Matthew Nisson has known two great loves in his 88 years on this Earth.
The first are the orange trees that sprang from the land where Matt was born – a 10-acre grove in Tustin that has been in the family for nearly a century.
The second love of his life is Peggy Was, upon whom he first laid eyes in the summer of 1941. He was lying on a towel in Newport Beach, listening to big-band music on his portable radio. She was sunbathing with her mother.
“She looked pretty good,” Matt said, an impish grin tugging at the wrinkles in his face.
The war in Europe was in full swing, and it was anyone’s guess when Uncle Sam would send Matt across the pond to slap those Nazis into line. He knew he would never see Peggy again if he let her pack up her towel and drive out of his life forever.
So he did what any 16-year-old boy would have done in that situation.
“I got in my car and followed her home to see where she lived,” he said without batting an eye.
Today, you might call this stalking. Then, it was puppy love.
Matt followed Peggy and her mother to their home in Santa Ana. When her mother wasn’t looking, Matt held up a hand-scribbled note for Peggy to see.
“NAME?” the sign read.
Then another: “DATE?”
“He was very audacious,” Peggy said.
It would take months of cajoling before Peggy’s father would let Matt take his 13-year-old daughter out for a Sunday matinée and a trip to Mary’s Malt Shop.
Three months later, the Japanese made a surprise visit to Pearl Harbor. Soon, Matt would be a military man, with a rifle and a new haircut.
It would be four years before Matt and Peggy would share another chocolate malt.
•••
As a third-generation orange grower, Matt bleeds citrus.
His grandfather Mathias Nisson was a prosperous farmer and businessman who had immigrated to Santa Ana from Denmark in the 1870s. His grandmother Charlotte was born to French immigrants that had sailed to San Francisco in search of gold and a better life.
The ranch where Nisson was born, on the eastern corner of Red Hill and Walnut Avenues, was a wedding gift from Mathias to his son Clarence, Matt’s father. It’s where Matt fell in love with the land.
“It wasn’t milk and honey, raising oranges,” Matt said. But it’s something he’s always done, “ever since I was old enough to follow my father with the plow and mule.”
Tustin was so small that the expression “to ride into town” still held meaning. Traffic was so light that the streets were a child’s playground. Even streets as important as Red Hill would end abruptly, disintegrating into marsh or farmland.
“We didn’t have any neighbors,” Matt said. “We were out in the sticks.”
Matt walked barefoot to school. It was his job to tend the chickens and water the trees. In wintertime, he helped his father stoke the smudge pots – small oil fires lit among the trees that kept the oranges from freezing.
As a teenager at Tustin High, Matt used to ride his bike into town to shoot pool at the Swinging Door, and in the summertime he would go body surfing at the beach. At least, until history swept him off to war.
Matt tried bodysurfing while he was stationed in New Guinea, but the waves just didn’t break the same.
•••
Peggy was sad to see her audacious suitor shipped off to the South Pacific, but there was no time for plucking heartstrings. The country was at war, and those back home had to pull their weight.
She got a job as a mail courier at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, where she zipped around in a Jeep delivering the same kinds of letters that she was sending to Matt.
The two wrote each other every week – or was it every month? Today she can’t remember.
“I wrote to other fellas, too,” she says.
As Peggy grew up, people started to notice what had been so clear to Matt that day on the beach – she was gorgeous.
She enrolled in modeling school and soon had two agents booking her into Hollywood runway shows and fashion shoots. She even got a bit part in a Lucille Ball film. It was an exciting time.
Then in January of 1946 there came a knock.
Peggy opened the door to find a young man in full uniform standing before her. The war had ended that summer, and he had just come home that very day.
“I’m back,” Matt said. “Take me! I’m yours!”
•••
Matt did not make a living from growing oranges.
After graduating from USC business school with help from the G.I. Bill, Matt had lots of job offers at firms like Procter & Gamble in big cities like Chicago. But Matt wanted to get back to Tustin and his family’s land.
Matt’s father had sold off all 50 acres that the family owned in Santa Ana and Orange, leaving only the Tustin farm. With Matt and his two brothers off at war, there weren’t enough hands to keep things running.
Matt bought the Tustin land from his father and moved in with his young bride on Jan. 10, 1949, the same day a freak snow fell in Orange County.
The move was a bit jarring for the young starlet.
“I thought it was way, way out in the middle of nowhere,” Peggy remembered.
Still, she was happy to be back in Orange County. Young couples were flocking into the region to fill jobs created in the post-war boom.
Within 20 years, Tustin would bear little resemblance to the isolated orange grove she now called home.
Matt and Peggy, with their growing family, couldn’t afford to farm full time. Matt worked for a water-softening company and worked the farm in his spare time.
His children wouldn’t be farmers, but they got a taste of what farm life was like.
“It was so beautiful and idyllic,” said the Nissons’ eldest son, David, who remembers catching crawdads in the irrigation ditches and sunbathing in the street. “There were no cars,” he said. “It was that quiet.”
The face of Tustin really started to change in the late 1950s, after a catastrophic virus wiped out much of the citrus countywide. Most of the farmers still in business at the time sold their land to developers.
A massive apartment complex sprang up on the other side of Red Hill, then another off Walnut.
“I hated it,” David said. “My paradise, the world that I grew up in, was being destroyed.”
•••
A plywood fruit stand sits by the road, the structure sagging in the late morning heat. The palm thatch roof shakes as SUVs and luxury sedans whiz by.
Jacaranda and eucalyptus have replaced the canopy of walnut trees that once sheltered a single, tar-paved lane.
“That’s why they called it Walnut Avenue,” Matt says, gazing at the road.
The Nisson family ranch is one of only two orange groves remaining in Tustin (the other is on the 18900 block of Dodge Avenue).
It’s not as big as it used to be – the government appropriated an acre to widen the road – and Matt had to put up a fence to keep the city kids from stealing his oranges.
Otherwise, the orchard remains unchanged.
The neighbors that the Nissons once saw as interlopers are now some of their closest friends. David’s brother, Nick, even ended up marrying a girl who moved in across the street.
Matt has come to terms with his new surroundings.
The orange and avocado stand he keeps stocked outside his gate is evidence of his trust. For 40 years, the stand has operated on the honor system – a sign asks customers to pay a little ($1 for a small avocado; $1.50 for a big one) by leaving money in an unmanned metal box. Matt says only a handful don’t.
Matt and Peggy love to see their grandchildren running around the farm, looking for chicken eggs and picking the oranges they have worked so hard to hold onto.
“You step back here, and it’s like stepping back 50 years,” Matt said. “We’re going to keep it in the family as long as possible.”
