Chase Gardens

Chase Gardens

In the thirties and into the early fifties, it was common for women to wear a corsage when they went out for dinner or dancing on a Friday or Saturday night.  In the southern Willamette Valley, these corsages were provided by Chase Gardens, which was a company  owned by the Chase family with a great number of greenhouses on the north side of the Willamette River, between Eugene and Springfield. They also grew fruit and vegetables for winter sales to the grocery stores.  The Chase family owned many acres of land along the north bank of the Willamette River, where they grew peaches and beans, a vast collection of bean yards where generations of Eugene and Springfield teenagers, from my parent’s generation up to and past my own, spent the summer picking the bean which went to the cannery and were sold all over the West Coast.   In the late sixties the Chase family sold their land for real estate development. The land is now freeways and businesses.

During the depression it was hard for Freeman and Everett to find work.  Ben was laid off from the U of Oregon maintenance department.  The only money that came in that first year was from the two boys finding a job at Chase Gardens pruning trees at ten cents a tree.

Freeman subsequently found work driving a truck delivering finished lumber for the Booth Kelley Lumber Company.  Everett joined his dad contracting, doing odd jobs, painting and roofing and glazing.  They spent one year in Portland as glaziers, putting up green houses on Portland’s east side.

With this experience Everett was able to get a job at Chase Gardens working on the greenhouses.  After a few years Ben was rehired at the U of O and once again the family had money coming in.

After returning from his war service in the South Pacific, Everett was able to regain  his old job at Chase Gardens, as head of maintenance.  Mom and aunt Carldene got jobs there also, making corsages.  This involved sitting a large table covered with boxes of gardenias.  The ladies trimmed the stem, then wrapped the stem in a green paper tape, a gentle downward twirling motion, then poked a pin with a nice looking glass head into the stem and put the gardenia, a lovely smelling white flower with dark green leaves, into a white box.  The boxes were gently packed and taken by truck to flower stores all over the valley for weekend sale.

The two ladies worked at Chase Gardens for several years after the war, until David, Carldene’s husband, took advantage of the GI Bill and moved to Monmouth to attend the Western Oregon College of Education. 

Mom got a job as a school cook, a job she had until retiring at age 65.

Dad found that working in the steamy greenhouses reactivated his malaria, contracted in the jungles of New Guinea, so he got a job at the Georgia Pacific Plywood Mill, where he worked until he was 62.  Then he told his foreman that he hated his job and he was quitting, and went out drinking.  Mom said he arrived home quite drunk.  He was able to work full time raising cattle on his 98 acre spread until Mom retired and they got a double wide trailer in Queen Valley, Arizona.

Mom said that Dad suggested they drive to New Orleans.  On the way they stopped to visit friends in Queen Valley, a small community east of Phoenix. Mom said she was surprised when Dad bought the trailer house.  She complained that she never did get to New Orleans.