The Golden Pineapple
The holy grail of the pineapple growers and how it destroyed Maui
A modern-day tale of the Garden of Eden
Man’s expulsion is followed by wildfires
There are many American dreams, of which the Golden Pineapple is one. As its name suggests, the Golden Pineapple — known upon its market debut as the Del Monte Gold — was distinguished by its Technicolor golden hue, as well as by its sweetness, the product of an ideal brix-to-acid ratio, and an unusually long shelf life that allowed it to be sold as fresh fruit even in the continental United States, where a pineapple, especially one grown in Maui, might take two or more weeks to reach a supermarket shelf.
The Golden Pineapple was created by a methodical, decades-long breeding program sponsored by Hawaii’s three leading pineapple growers to create the perfect fruit. In the records of the Pineapple Research Institute (PRI), the Golden Pineapple was known as “the 73-114” — the identifying number which represented the year and the number of the pot in which it was grown. This end-product …
The Front Porch
Nothing in this newspaper is written by AI. That’s a promise that we make to our readers, and that we view as central to our mission, which is to provide a home for the American voice in all its plain-spoken humanity, contradiction, ambition, and promise. While American writing comes in many styles and forms, it has a particular snap to it, an earthy yawp that vibrates unpredictably between the common speech of the streetcorner and the frontier and the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Our language is an expression of who we are as a people — the people who invented the Delta Blues and Bugs Bunny.
You can’t fake being an American. Not really, even though there are many different types of Americans who come from many different places and who speak in rhythms and dialects that were once nearly separate languages, even though our regional accents have been flattened if not eliminated …
The Telluride Ski Patrol Wars
Hauling explosives up the slopes of a box canyon on skis isn’t for everyone.
TelSki villain Chuck Horning is a patsy for the big developers who are raking in the big bucks
Empty luxury homes replace mining in the local resource-extraction economy
Telluride’s first skiers strapped planks to their work boots on payday to descend from the mines to the brothels on Pacific Avenue. Before it was a ski town, the town beneath Palmyra Peak was a mining town — and a besieged one at that. Posters, hung across the state by the Western Federation of Miners in Telluride in the last days of 1903, asked, “Is Colorado In America?” It showed a modified American flag, the tenth stripe bearing the slogan: “Corporations corrupt and control administration in Colorado.” Charles Moyer, president of the WFM, whose signature appeared on the poster alongside Big Bill Haywood’s, was jailed for desecrating the flag. At least a dozen striking miners and union members were arrested on charges ranging from vagrancy to conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, many held in bullpens and makeshift jails against the orders of a judge. The union miners, out of options, fled town, and the …
