So if you haven’t caught on yet, Malcolm Anderson is my grandfather on my dad’s side. He’s the one who carries the Scottish blood in my family and has passed it on to my dad, and then onto me. During my video conference with him a few weeks before he died, I asked him a bit about his parents. His dad, Felix Anderson, from what he said, was born in Los Angeles in a house that has been passed down through several generations. My family’s been here for a while!
My Scottish ancestors immigrated to Los Angeles before the 1900s and Felix Anderson is the earliest person of Scottish heritage that I could find. Grandpa Malcolm told me that when he was a child, the house didn’t look very different from the outside compared to what it does now. On the inside, its furnishings have changed radically— in those days they didn’t have a television or refrigerators or anything like that, but the overall floor planning has more or less remained the same. It only had two rooms which the entire family had to share.
Felix Anderson, as Malcolm told me, was born in 1899 at the old Los Angeles House. At the time, many referred to it as the Anderson Residence, so I guess that’s what I’ll call it. Like I said, the house has belonged to our family since before 1900 and it certainly looks very old. If you went to the house now, you’d find it in a crowded, joyful neighborhood with tons of people at your side. In those days, Felix kept a diary which he started when he was around my age and he maintained for several years.
I can’t possibly show everything in the diary. If I did, this chapter would be much longer. But from what he put in this diary, I can get a really good scope into his life a century ago, and it’s really interesting.
August 9th, 1913
Dear Diary,
Things are getting much worse around the family farm now. Father says that with all the competition going around, even our decent harvests won’t match the incredible stockpile our neighbors can produce. We have worked for hours on end every day to try to improve the taste and nutrition of our crops, but we can’t afford the fertilizer that our neighbors use. Father fears that all the customers in the market will be under the sway of the Wilson Residence and from there we will lose the little money we have been able to acquire.
Your friend,
Felix
Felix Anderson’s teenage years were harsh on him. There were a lot of farmers in the area where he lived, and there was a lot of competition on the market. Everyone was working their backs off to try and find out how to make the most appealing crops for consumers in the market, and Felix’s family was right in the middle of that. Their main rival, a family called the Wilsons started buying lots of fertilizers which ended up giving them much more inviting foods. As a result, they ended up in a sort of war against the Wilsons, locked in a yearly contest to see who would have the more successful harvest. Unfortunately, every year from 1912 to 1918 was a defeat for the Andersons and it wasn’t until 1919 that they would have their first victory.
Transcript from my Zoom Call with Grandpa Malcolm
Me: Then how did they win that year?
Malcolm: Felix Anderson had a large interest in insects. He liked to experiment with them and study their behaviors and interactions with environments. He eventually began to notice something with one of the insect species he studied. The Wilsons were experimenting with a new kind of fertilizer at the time that they planned to use this harvest. It was much more effective than the one they had used in the previous years, but it was much cheaper, and this was the first fertilizer that the Andersons could get a hold of.
Me: If they had the same fertilizer, wouldn’t they do equally well?
Malcolm: The Wilsons had a larger crew and more land to work with. They would have won either way. But my father discovered a pattern about insect science that would change everything.
Me: Which was…?
Malcolm: Well, this cheaper fertilizer carried a scent with it. To humans, it is nearly indetectable, but to insects, it is quite strong. The fertilizer attracts insects, which would be a disaster to the crops. Had he not discovered this, our harvest would have had its worst year ever.
Me: Well, how did he stop it?
Malcolm: Well, for a few weeks, he did some experimenting with some basic cooking ingredients… he was able to find it. A secret recipe that he added to the fertilizer, and it did not attract the insects. He applied it to the crops, and… it worked. The Wilsons’ harvest was only mediocre. That harvest was our first victory in the war. The fertilizer was effective, and we would win every battle with that special formula.
As Felix entered his late teen years, he started to drift away from his education and worked more on the farm. Because his father was getting older, he had to start taking over the family duties. This was a gradual change I began to notice as I passed through the later years of his diary. After a while, the entries became less frequent because he had less interest in it. He still wrote in his twenties, but only once every few months… and the last entry he wrote was in the year 1922. It was hard to find out how his life went after that.
It wasn’t all bad though. Grandpa Malcolm did have some stories that Felix Anderson passed down through the generations. Grandpa Malcolm said that Felix Anderson had an interest in bugs and used to keep a file of bugs he discovered on the fields which he played with his friends. Over the video call, I asked him if he could show me some of the files, but Malcolm just gave me a grim smile and told me that they were destroyed in a fire when Malcolm was a little boy.
Malcolm did show me a number of precious things from Felix’s younger life. He showed me Felix’s favorite ball from his childhood— which has been used for so many years it almost can’t be recognized as a ball. It was incredibly deformed and deflated, and it was very dirty. Malcolm gave them to me when he died, and I kept them on a shelf in my bedroom. Jason and Ava are really confused about why I’m doing that, because they can’t see why I’m so interested in keeping a filthy piece of rubber on my shelf like that and treating it like it’s a million dollar piece of art. It’s the memory of Felix Anderson, the boy who won the crop growing war against the Wilsons. When I think of Felix Anderson, one of the first things that comes to mind is a dirty pile of rubber. He had abandoned his diary and there weren’t many records, only a few photo books. I did figure out that this time of his life was still largely consumed by working on the farm and selling at the market, although romance was probably a large part of it. Felix got married in the 30s. He had four children in total.… and the youngest was my grandpa, Malcolm Anderson, born in 1940.