Central California town of Exeter nurtured two Nevada governors

Fruit crates like the ones Clifford Guinn stacked behind Mt. Whitney Cold Storage still overlook the football field at Exeter Union High School.

In the late 1940s and early ’50s, the sight of Guinn perched atop the crates was a fixture of the Exeter skyline, along with the water tower, the stadium lights, the packing houses and the peaks of the Sierra Nevada.

The vantage point allowed him to watch his sons, Chuck and Kenny, during their heyday with the Monarchs football squad without having to leave work.

The stern eye Guinn kept on the exploits of his two boys was typical of small town life in Exeter, a farming community in the southern San Joaquin Valley about halfway between Fresno and Bakersfield.

It was a good way to enjoy the boys’ success on the field, but also served as a reminder to them that if they slacked off or misbehaved they would have to answer for it at home.

"There was no question who was the boss in the family," said Tom Dungan, a close friend of the Guinn family who still lives in Exeter. "He was a great dad. He was rough and tough, but he was a good guy."

The disciplined and diligent parenting of Guinn and other adults in town helped Chuck and Kenny achieve later success.

Chuck became a well-regarded businessman and community leader in the area. Kenny became the second son of Exeter to be governor of Nevada, following in the footsteps of Robert List.

When Kenny Guinn died on July 22 after falling from the roof of his Las Vegas home, most of the tributes that poured in mentioned his agrarian roots. It also highlighted the historical oddity that one tiny town in California produced two Nevada governors.

"The Exeter connection has always been kind of mind-boggling to me," said retired Nevada state archivist Guy Rocha.

Plenty of future Nevada governors have crossed paths in Ely, made connections in the Comstock and forged ties in Eureka mining communities.

But two governors from one little-known town with no other connection whatsoever to Nevada political circles?

"What you have there is very unusual, very, very unusual," Rocha said.

To people raised in Exeter, however, it’s not much of a surprise men of List and Guinn’s generation would find such success.

They knew to grow up in Exeter meant to work hard — in class, in sports and at work.

"We had a lot of kids from Exeter who went to universities and did quite well," said Shirley Blair who along with her sister, Linda, and mother, Vergie, rounded out the immediate Guinn family. "All the parents knew all the kids, so you didn’t dare do anything wrong."

A visit to Exeter today shows that sentiment still exists, even though Clifford Guinn is no longer perched on the fruit crates to keep an eye on things.

In fact, 55 years after Kenny left for college, Exeter is cleaner, safer and more prosperous than most towns in California’s farm belt in part because a tight network of eyes and ears still enforces social order with peer pressure, gossip and shame.

"People here, it seems like they take care of each other," said Leland Tilley, 41, as he watched the junior varsity Monarchs practice in triple-digit heat on a recent evening.

Tilley, a substitute teacher who coaches baseball and basketball, moved his wife and four kids from nearby Visalia to a farm house in an orange grove on the outskirts of Exeter in large part to experience a lifestyle that is hard to come by in larger cities.

"If something good happens, everybody is going to know and support you," he said. "But if you do something wrong, everybody knows it.

"Maybe that helps. It keeps you clean."

Across the street Tom Simmons, 52, an Exeter native, was watching the varsity squad practice and explaining how the network sprang into action after pranksters covered his son’s truck with old hamburger buns.

"The next day I knew who did it," said Simmons, a tire shop owner. "The parents took care of the problem. That is how quick you know stuff is going on. It is faster than the Internet."

■ ■ ■

Even before Exeter had the distinction of producing two Nevada governors, the small town had historical significance as the home of the Emperor grape, a plump, seeded variety of table grape.

A century ago, B.F. List, Robert’s grandfather, moved from Gardena, Calif., to Exeter and successfully shifted from the lumber business to grapes. He owned vineyards and a packing house, where Robert List eventually went to work.

Inside, young List cleaned and swept the floors while workers in long rows packed the grapes as they came in from the vineyards. Outside, the cartons were packed in ice and loaded onto rail cars for shipment as far as the East Coast and Canada.

By the time List was old enough to work in the packing house, his family was well known, largely because of his grandfather, who had become a global expert on grapes.

B.F. List not only had started what became a large and successful business around Exeter’s most important crop, but he was a former mayor and grape expert who traveled to France, Spain and Chile to retrieve cuttings and study new methodologies to produce table grapes.

"At the time, it didn’t seem unique or unusual," List said of his upbringing. "But, of course, it was."

In addition to the B.F. List and Son packing house, the List family had a 76 Station, a garage and parcels of farmland in the area.

B.F. List’s two-story house with a wraparound porch and big front yard is still there on a tree-lined street near the middle of town.

The ranch where Robert List grew up is at the edge of town in an orange grove on a street called List Avenue.

Aside from List Avenue, though, the List family name is mostly a memory in Exeter.

In 1951, Robert List’s dad moved the family to Carson City, where they had bought a ranch, in addition to a ranch in Eureka County.

"My dad liked the cattle business better than he liked the grape-growing business," List said of the decision of the pioneering Exeter family to pull up their roots and move to Nevada.

List just completed his freshman year in high school when they left California. His final year in Exeter had been a rough one, as he contracted polio and was hospitalized.

"I was very fortunate that I came out of that without any paralysis," he said. "It was a very painful experience for me and my family. … Then we made that move to Carson City, and I kind of started a new life."

The two future governors weren’t in Exeter together for long, as the List family’s days in town were winding down while the Guinn family was just getting started.

Chuck Guinn, the oldest child, said the family settled in Exeter in 1948, about a decade after leaving a farm in Garland, Ark., where they were sharecroppers, to pick cotton in McFarland, a farm town in Kern County, Calif.

Like a lot of Dust Bowl-era refugees from the South and the Plains, the Guinns traveled cross-country on Route 66 in search of a better place to work and live.

"We didn’t realize we were poor. We were working," Chuck Guinn said. "Where the work was was where we went."

Refugees from Oklahoma and Arkansas — Okies and Arkies as they were pejoratively called — typically recollect their experience with stoicism, but their day-to-day lives on the road and in the fields were difficult.

After living in McFarland, the Guinns moved around Central California, picking fruits and vegetables in places such as Lindsay and Farmersville and in the mountain towns of Johnsondale and Isabella.

"We would rent houses, and sometimes when we followed the fruit we would take tents and pitch them on the river banks," Chuck Guinn said.

He recalled a one-room mountain schoolhouse with 25 kids in first through 12th grades, and a softball team that included kids from third grade on up.

"We had no schools to play, so we went down to Kernville and played the prisoners at the prison," he said.

In Woodlake, the Guinn boys were minorities in a mostly Hispanic school.

"We were getting into fights left and right," Chuck Guinn said.

Eventually the superintendent called them in for a talk, explaining that they couldn’t spend their days fighting classmates and needed to make friends.

"So we did, and everything settled out," he said. "But, boy, we were at war with them for the first week we were up there."

The family finally settled in Exeter, buying a small house in a laborers’ settlement called Okietown, or Tooleville , about two miles east of town.

The settlement, which is still there and sits astride the Friant-Kern Canal, was two streets lined with small houses packed with farmworker families.

The Guinns were one of the few families to tend a neat lawn. Their old house burned down and has been replaced with a manufactured home, but the tidy square of grass is still there.

"Once we settled down here we really felt we had a home," Chuck Guinn said.

After they settled in Exeter, they still spent time on the road following crops, sometimes as far away as Washington.

While the farmworker lifestyle wasn’t always conducive to attending the first week of football practice, Chuck and Kenny never missed the first day of school. Being working-class didn’t hinder their adjustment to life in Exeter.

In addition to being a star football and basketball player, Kenny Guinn was a Boy Scout and class valedictorian. He also fell in love with wife-to-be Dema Lane, who was from an established Exeter family.

The other Guinns were successful, too.

"I had two older brothers, both of whom were very, very popular so I had no problem when I got to school," sister Shirley Blair said of her Exeter years. "I was from probably one of the poorest families in Exeter. I was voted student body queen."

Certainly the Guinn children had brains and instinct to succeed on their own, but they got a boost from the welcoming and protective atmosphere of the town.

Tom Dungan remembered a first day of school during his and Kenny Guinn’s high school years.

Since his dad was a school official and his other family members were relatively prosperous farm owners, Dungan was enrolled in college prep classes. Kenny Guinn, however, was enrolled in easier classes such as shop, physical education and a less challenging English course.

When Dungan’s dad saw Kenny’s class schedule, he marched him back to the school and demanded that the counselor re-enroll him in tougher classes.

"He was smarter than that, and my dad knew it," Dungan said.

It was typical of how families looked after one another.

"We didn’t have just one dad. We probably had about five or six," he said.

■ ■ ■

Although the Guinns found peace and harmony in Exeter, not every farm labor family was so lucky.

The history of Exeter, like many San Joaquin Valley towns, is tarnished with hardship and conflict.

One incident in 1929 that led to an exodus of Exeter’s Filipino residents is still a touchy subject today. No one disputes that a fight between white workers and Filipinos spilled into the streets of town, resulting in a burned down barn and the departure of Filipino workers from Exeter.

Some accounts describe it as a race riot in which enraged whites bludgeoned dozens of Filipino workers and touched off a wave of anti-Filipino violence elsewhere.

Local historian Chris Brewer describes the incident as an overblown personal dispute that turned ugly.

"The Filipinos got their guys, the local guys got their guys, and it ensued into a street brawl. Nobody was killed. Really, nobody was seriously injured."

There’s not much appetite in Exeter to delve deeper into the story, Brewer said, largely because descendants of the people involved still live in town and don’t care to discuss it.

"They don’t want to drag this up again," he said.

During World War II, Japanese farmers lost their land and possessions in the region, and throughout California, as the federal government had many shipped to internment camps.

As in many communities in the region, people in the Exeter area struggled with racial and economic tension fueled by the bracero program that brought in Mexican-born workers after World War II and later by union organizing and grape boycotts.

"There were armed standoffs in the fields," Brewer said. "It actually came down to eye-to-eye confrontation here in the Exeter area. … It didn’t get down to super-violence, but it came very close."

Exeter also suffered as consumer preference shifted from Emperor grapes to smaller, seedless varieties.

That contributed to the rise of citrus in the area, but the navel oranges in wide production are now threatened to be overtaken by new varieties that peel easier, said Dungan, who owns about 375 acres of oranges and farms another 2,000.

Even more ominous to the farming culture of Exeter is the rise of corporate farming, which is making it difficult to maintain and make a profit on small farms such as the ones the Guinns worked and Dungan still owns.

Fred Krissman, a professor of anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, has studied the farm and labor economies of the Central Valley.

He said farms such as those that created the culture of Exeter won’t last much longer.

"These are economies of scale now," Krissman said. "The retailers only want to deal with huge wholesalers. The wholesalers only want to deal with huge packing houses. The packing houses only want to deal with huge farms."

Exeter has remained relatively well off so far because it has retained much of the land-owning, mostly white, population who have the means to maintain a good standard of living and pursue education, he said. It also has attracted some commuters who drive to larger towns to work.

"Exeter is, of course, an agricultural town. It is not what I refer to as a farmworker town," Krissman said. "If the town is dominated with farmworkers, it is incredibly impoverished. Period."

■ ■ ■

If the pastoral way of life is endangered in Exeter, it isn’t showing on the surface.

On a recent weeknight, the football field was abuzz with activity. Players ran drills on the grass while local residents and athletes in other sports exercised on the track, which is open to the community.

The downtown streets are lined with vibrant small businesses. There’s a coffee shop, ice cream shop, book store, bars, pizza joints, several restaurants and antique stores, all locally owned.

In the shadow of the water tower, the town has a museum in a historic power company building that features tributes to Guinn, Japanese league baseball great and Exeter native Satoshi "Fibber" Hirayama and other honored citizens. Other notable Exeter alumni include Brad Mills, manager of the Houston Astros baseball team, class of 1975, and Howard Way, former president pro-tem of the California state Senate, class of 1930.

A mural project depicting the city’s history on the walls of a historic building draws people downtown. They started in 1996 after a fire destroyed the historic Mixter building.

Sally Brewer, Chris Brewer’s wife, said Exeter residents have managed to keep big box stores out of town and major chains to a minimum, preserving the small-town business atmosphere.

"We’ve been able to keep the downtown going. Sometimes I think it is just fate," she said. "If people settle down, then they tend to be taxpayers and purchasers, and renters and buyers of homes. You don’t see a lot of emptiness."

After school, kids from the high school flood the streets to get ice cream and snacks at the Frost King and stroll down the meticulously maintained sidewalks and boulevards.

Maria Lucero, 34, took a break from her job managing a Mexican restaurant downtown and compared Exeter to other central valley towns.

"In other locations, it is, ‘I’m in a hurry. I’m here to eat. I have to go. I’m done.’ Here people take more time."

Contact reporter Benjamin Spillman at bspillman@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3861.