“We lived on Garden Street for ten years. We sold that house. Not long after, the Gage Canal collapsed. No one could afford to water 144 trees on city water rates. So the trees all eventually died off. Now it’s just a bare piece of land.”
Ron grew up in Riverside on a 1.4 acre plot of land, in a house surrounded by fruit trees.
The orchard was planted by Mr. Aloysius Wintz. We had eleven varieties of peach, several varieties of plum; there were varieties of fruits that I haven’t seen since. Almost every tree was different.
Among the trees were four that bore apricots – two Royal Annes, one Moorpark, and one Castle.
This meant that when the first of the Moorpark came in to the end of the Castle apricots, there were apricots for most of a month. Most fruit trees have their entire crop in a period of two weeks. But with this system, we had apricots on top of apricots on top of apricots.
Ron’s mother was not one to let food go to waste. So she canned apricots, and she experimented with both jellies and jams. One day she struck upon a seemingly magical invention – apricot “jelly jam.”
The way to make jelly jam is you start with apricot jelly, as hard as it is to make. And then you make apricot jam. You keep them separate until the last minute, both hot. Then you take greenish apricots, slice them into tiny pieces, and mix them into the jelly or the jam, combine everything together, and then immediately put the mixture into jars. What you get is very sweet jelly, tiny pieces of tart apricot flavor, and traditional jam, all together. It is wonderful.
Jelly jam was extraordinarily popular, within Ron’s family and in the bigger Riverside community.
Now, you have to realize that back then everybody canned things. Most people couldn’t sell or give away enough. But my mother’s jelly jam invention was enormously popular. It was always the first thing to sell out at the church bazaar, it was given as gifts, and it was cherished by many.
Eventually Ron’s family sold the house, and the orchard. They had a healthy back stock of jelly jam, but even those ran out.
Because she knew her days with it would come to an end, she saved many, many, many jars of jelly jam. She gave them as gifts to her closest friends and family. It was a sad and wonderful day in 1986 when we opened, on Christmas Day, the final jar that would ever be made was eaten.
Ron hopes to carry on the tradition of jelly jam himself, in the near future.
It is my life dream to make a batch of jelly jam. I have planted all three varieties of tree. They’re young trees yet … But, it is my dream that someday I will have enough overripe, ripe, and green apricots available at the same time to make jelly jam. I have the recipe. I know what to do. And I want to make at least one batch before I die.
Ron’s three mason jars on display here are sitting, symbolically waiting to be filled. Ron’s dream to recreate jelly jam stems not only from his hope to taste it again (because it is delicious), but from a deep respect for his mother’s legacy.
Jelly jam was her creation, her invention. No one else has ever done it. And my mother was quite a lady! She was an early civil rights leader, she worked with troubled youth, she really pushed for Riverside to be the first district in California to integrate its schools, she advocated for a Methodist church, she reorganized the PTA … These things happened because a determined woman gathered people together. My mother was there and doing it. Jacqueline Rose Myers Chick was a truly singular human being. The city of Riverside is a better place because she was there.