Along the Way

The War of the Figs Ended, but Its Battles May Live On BY KATHLEEN WALKER

Ive searched for the veterans of Tucson's gentle war. I've looked over walls, peered into backyards and patios in the old center of the city. I've found a few survivors but not the best of them. They were the fabulous fig trees of 1930s Tucson. They fed both the citizens and the birds while providing green canopies of shade for the back lawns of family homes. And then there was that day when they grabbed the newspaper headlines of a sleepy city on the edge of the Depression but still safe between the horrors of two world wars.

The day was Monday, June 9, 1930. It had been hot Sunday and would be 105° F. on this day. The front page of the Tucson Daily Citizen, the evening paper, gave the ink to the seemingly perennial disasters of mankind: a steamer accident on the Yangtse, workers killed in a tunnel under a Midwestern river. There was the encouraging news, also to become a standard, that a cure for the common cold may have been discovered. But on Page Two, top left, a good local read could be found. The story detailed the latest development in Tucson's five-year War of the Figs.

The antagonists were well-known. Charles Bayless, rancher and Tucson banker, was squared off against Tom Richey, Tucson attorney. Both were armed to the teeth with figs. Not just any figs, those plump little fruits long overshadowed by the flash of apples and oranges, the softness of peaches and plums. No, these were substantial figs, figs worthy of a fight.

So far it had been a mighty competition. Richey had won the battle of 1929 when one of his trees produced a fig measuring 10% inches in circumference. Before marking that one off to any propensity the press might have to err on the side of exaggeration, consider the fact that there still is a witness to that weighty fig, the son of Tom Richey.

"Oh lord, yes," Bill Richey remembers. "It was big. Dad was very proud of it."

Bayless lived a few blocks to the northeast. He had reigned supreme the first three years of the measuring. The salvo he fired in 1930 to retake the field included a dozen figs with a combined weight of 3% pounds. King Smallhouse had married into the family and well remembers the tree that produced the ammunition.

"It was the largest fig tree that I have ever seen," he says and describes the figs as being, "almost as big as a baseball." He holds up a fist to show the size. At the end of his arm for 91 years, it is still the powerful fist of a hardworking man and looks bigger than any baseball ever thrown.

Bayless had the one tree; Richey, two. Bayless gathered over 1,000 pounds of figs from his in 1929, or so it was reported. Richey's trees could barely pass muster with a mere 500 pounds total, but that was still a sizeable amount for the son who picked them.

"We'd picked sometimes 20 or 30 pounds a day," recalls Bill Richey. "And they were good eating. You'd cut up one fig like that, and it would be all a person can eat."

Those sweet fruit-bearing trees are gone now. A backyard sortie along the fence of the old Richey place yielded up only one very alert dog and a friendly resident who seemed to recall the trees being taken out years ago.

At the Bayless property, a similar story. King Smallhouse is here with me, his first trip back to the house in 40 years. It must have been a pretty Home, standing tall on the corner of a quiet residential street, an arched front porch now glassed in to house offices.

In the house's backyard, Smallhouse stops and motions with arms wide. "Now that tree would have been right around in here," he says, but there only is a manhole cover to mark the spot.

"Probably what they did was they tore it down for the sewer lines," he explains to me and perhaps to himself.

"It's changed so much," he says. Ah yes.

Charles Bayless died in 1938, Tom Richey in 1953, and I was unable to find any other reference to their yearly competition. It is very possible it was only a onetime story to fill the pages of a small city newspaper, to give a chuckle, a smile, on a summer evening, forgotten in a minute. But the tree of life is a sturdy one.

Before moving from his home, Richey gave away slips from his fig trees. Bayless may have done the same over the years. We do know he gave away at least two slips - to Tom Richey. The Bayless tree had, in fact, produced the offspring that were to out-produce the sire in the annual competition. Somewhere out there in the backyards of Tucson there could be a fig tree from this proud line. On it there may be at least one fig, still green perhaps but born to wear the purple. It needs only to reach a girth of more than 10% inches to win a battle in a gentle war, the kind they once fought on a slow summer evening in Tucson, Arizona.