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REPORT OF THE FIRST SEMI-ANNUAL MEETING 



Three years ago there was a man by the name of G. Fuentes, 

 living at AtHxco, Mexico, who shipped us a basket of the finest 

 fruit we ever handled, being the large black alHgator skin and hard- 

 shell variety. 



These were packed in excelsior in a basket that held about 

 fifty pears, with nothing but a cloth cover to protect them, and they 

 carried pretty well. We immediately wrote him to ship us all he 

 could get. He began by shipping about two baskets a week, and 

 we wired him again to ship more, and the next week it seemed like 

 every train out of Mexico had some ten to twenty-five baskets of 

 fruit for us. We were paying out about $100 a day express charges, 

 and before we could stop them had about five or six hundred dozen 

 on hand. We thought we were stuck for fair, as we could not get 

 rid of that many in California. 



I got out Bradstreet's and spent about twenty-five or thirty 

 dollars in telegrams to all the large produce houses in the East, and 

 got orders out of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and 

 other large cities, following up with repeat orders, and we cleaned 

 up this fruit at a good profit. Fortunately this fruit came onto the 

 market in the holiday season, along about Christmas time. This 

 fruit brought $6 a dozen wholesale. This stands to show that 

 there was a good market in this country, among certain cities, three 

 years ago, and the trade has steadily increased since that time. 



I will say here that a man from Lower California shipped us by 

 boat 274 boxes of the large green variety fruit. This fruit was 

 not packed at all and came in the worst possible shape imaginable. 

 Every pear was bruised and lots of them mashed, and we had a 

 hard time getting freight out of them. We sold the seeds at from 

 five to eight cents apiece, and the man who shipped them probably 

 thought we robbed him, as we never heard from him again after 

 making returns for them. 



It seems to me there ought to be some way to classify this fruit 

 without having so many different names, as it is going to conflict 

 a good deal in filling orders and quoting them out on price sheets. 

 We have orders coming to us from Arizona every week, and it will 

 only be a matter of a couple of years when this fruit gets down to a 

 reasonable price, that there will certainly be a big demand for it. 



East winter we handled a good many of Mr. Walker's fruit 

 from Hollywood, getting as high as $12 per dozen for them. We 



