Hometown History

Millions of turkey dinners are served in November, the Thanksgiving Day month — this year the 26th.

But back when the Antelope Valley had an enormous turkey production industry, one local dinner included live pet turkeys as the honored guests. The meat served was a ham, cooked slowly for 16 hours.

This historic meal was provided by Cecile Bosworth, who had been the wife of Hollywood movie star Hobart Van Zandt Bosworth (Aug. 11, 1867-Dec. 30, 1943), married on Dec. 22, 1920, when she was 16. She was an active alum of UCLA.

Among a large flock of birds, she had selected three as house pets

— one with a deformed neck — and they were invited as dinner guests along with some local turkey growers and me, editor of the Lancaster Light newspaper at the time.

The birds stayed off the table and none were taken to Washington D.C. for the traditional pardon by the U.S. president.

Cecile was a hard-working proponent of good works, primarily devoted to the military troops during World War II. She was credited with being a major founder of the United Service Organizations (USO).

The king of the local turkey industry was Victor Ryckbosch, who developed a turkey-ranching co-op, eventually working with 300 growers.

Sara Bir, who was the wife of one of Ryckebosch’s grandsons, wrote a story published in November 2014 titled “How Turkeys Got Broad, White Breasts.”

Here are some excerpts of her article that explained how the turkey industry was hugely developed in Antelope Valley.

“The steady march of technology and innovation in the 20th century led to the development of the Broad Breasted Whites. Efficiency is the raison d’etre of this breed, which now dominates the market.

“The birds were bred specifically to produce maximum meat at minimum cost. Because of the bulk of their hefty breasts, they notoriously cannot mate naturally; the hens must be artificially inseminated.

“But in early America, turkey farming was a small-scale affair. Popular breeds included Bourbon Red, Narraganset, White Holland and others. They actively foraged for most of the food, and did not gain weight rapidly because they burned calories looking for lunch. Most farmers raised a few birds for their families, perhaps a few more to sell to neighbors or markets.

“Improvements in transportation and freezing technology enabled a cottage industry to become a modern industry. In the early 1900s, farmers cannily shifted from charging a flat fee per bird to a perpound model and this made raising plumper birds more lucrative. With refrigerated railroad cars hauling frozen turkeys, the range of distribution expanded vastly. It took money to make these things happen, giving larger operations with more capital an advantage.

Ryckebosch, a strategic think

er and inherent entrepreneur, as a young man he noticed that turkeys were a luxury item raised in small production.

“He seized the idea of breeding fleshier birds and starting in 1929 kept an incubator in his Santa Monica apartment, where he raised poults (baby turkeys) for six weeks before transferring them to his family’s farm in the high desert of the Antelope Valley.”

Vic’s business grew considerably. “Broad Breast in the Land of the Joshua Tree,” reads an article preserved in a family scrapbook that features a photo of turkeys on the ranch resting under the shade of said Joshua trees.

The birds were sold under the Lancaster Farms brand. A December 1948 article in the County Chronicle reported, “He farms the birds out to other ranchers in a share basis and provides them with feed. This leaves the Ryckebosch place free for breeding purposes, hatching and the sale and shipment of eggs.”

“All of the family scrapbook articles about Vic, which range from the 1940s to the 1960s, blithely focus on progress. They relish details about increased production and profits, the American Dream manifesting right there on those yellowed pages of newsprint. It’s been years, however, since a Lancaster Farms turkey graced tables on Thanksgiving Day.”

The sizable business Vic started went under in the 1990s, unable to compete with the even larger corporations that eclipsed it.

In our newspaper articles we reported that turkeys could be transported from Arkansas and sold in California cheaper than the local birds.

CECILE BOSWORTH