Written by Leslie Duryée Taber
Melville Kissam Duryée was born in 1910 and graduated from high school in 1927. Following high school, Mel attended the University of Oregon in Eugene. He was there for just one academic year and was affiliated with the Sigma Chi fraternity. He must have been feeling the freedom of being almost 1000 miles from his home and parents because he was expelled at the end of the school year. His parents pulled in the reins a bit and brought him back closer to home. He went to the University of Southern California where he majored in Economics.
It was at USC that Mel had as his roommate John Roy “Jay” Hunt Jr., the brother of Sheila Hunt who became Mel's first wife. Jay Hunt was the son of John "Roy" Hunt Sr., a well-known Hollywood director and cinematographer who created the Hunt Hollywood Housecar, which was essentially the first motorhome. Speaking of Jay, Mel said that he had a photographic memory and, much to Dad's chagrin, hardly needed to study for exams. At USC Dad pledged to another fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi. He said the fraternity had a death during initiation and subsequently closed for some time.
Having grown up in Los Angeles, Mel really knew his way around town. The Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel was one of his favorite places. Interestingly, “The Grove” operated from 1921 until 1989. In the late 1980s, Christy Fox of the Los Angeles Times wrote that The Grove was “probably the most beloved public room of all time.” One night Mel was at The Grove in the early 1930's, and said he saw Bing Crosby's first public performance. Dad said Bing came out and was so drunk that he passed out on the stage before he sang a note!
In 1932, Mel graduated from USC with a degree in Economics. His parents gifted him a 100-acre ranch they had bought sometime in the mid-to-late 1910s and used as a weekend getaway from LA. In a few years, Mel had converted it into a large turkey ranch.
Since childhood, Mel had been friends with Stoddard Jess, the founder of Jess Ranch in Apple Valley, CA. He admired Stoddard a lot. Each of them now had property on the Mojave Desert which had been owned by their families since around the turn of the century. So, they each began careers in the turkey business, my Dad on his family's 100 acres in Littlerock, CA, and Stoddard on almost 1500 acres about an hour east of Littlerock, in Apple Valley. Dad always said how Stoddard was a millionaire but you would "never know it". He idolized Stoddard's larger turkey ranch, which he always said was a "womb to tomb" operation.
By “womb to tomb”, Mel compared Stoddard’s process to his. Mel would buy turkey eggs from a supplier. He had built a large hatchery on the ranch, and the eggs were placed in the hatchery enclosures until the turkeys hatched. The birds were raised to maturity, then he would sell them to a processor. Stoddard skipped the egg delivery and kept female and male birds together until eggs were lain. The eggs then went into the hatchery like Mel’s and the hatched birds were raised to maturity. Then there was a processing plant on the Jess ranch where the birds were quickly killed, de-feathered, and processed, then packaged and sold to a large company that in turn would sell them to grocery stores and other outlets.
Mel was very independent and quite the loner but I am not sure what attracted him to the turkey business. Looking at his background and schooling, there is really no connection. However he did it, he was very successful at it, raising 100,000 white fryer-type turkeys each year! In his heyday, he ran his own feed mill and sold various types of livestock feed as well as dog food. He had, I believe, about 12 or more smaller turkey growers under the umbrella of his business. Turkey feed would go out to them, and Mel received a percentage back after the sale of the birds to the processing company.
A little history, the ranch was originally named Rancho Cascabel, meaning Rattlesnake Ranch. When the mill began, the name of the ranch was abbreviated and the feed production business became the R-C Milling Company. The ranch itself kept the name Rancho Cascabel.
So, Mel began the business in Littlerock and then married his sweetheart, the sister of his roommate Jay Hunt, Sheila Hunt. She and Dad had two children, Harvey Hunt Duryée (1939-2008) and John Bartlett Duryée (J.B.) (1941-2012). As a note, Mel did not serve in the armed forces during the war years. He used to say that, "They wanted my turkeys more than they wanted me!" Or, he later would say that his wife served but he did not! His second wife had been a nurse in the Navy during World War II, and then worked for a doctor in Pasadena, CA. More on that next.
Sadly, Dad's marriage to Sheila did not work out and ended in divorce. Dad later married my mother, Margery Ann Ackley in 1948. My Mom and Dad met at a pediatric office in Pasadena, CA, where my Mom was a nurse. The office is still there at the corner of Madison Ave. and Colorado Blvd, on the northeast side of the street. Dad took Harvey and J.B. to see the doctor there, Dr. Ralph Netzley. On a return visit, Dad wanted J.B. to give my Mom a box of chocolates. He wound up giving the box to another nurse in the office. Dad said, "No, no, it's this nurse", meaning my Mom. Then J.B. replied, "Oh, I thought it was for the nurse who drank my blood!" (The nurses used to put the rubber tubing to their mouth for suction when drawing blood.)
Mark Kent Duryée (1961) and I, Leslie Grace Duryée Taber (1949), are their two children. A little while before I was born, Dad had left the ranch in Littlerock. He had employees who kept the place running while he expanded his horizons. He bought a 300-acre property which he named Rancho Oso, meaning Bear Ranch. It was in San Marcos Pass, above Santa Barbara. Traveling the Pass today, one will still see the name Dad gave the property, the road sign indicates "Rancho Oso Drive". There is also Thousand Trails Rancho Oso on the property, so the name lives on.
The ranch was in a beautiful valley, with hills and mountains all around. Dad began raising turkeys there and was doing so when I was born. We had a housekeeper there, Lena, who had kept house for my Dad's mother, Grace when she lived in La Cañada, CA. When Grace passed away, Lena came to Rancho Oso and helped take care of me. She had a Hungarian accent and so some of my earliest words were, "Good morninck darlink!"
Mel’s ranch manager there was George Arrup. He and his wife, Bertha, were just wonderful people. Bertha was my first babysitter - I remember the spaghetti she made (still my all-time favorite) and waiting for my Mom to come home.
Dad was increasingly worried about water at this property and also the chance of fire in that area. There was only one exit road from the ranch which made evacuation in case of wildfire difficult, if not impossible. And so, one of my first memories is riding in the car wearing a little light-blue hat with rabbit fur around the face that my grandmother, Nambo, had made. My Mom was saying that we were moving away and leaving the ranch. I knew that was a big deal somehow, but Nambo was with us and that made everything better.
We moved to a house on Green Lane in La Cañada, CA. Mel was making the drive every day from La Cañada to the ranch in Littlerock, CA, almost two hours each way. He did that for two years but then was caught in a snowstorm on the Angeles Crest Highway for eight hours one day. That was it! The Duryées were moving to the Littlerock house on Rancho Cascabel. My Dad used to say the Mojave Desert had three climates, "Hotter than hell, colder than hell, and windier than hell". I was five when we moved into the adobe ranch house that I love and remember so well, so that was 1955. Though Rancho Cascabel could easily qualify as the poster child for the "middle of nowhere", it remains to this day the definition of who we are as a family.