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20. A Reputation
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20. A Reputation t horeau wrote of his bean field that it "attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus." Capra hoped Red Mountain Ranch would do the same for him, but his posh version of Walden Pond proved to be as frustrating as Hollywood. "When Capra quit the picture business, he was going to be The Land Owner down here," said Chet Sticht, who followed him reluctantly to Fallbrook in 1951."That lasted about two and a half years. Watching trees grow is not too exciting. Hell, you can't suddenly quit something you've been doing and come down here and vegetate." Outwardly Capra did not appear to be vegetating as he threw himself into the ranching business with the energy he once had devoted to his films. He planted thousands of new avocado and citrus trees (eventually he had 16,000 trees on the ranch) and built quarters for the Okies and braceros he brought in to pick them. Because the olive oil market had dried up with the reopening of Italian and Greek exports after World War II, he tore out his remaining olive trees and started a poultry business with 4,000 hens. "He would go around in a jeep, wearing old clothes and looking like a wetback," Sticht recalled. "I think Frank never forgot he was born in Italy," said George F. Yackey, a Fallbrook friend. "He had his hand on that shovel pretty hot." Capra tried to put his college education to practical use by devising "scientific" new methods of stimulating growth in his orchards. He kept a card file with a separate card for each tree on the ranch to monitor their development for grafting purposes, devised an experiment measuring the growth of avocados by water displacement, and dug a 100-foot-long compost heap, blowing air into horse manure with hoses to force bacterial development. He also built a small earth dam and a concrete reservoir, remodeled the old main house, and erected barbed-wire fences and gates. 6 1 2 F R A N K C A P R A And because Capra was "spooked by atomic bombs" during the Korean War (as Yackey put it), he built an underground bomb shelter with enough room to sleep twenty-five and kept it stocked with food and water, telling his ranch foreman, James Pruitt, "If anything happens, this is for the workers. I always feel like I owe these people something." The first few months of almost frantic activity, which coincided with Capra's security clearance crisis, were undertaken in the hope that his new life as a rancher—a means of developing a more stable income than motion pictures, and a sentimental attempt to re-create his father's dream—would wipe out the frustrations of what he felt was a misspent life in the movie business, and in the hope that the hundred miles separating Fallbrook from Hollywood would keep him free of the political taint which had driven him back to the soil, feeling "dried-up inside." Within a year of his first retirement to Red Mountain Ranch, however, Capra was back at work on film projects—but not for the studios, which he avoided, evidently for fear of having the loyalty issue reopened. AT&T brought him back to make The Sun, a pilot film for a children's television series to boost its corporate image and to brighten the benighted postwar image of science. For the maker of the Why We Fight series, the four films he made in the Bell Telephone science series between 1952 and 1958 were no mere diversion but a return to propaganda, although of the more sophisticated Madison Avenue variety, which did not seem like propaganda at all. Capra had just received his security clearance and was about to leave for India when he received the first call from Donald Jones, who had been assigned to recruit and supervise the creative staff of the series for the N. W. Ayer & Son advertising agency. "I had been going through everyone I could think of in show business who was interested in science," Jones recalled, "and Capra was the only one I ever considered seriously. Gene Milford [Capra's former editor, then an Ayer consultant] recommended him to me. He said, 'Frank's really bugged about science. Whenever you work with Capra, you learn something.' " When Jones called, the project Capra had been developing for Caltech about cosmic rays was stalled for...