports to work at three in the morning, remaining at the warehouse until about noon. He goes home to nap for a few hours — but he’s back from about four until eight every evening. “I get plenty of sleep,” he declares in a jocular tone. “I just don’t do much else.” It’s a family trait. Gonzales’s sixty-seven-year-old father still reports to the warehouse every afternoon about 4:00 p.m. and stays until five the next morning; and recently Jerry’s twenty-year-old son dropped out of Cal Poly Pomona to devote his attentions to the business. “Our homes are more like second homes to us,” Jerry says in the office of the warehouse. Hanging on the wall next to him is a tarnished musical cymbal labeled “Status Cymbal.” On an opposite wall, a poster of a man drinking champagne in front of a Rolls Royce declares “Poverty Sucks.”

Despite the poster, Gonzales isn’t one to flaunt his financial success. He dresses in battered blue jeans and running shoes. A fistful of flashy rings is the only obvious clue to his prosperity, though there are subtler indications that, like Sleeper, Gonzales has done well. For example, he sends his children to the Bishop’s School in La Jolla.

But in times like these, with romaine lettuce going for seventy-nine cents a head, and celery getting eighty-nine cents per bunch, Gonzales shrinks from the profiteering image. He blames the excessive rain for the high produce prices of the last few months. “You couldn’t till the soil; farmers couldn’t plant. There’s very little supply of merchandise now.” Since it takes from sixty to seventy-five days from the planting to the harvest of most greens, Gonzales says,

“I don’t really expect to see prices come down for another month or so. ”

Gonzales also contends that the temporarily high prices tend to obscure the fact that produce remains one of the best deals in San Diego supermarkets. “People in California do not realize the luxury they have!” he says. On a year-round basis, produce is probably the cheapest food item available, he argues, and it’s fresher than most people here can imagine. Gonzales says by the time a head of romaine lettuce makes it from a California farm to a grocery store in New York City, probably seven days have elapsed. In contrast, the romaine he dispatches to Jon Maniscalco this morning was growing in a field less than twenty-four hours ago.

Once Jon and his brother Mike have received the greens from Gonzales, it doesn’t take them long to finish arranging the orders for their retail customers. Each of the brothers will drive a delivery truck this morning. They’ll return before noon, but with all the little chores that accompany the running of any business, they say they usually clock a ten- or eleven-hour day before heading home. Although they’re not making a lot of money yet, they look forward to orders steadily building. Produce is a good business, they agree, even if it does carry its own pressures.

As if to underscore the point, a merchant from the Farmers Bazaar strolls in. He’s buying one or two different grades of mushrooms, but he informs Jon he won't be needing one of the other grades because he was able to obtain it from the American Mushroom wholesalers for a nickel less per pound. He leaves Jon fuming. “When there were no mushrooms, they were all calling, saying, ‘Anything you want.’ Well, he [the merchant] just got himself off my priority list. ’’ The young produce dealer is too easygoing to sound really angry; he’s just exasperated. “A lot of loyalty on this street!” he murmurs. “A nickel a pound.”