“I told John (Vlcek), ‘I’d like to put up a market here in Tyler’… So we had a meeting and we had about 15 to 16 producers in East Texas to show up for the meeting and explain to them what we was trying to do. But then I went on the Horace McQueen Show and advertised it and promoted […]
Ellen Widess
“One of the provisions they (the Trump-era EPA) wanted to get rid of was the farmworkers’ right to have their doctors, or any other advocate, a lawyer, priest, worker center, anybody, union, get access to their pesticide safety sheets to know what they were exposed to, what the risks were and to be able to go after the company and […]
Becky Murphy
“I remember one of the (California) grape growers said, we have a surplus of wine and a surplus of grapes in California and things are getting tough. Now we have all you other states competing with us. I said, wait a minute, you obviously never read Leon Adams. He said, if we had people growing grapes all over the United […]
Barbara Meister
“It’s Hightower’s philosophy, go out and scour the countryside, find these folks who are doing these innovative things and bring them into the government structure.Give them a computer, give them a secretary, give them a travel budget, and say, keep doing what you’re doing. But do it in here, do it throughout the whole state. I remember that being a […]
Demetrius McDaniel
“I put together the Black Farmer Conference. That was my doing, that was my first big assignment that Hightower gave me…. Hightower says “I want the title to be Improving the Future of Texas Black Farmers.” He said we don’t want to rehash the past, we want to talk about how we have helped Black farmers to maintain land, and […]
Robert Maggiani
“(T)hat’s another legacy relationship that we have, industry has, with HEB, because Hightower and the staff really put a lot of energy into making it happen. We did a lot of behind the scenes work that nobody saw but it did make it happen. HEB did a lot of promotions, still do a lot of promotion. They have a big […]
Karen Haram
“He (Hightower) was such an enthusiastic promoter, and that he did such a good job getting the word out about Texas foods and Texas wines. California was always the end-all, be-all with the whole California food movement. Suddenly, we were doing the same thing here in Texas, with more personality. I think we sold it better, frankly. What I remember […]
Lacy Fryer (D)
“Lacy (Fryer) took me underneath his wing. I would not have been a regional director had he not been here. Before he left, he said, I have been training you, I’ve been watching you for years because I want to leave a legacy behind. I want someone to follow in my footsteps to make sure that the things that have been done in […]
Rebecca Flores
“In July of 1988, Cesar (Chavez) started a fast, and he call it the Fast for Life. And this was really around the issue of pesticides, because he had seen that even though we’d been talking about it and we knew there were cancer clusters and we knew children were dying at a very, very young age. They’re like 10,11 […]
Nancy Epstein
“(W)we were the first state exchange with Israel. At the time that I left, there were 21 states that had their own memoranda of agreement with Israel. They weren’t all agriculture, some were commerce, some were technology. But we were the first that created a whole movement… There was funding from the Meadows Foundation to begin a demonstration farm in […]