Lemon Fest Zest

It is always a joy to see my mother, Delia Ruan de Campos, on the cover of the Independent. The picture used to illustrate your Goleta Lemon Festival issue is most likely from 1947, probably about a year before I was born. It has been used many times and never grows old, it is such an iconic photo. And it has a good back story to boot.

My mother would recall that the day she was photographed was one of the worst of her life. She had just arrived from Mexico and could not speak a word of English. The photographer and his crew were busy shouting instructions to her, which she could not understand. They became frustrated with her until someone informed them she could only speak Spanish. Resolving that issue, the photo shoot proceeded with many photos taken.

Apparently, the photos showed her going through the process of measuring, washing, and wrapping lemons in tissue. The photos, as she understood it, would appear in an agricultural trade magazine. Only the one photo kept at Stow House is presumed to have survived.

The Goleta Lemon Association initially used stock labels for its images in 1935. The brand names were established from the get-go, but the images on the seven brands were not used for another year or so. I have managed to find five of the seven brands in their original stock label form and gave reproductions to the Stow House. Since then, my latest acquisition is a San Marcos brand.

Perhaps, in a future Goleta Lemon Festival story you can publish them and give Santa Barbara a whole new visual image of what a Goleta Lemon Association lemon brand looked like back in 1935.