Eponymous Foods: Fruits

This installment of eponymous food stories is entirely about fruits. We’ve got a berry, a pome, and a citrus, all with varying degrees of documentation.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 2:10Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:20Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:26Holly Frey?

  We haven't had an eponymous foods episode in a minute. And I just felt like it.

• 2:35Holly Frey?

  It's kind of like that thing that we've talked about before, where when I do really, really dark stories, it's probably because I'm in such a good place mentally and emotionally that they're not a problem. And then when I do really light ones, it's because I'm overwhelmed with the world. So, welcome to Fruit Time.

• 2:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  I was talking to some friends of mine and I was like, if you look at our recent episodes, I feel like Holly's and my coping strategies are opposite because Holly's episodes are like strawberries and my episodes are like, we're pouring blood on the draft files.

• 3:07Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 3:09Holly Frey?

  Yeah. If I can

• 3:13Holly Frey?

  spend some time in a more, in a place of levity.

• 3:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sure.

• 3:17Holly Frey?

  I mean, I'm not ignoring all the other stuff.

• 3:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  No.

• 3:20Holly Frey?

  But I, I can, if I wallow in it, I will, I don't know what will happen. It won't be good. So here we are, talking about fruit. This eponymous foods episode kind of dovetails on that strawberry episode because it is all fruit. So we have a berry in this one, a poem, and a citrus. They all have varying degrees of documentation. One of them includes a naming whoopsie daisy that I find oddly amusing and just hilarious. And we'll get to all of that.

• 3:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  I only knew one of these was an eponym and it was not the first one. Charles Rudolph Boyzen was born July 14th, 1895 in La Grange, California. That's a little more than 30 miles due east of Modesto. Some write-ups indicate that he was an immigrant from Sweden, but that appears to be incorrect. His father was from Germany, which might be something that's been confused in the retelling of this story. In his early life, post-school, Rudy, as he was called, enlisted and served in World War I. And when he got home from the war, he moved to Coombsville, California, in Napa, and worked as a farmhand. And it's there that he started experimenting

• 4:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  with cross-pollinating berries.

• 4:42Holly Frey?

  So the exact nature of how he got his original berry is a little bit lost. Because this story has been shared through oral history over the years, rather than through any notes or documentation on Boisen's part, it's been told in some different ways. So some suggest that he was purposely combining berries through cross-pollination. Others suggest it may have been a happy accident of having just planted different berries near one another. And it is actually highly likely that there was something in between. Boisen was very good with plants, and he was also a hobbyist. So he may have just been trying things out without really having an idea of an end goal. His wife told reporters almost a decade after

• 5:27Holly Frey?

  his death, quote, "He did it just for fun. He sprinkled Himalaya blackberry bush with pollen from various related berries and got the Boisen berry." But what matters most is that when some of his berry vines cross-pollinated in 1923, he recognized that the resulting fruit was something unique and very delicious.

• 5:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Boisen berries are considered to be a type of blackberry. And like the blackberry, it's a bramble fruit, which just means it comes from a shrub-style plant that can be thorny or bristly. Like our recent topic, the strawberry, it's part of the rose family, and it's a dark reddish-black color and full of flavor. They're usually described as being juicier or sweeter than a blackberry, but with a tart note that shines through the sweet. Unfortunately, boysen berries don't have a very long shelf life once they have been picked, so you don't see them in grocery stores for very long. It's usually a very brief window when you can buy them fresh. But they're excellent for baking and for preserves.

• 6:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  That's probably how most people first encounter them. It is definitely true that Holly had boysen berry preserves as a kid.

• 6:41Holly Frey?

  Yeah, that was like a big favorite in our house growing up. That's the only way I knew what they were. Numerus berries are often suggested as the likely or possible genetic donors to the hybrid that became the boysen berry, including the logan berry, the European blackberry, European raspberry, and American dewberry. And of course, as we mentioned just a moment ago, his widow mentioned the Himalaya blackberry. Recent genetic comparisons have led to the theory that it's a cross of a marion berry and logan berry. The vine that produced the berries that Rudy Boisen recognized as new were very hardy. We'll talk about just how hardy in a bit. And the fruit itself was much larger than other berries.

• 7:23Holly Frey?

  He touted it as being as big as a thumb, which was significantly larger than anything on the market in that, that type of berry. Boisen contacted the USDA Bureau of Plant Industry, and specifically a man named George M. Darrow, who was in charge of the small fruit division about this new berry, but he never received a response, and so he just kind of went on with his life.

• 7:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Two years after the berry discovery in 1925, Boisen moved to Anaheim, California. There, he worked on public park projects for the city, planting trees for a new 20-acre green space known simply as City Park. That park would later be renamed Pearson Park, which is the name it has today. Eventually, Boisen was made superintendent of the park and was paid $175 a month to care for the new space. Boisen married a woman named Peggy Bruton, and they had one son. After they got married, they moved to a property in Fullerton, California that was owned by Peggy's mother, and Rudy brought the berry vines right along with him, planting them at their new place.

• 8:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Boisen became well-known in Anaheim for his expertise in growing things, and even gave talks about plants to community groups, including one called "Street Trees and Their Stories", which he shared at the Anaheim Toastmasters Club in early 1928.

• 8:48Holly Frey?

  Another city works project that Boisen was involved with in 1928 was the greenification of Anaheim. A write-up in the Los Angeles Times from January 22 of that year reads, quote, "Anaheim will plant 4,400 trees in city. The planting of 4,400 trees by the city within the next few months, in accordance with a program adopted by the city council to make Anaheim one of the most attractive of all southern cities, has been announced. Rudolph Boisen, overseer of the city park, is in charge of the planting early in February." Rudy also combined his plant knowledge with his involvement in the American Legion to initiate a program where he prepared floral arrangements each Memorial Day to be distributed

• 9:32Holly Frey?

  to the grave sites of the city's veterans.

• 9:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  While Boisen remained an active plant enthusiast for his whole life, he had an injury in 1928 that slowed him down, and likely contributed to his berry vines kind of falling by the wayside in terms of being actively cultivated. He had fallen down a fire pole while touring a fire station, and he injured his back. This was probably a factor in why he wasn't able to really cultivate his berries much beyond that initial planting. His back issues and other responsibilities might have just prevented it. He had given away a lot of his berry plants over the years to friends and neighbors, so there's no telling how many may have been producing fruit that were never documented.

• 10:18Holly Frey?

  Yeah, but they all came out of this one vine, which he had allegedly planted, it's often described as "in a ditch" on his mother-in-law's property. Years after, Boisen had written to George Darrow at the USDA, Darrow found those letters, and he became intrigued about this thumb-sized berry that was described in them. So Barrow decided to find Rudy Boisen and his plants to assess them. But as Rudy had moved a couple of times, it just wasn't as simple as going to the return address on the letters. And eventually Barrow enlisted the help of another man with a name that is easily recognizable in the berry game. That is Walter Knott.

• 10:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Knott was able to locate Boisen's abandoned vines that had been planted in a ditch on the Fullerton property and Knott relocated the plants to his own property to try to get them back to a more robust state. Knott was able to propagate 100 vines from the plants that he had collected in Fullerton. They became hardy producers of the berry Boisen had cultivated. Knott was the one to give the fruit the name Boisenberry, but he didn't really cut the fruit's namesake in on the profits that he made from it. Knott's berry farm was made possible in part by the money that Walter Knott made from Boisenberry's sales.

• 11:35Holly Frey?

  Rudy continued to work for the Parks Department and per the accounts of family members, he did not harbor any resentment toward Knott. He focused on his work in Anaheim, establishing new parks and keeping the existing green spaces filled with healthy flora. Over time, he aged and his health declined and he eventually had mobility issues due to a health condition that led to the loss of one of his legs. He died at the age of 55 on November 25th of 1950, but he had worked for the city right up until the end of his life.

• 12:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  All indications are that Rudy was beloved by the city of Anaheim. His death was reported in the papers beyond merely an announcement or an obituary, with many noting that the chapel where his funeral was held was not big enough for all the people who came to pay their respects and say goodbye to him. Two years after he died, a write-up in the Anaheim Gazette noted that a victory garden he had planted at the beginning of World War II for the community and planned out with regular crop rotations to optimize output was still going strong, including boysenberries cultivated by Rudy at the start of the plot's life. Almost a decade after his death, the city started a week-long festival in his name.

• 12:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  And to be clear, that festival featured the berries, but it was about Rudy. The LA Times reported on June 14, 1959, "Week to honor creator of famed boysenberry."

• 13:06Holly Frey?

  Rudy's legacy berry has continued to have a very busy life. In 1955, one of Rudy's siblings got permission to remove the original vine and bring it back to their home in Merced, California. That plant was very hardy. And then in 1976, that plant, which continued to be very healthy, that's more than 20 years after that moving, was propagated through Root Division and given from one family member to another in a shoebox. This transfer apparently took place at a wedding. Those shoots that were in the shoebox were planted in Castro Valley, California. They continue to be prosperous there.

• 13:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Then in 2017, Rudy's granddaughter, Jeanette Boysen Fitzgerald, was able to get access to her grandfather's original boysenberry plant, which continued to survive and produce fruit nearly 100 years after it originated. Jeanette and her husband were able to take clippings from the original plant and propagate them, eventually opening a vineyard, Boysenberry Farm in Orland, California, where the vines thrive today. And if you want to own a piece of berry history, you can purchase plants from them that are propagated from the original boysenberry stock. During the height of the pandemic, the farm opened up their property so people could come

• 14:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  and pick berries and get some outside time, noting that their rows were planted eight feet apart. So it was a way to enjoy an outing while keeping a safe distance from others. That picking experience has continued in the years since then, lasting several weeks beginning in late May. Yeah, you only get a few weeks a year because of that very short time that they stay fresh. But coming up, we're going to talk about a fruit that had a bit of a naming accident that I referenced at the top of the show. We'll explain after we first pause for a sponsor break.

• 15:06Speaker 05

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 15:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 15:30Speaker 05

  It was good arrival, anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 15:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 15:44Speaker 06

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 15:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 15:58Speaker 05

  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 16:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 16:07Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each

• 16:51Holly Frey?

  other? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search "National Squash League" and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

• 17:33Speaker 03

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• 17:49Holly Frey?

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• 18:08Holly Frey?

  The Bartlett pear has long been a favorite in the United States. It's a good canning pear. It's excellent for eating ripe, and it also bakes up beautifully. In 1921, U.P. Hendrick wrote of the Bartlett, "Bartlett leads all other pears in number of trees in New York and vies with Kiefer for the greatest number in America. Its fruits are more common and more popular in American markets than those of any other pear. When the characters of the variety are passed in review, although several poor ones of fruit and tree appear, the popularity of Bartlett with growers and sellers, if not with consumers, seems justified." But the story of this particular fruit's name is a little wonky, and it involves a case of mistaken originality.

• 18:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  In an entry in the 1892 book, "The Bartlet's: Ancestral, Genealogical, Biographical, Historical, Comprising an Account of the American Progenitors of the Bartlett Family, With Special Reference to the Descendants of John Bartlett of Weymouth and Cumberland," there's an entry for Enoch Bartlett, which reads, quote, "Enoch Bartlett, who died in 1860, was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1779. He was a merchant in the truest meaning of the word, and was an extensive importer of foreign merchandise during the troublous 1812 period when merchants suffered heavy losses by the depredations of the enemy

• 19:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  on the seas. He it was, after whom the favorite Bartlett pear was named."

• 19:43Holly Frey?

  Enoch did not cultivate that pear. He found it. In 1817, he had acquired an estate that had been previously owned by a man named Thomas Brewer. Brewer had a number of fruit-bearing trees growing on the property, and Enoch Bartlett was very interested in them. One of the trees produced a pear unlike any that Bartlett had ever seen before, so he nurtured it, and he started actively producing and cultivating the fruit. And because he didn't know anybody else who was growing that same pear, he named it after himself.

• 20:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  An 1832 write-up in "The New England Farmer," which also appeared in numerous other places, describes a horticultural festival that was staged in honor of the anniversary of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. This event included a lecture on entomology, which talked about pests in the garden, and it also featured a fruit and flower display where members could share the literal fruits of their labors. Listed among them are Enoch Bartlett's Bartlett and Capuemont pears, which are rated in the mention as "very fine." Bartlett did not only cultivate pears. There are many mentions in local papers in the 1800s of the many varieties of apples

• 20:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  he produced, which seemed to have been universally recognized for high quality, as well as nectarines and peaches. So he had a very good reputation.

• 21:06Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he was a fruit man that people trusted. In 1848, the newly formed American Pomological Society, which is now the oldest fruit organization in North America, included the Bartlett pear in its catalog of fruits available on the North American continent. It described the Bartlett tree this way, quote, "Tree medium in size, tall, pyroform, upright, hardy, very productive. Branches stocky, smooth, reddish brown, overlaid with an ash gray scarf skin with few lenticels. Branchlets short with short internodes, reddish brown, glossy, smooth, glabrous with conspicuous lenticles." And the fruit of the tree was written up as, quote, "Skin thin, tender, smooth, often

• 21:50Holly Frey?

  dull, the surface somewhat uneven. Color clear yellow with a faint blush on the exposed cheek, more or less dotted with russet and often thinly russeted around the basin. Dots many, small, conspicuous, greenish russet. Flesh fine-grained, although slightly granular at the center, melting, buttery, very juicy, venus aromatic. Quality, very good."

• 22:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  But even before that 1848 write-up, there had been a realization. In 1828, a fresh shipment of fruit trees from Europe arrived in New England, and among them was a pear tree that was just like the Bartlett in every respect, and it bore identical fruit to the Bartlett. Record scratch, the Bartlett pear was not a Bartlett at all, but a variety called a Williams Boncretien, or Williams Good Christian.

• 22:46Holly Frey?

  The Williams Good Christian was also not the first name that that pear tree had. It was first known in England as a Stares pear. That's because the first person who actually discovered it First, at least to the best of our knowledge, was a schoolteacher by the name of Stair. And Mr. Stair found this pear in 1765. The Stair pear was acquired by a nurseryman named Williams, who distributed in England as the Williams pear, or Williams bon Chrétien.

• 23:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1799, an importer in the US named James Carter had several of the Williams pears shipped across the Atlantic to be planted on the Roxbury, Massachusetts estate of Thomas Brewer. And it was that estate that Enoch Bartlett purchased in 1817. I just want to say, in case other Massachusetts people, Roxbury is not next to Haverhill. That's not really what that original biographical thing was saying.

• 23:45Holly Frey?

  That's where he was born.

• 23:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right. That's not where the trees were, is what I'm saying.

• 23:49Holly Frey?

  Correct. But this is a case where that revelation of the pear's real name, which is funny because people knew initially, when they brought the pear over, that it was a Williams, but that information got lost. It had no impact on the pear's name in the US. Because by the time this mistake was uncovered, so many people had been growing and purchasing and eating Bartlett pears because of Enoch Bartlett's reputation, that everybody just kind of stuck with it. But in Europe, it is still called a Williams pear. So if you're from one place or the other and you're traveling, if you see a Williams or Bartlett pear on the menu in a market, and it's not the one you call it, it's the same thing. It's the same pear.

• 24:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  We are about to talk about our final eponymous fruit, but before we do, we will hear from some of the sponsors that keep our show going.

• 24:46Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition. pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 25:31Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

• 26:12Speaker 05

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• 26:57Speaker 05

  so I just kind

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• 27:43Holly Frey?

  Okay, our next food starts with a man whose name will in no way tip you off to the fruit that is named for him. Sometimes this is considered a technicality because he did go through a name change. We'll talk about it. Victor Rodier was born on May 25th, 1839 in southern France in a town called Chambon-sur-Dalard. There isn't a lot of ready information about his early life, but we do know that as an adult, he joined the Order of Brothers of the Enunciation. And when he joined the order, he took the name of Brother Marie Clément, sometimes just going by Clément.

• 28:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Brother Clément was sent to Algeria to work in the orphanage that his order ran there in the town of Missugen. That's in the Oran province on the north coast of the country, just across the Alberen Sea from Spain. This was not long after France had colonized Algeria, which happened in 1830. At the beginning of 1830, Algeria was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by a Sultan headquartered in Constantinople. Tunisia and Tripoli were also under the Sultan's umbrella of power, although the real day to day rule of each country was carried out by their own regents.

• 28:56Holly Frey?

  But several years earlier, in 1827, Algeria and France became embroiled in a feud after the Algerian regent, known as the Day, slapped a visiting French consul with a fly swatter. That slap did not come out of nowhere. France was deeply in debt to Algeria and had been really dragging on repayment. But that slap gave France the sense of outrage that made a conquest of this country seem justified. The actual military conflict that took place after the French landed on July 5th of 1830 was extremely short because Algeria really did not have the means to fight back. So, the Daé cut a deal with the French to go into exile and the Europeans immediately moved

• 29:40Holly Frey?

  in, including setting up monasteries and religious centers to try to convert the Muslim population to Christianity. And that is how Brother Marie Clement landed there.

• 29:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Clement's exact interaction with the citrus trees and their fruit that would eventually bear his name is largely a matter of lore. Did he discover the fruit? Did he cultivate it through crossbreeding? We really have no idea, although there are definitely versions of the story that paint a quaint picture of a French monk tending his grove of citrus on the northern coast of Africa. When did it happen? Also, no clue. Well, some clue. We have a window. Clement got to Algeria in 1892 and the fruit is a matter of record 10 years later in 1902. So, somewhere during that decade.

• 30:35Holly Frey?

  So, a clementine, or clementine, as it was shortly called initially, and we will get to who named it that in just a moment, is a small citrus. It's like an orange, but it's a whole lot sweeter. The size and flavor make clementines very popular as snacks for kids. They're also really easy to peel and they don't have seeds. So, again, kid-friendly. They tend to be more oval-shaped rather than spherical. That's probably also one of the things that makes them easy for little hands to handle and peel. And another big draw for them is that they generally harvest later than oranges. So, they fill this gap where fresh citrus would normally not be available. They're sometimes called Christmas oranges for this reason.

• 31:16Holly Frey?

  So, you're looking at like an autumn into early winter harvest. There are actually dozens of clementine varieties, according to a 2007 interview with Tracy Khan, curator of the Citrus Variety Collection at the University of California, Riverside. That interview appeared in the Cape Cod Times.

• 31:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  I had one with my breakfast.

• 31:38Holly Frey?

  Delicious.

• 31:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although it did have a couple of seeds in it.

• 31:41Holly Frey?

  Oh.

• 31:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Holly Frey?

  Gasp.

• 31:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh, it was believed for a while that clementines were a cross between a tangerine and an ornamental bitter orange known as citrus arantium. But today, they're considered to be a type of mandarin orange, usually a mandarin crossed with another sweet orange to create a fruit that's smaller than other mandarin oranges. Enter another kind of hazy bit of drama. There's a fairly high degree of probability that clementines actually originated in China and were hybridized there. And that likely happened hundreds of years before any involvement of any French monks in northern Africa.

• 32:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  But like the purported Algerian origins, there's not any solid information.

• 32:30Holly Frey?

  Yeah, Algeria definitely claims to be the birthplace, but so do some areas in China. The important thing is we all get delicious fruit and plenty of vitamin C. But the name Clementine, Clementine, which is based on Clement, which was not the monk's original name, but was the one he took when he took orders, was bestowed on the fruit by a botanist. That was a man named Louis Charles Tracy, who was assigned to the French Agricultural Society in Algeria. He also was making a general study of plants in Algeria. But once again, we are met with a mystery. Did Brother Clement bring this fruit to Tracy's attention? The monk was clearly associated with it, but we don't know what transpired there.

• 33:16Holly Frey?

  And the Clementine, according to the 2007 book Citrus a History by Pierre Lazlo, won a gold medal from the Agricultural Society right after Tracy mentions it. So that is yet another mystery.

• 33:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  As for Brother Clement, he became a spiritan in 1903. That's a religious order of the Catholic Church, which was founded in 1703. It focuses on working with the poor and with marginalized communities. And that may actually be the origin point of some of the Clementine lore. It seems that a paper was published in a spiritan periodical, and that may be where other biographies are getting their information. Regarding the story of Brother Clamell and his little oranges, Holly was not able to get a copy of this to check. Clamell Rodier died in late 1904.

• 34:09Holly Frey?

  That was, incidentally, his death not long before clementines made their way to North America as a crop. They reportedly came to the US in 1909, and they were imported initially to Florida and then also to California, so the two big citrus growers. A 1937 newspaper article that ran in multiple papers claimed that the very first clementine planted in the US was in Brooksville, Florida. That write-up read, quote, "The parent tree of all clementine orange trees in this country thrives in Chinsigot Hill, Brooksville, home of Colonel and Mrs. Raymond Robbins, at the approximate age of 20 years."

• 34:49Holly Frey?

  That article goes on to explain that Dr. Walter T. Swingle of the US Department of Agriculture received a gift of budwood from Louis Charles Tracy himself, and that the tree in the Robbins' yard was that very gift.

• 35:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Clementines didn't exactly catch on in an especially big way in the US, and there weren't a lot of clementines grown in comparison to other citrus crops. For example, a newspaper out of Bryan, Texas, reported in the autumn of 1932 that a new type of orange was being grown in the area, and that article had to explain what a clementine was, noting, quote, "The clementine orange, also known as an Algerian tangerine, is an early maturing kid glove orange of hybrid orange, supposedly a cross between a sour orange and a tangerine. The fruit becomes edible about the last week of October and is past its prime by January 1st.

• 35:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  The quality of the fruit is excellent, the strong flavor characteristic of the common tangerine being totally absent. The size is small, one and a half to two inches, but the skin is very thin and the core inconspicuous."

• 35:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  But even with a lot of write-ups appearing telling consumers that clementines were delicious, and that we're all gonna start growing them, they really didn't experience a surge in popularity in the US for decades. And the eventual surge was the result of an especially bad winter. In 1997, Florida had an unusually bad freeze that destroyed most of its citrus production for the year. And to fill the empty produce sections, clementines were imported from Spain and Algeria. And from there, clementines have had a steady increase in popularity here. In 2007, that was the first year the US government tracked clementines as a separate

• 36:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  entity from other citrus. Before that, it had fallen under a blanket category that grouped the less popular citrus types together. But that year, an estimated 135,000 tons of clementines were produced in the US. And according to the American Farm Bureau Federation report from 2023, "While citrus production overall in the US has faltered significantly in recent years, quote, 'The only citrus fruit category to show a clear increase in production is the tangerine category, which includes tangelos, mandarins, clementines, and traditional tangerines.' But they're clearly seen, to a degree, as a more luxury

• 37:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  choice when it comes to the produce selection." According to The Packer, which is part of the Farm Journal Incorporated, "Clementines have primarily caught on with higher-income households, with 32% of households that bring in more than a six-figure income eating clementines and mandarins, whereas only 15% of consumers who earn less than $25,000 are purchasing the tiny citrus." It's not exactly surprising, but it does put the status of clementines' rising popularity in perspective.

• 37:54Holly Frey?

  And perhaps all because of a monk?

• 38:02Holly Frey?

  Fruit, man. I have a listener mail.

• 38:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 38:09Holly Frey?

  Which is a reference to our Gertrude Chandler Warner episode from our listener Susan, who writes, hello, Tracy and Holly. I really enjoy listening to your podcast. I learn something new each time I listen, and I love the way you present history in such a lively manner. I was interested in your recent podcast about the author Gertrude Warner and the Boxcar Children books. You discuss her use of a Gollywog character in the children's books. By the way, that was only in one book that she wrote when she was nine years old, not other children's books. Susan writes, I wanted to let you know that the Gollywog is a racist caricature of someone who is of African descent. And then they send the Wikipedia link.

• 38:47Holly Frey?

  Susan says, I grew up in England as a child, and there was a children's show called Naughty. In it, the Gollywog was a caricature of a black person that lived in the woods and often created mischief. Even as a child, I thought of it as racist and distasteful. Many Americans are not familiar with the Gollywog, but I do think if you're going to mention it in your podcast, you probably want to also let people know that this may have been used innocently by Warner, but is a racist caricature. Thank you so much, Susan. Thank you so much, Susan. I didn't know that.

• 39:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, on following the link and all of that, I have seen that visual stereotypical image before.

• 39:21Holly Frey?

  Exactly. But I didn't have that word attached to it.

• 39:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, had never connected it with the word Gollywog and just thought it was like a weird sing-songy children fantasy name.

• 39:31Holly Frey?

  Yeah, same.

• 39:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Same. Now we know.

• 39:35Holly Frey?

  So yeah, just to be clear, in case anybody hasn't read Boxcar Children and doesn't know, it does not appear in those books. It's literally just that one story that she wrote when she was nine.

• 39:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Kind of basing it off a different.

• 39:47Holly Frey?

  Yeah, there was a series of books that became popular in the US.

• 39:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Holly Frey?

  That Gollywog was part of. Remember, that was the book that she churned out really quickly because she had lied to her mom that she was writing a book.

• 40:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  She was writing a book when she was really spending too much time playing Tea Party.

• 40:04Holly Frey?

  Yeah. And then she had to quickly produce results.

• 40:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 40:07Holly Frey?

  So it's, there's probably a little plagiarism in the mix as well. It's a nine-year-old, so we cut her some slack. But I'm very, very glad to know that. So thank you for bringing it to our attention, Susan. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at [email protected]. You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

• 40:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 40:48Holly Frey?

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