[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 198 (Wednesday, December 13, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2350-E2351]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   TRIBUTE TO MR. STEPHEN LEE, LOCAL FARMER, PATRIARCH, AND AMERICAN 
                             SUCCESS STORY

                                 ______


                            HON. JIM SAXTON

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, December 13, 1995

  Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Speaker, several weeks ago our Nation celebrated the 
Thanksgiving holiday. It was a time to spend gathered with family and 
being thankful for all that we have. For the family of Stephen V. Lee, 
Jr., a local cranberry farmer back home in my district, it was a time 
to truly give thanks.
  Stephen Lee is an American success story. After serving his country 
in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Mr. Lee returned to America and 
took up the family tradition as a cranberry farmer.
  Although his family had successfully farmed their property as early 
as the 1870's, the Great Depression had forced its closure until Mr. 
Lee took individual initiative to restore and revive the family's 
agricultural heritage. After years of hard work, Mr. Lee and his sons 
reclaimed the land, restored old bogs, and built new ones used for 
growing the berries. His original loan of a couple thousand dollars in 
the 1940's has flourished into a multimillion-dollar farm. Throughout 
this productive return to the family heritage of cranberry farming, Mr. 
Lee has continued to be a strong father and grandfather as well as a 
leader throughout the community.
  Mr. Speaker, recently Modern Maturity magazine published a story 
entitled ``Crimson Harvest'' which details the life of Stephen Lee. I 
would ask that this article also be included as part of Extension of 
Remarks as a tribute to Mr. Lee.

                 [From Modern Maturity, Nov.-Dec. 1995]

                            Crimson Harvest

                            (By Mark Wexler)

       On a brisk autumn afternoon Stephen V. Lee, Jr., looks out 
     onto a sea of floating red berries and beams like a little 
     boy who has just opened a bag of Halloween candy. ``How 
     that's what I call a pretty crop,'' he says with a big smile. 
     ``There's good crimson color on the fruit this year, and that 
     means a sweet Thanksgiving.''
       Lee is a fourth-generation cranberry farmer living the 
     American dream in the heart of New Jersey's scenic Pine 
     Barrens region. In the late 1940s he used a $4,000 loan to 
     rescue his historic family farm from the brink of bankruptcy. 
     Now, after years of hard work, he's turned the operation into 
     a million-dollar business.
       ``This is my life,'' he says, pointing to the miles of red-
     colored bogs surrounded by trees and marshes. ``I've got 
     cranberry juice running through my veins.'' Today, at 85, Lee 
     continues to put in long days in what he calls his ``labor of 
     love.'' and his two sons are by his side.
       Family farmers like the Lees cultivate most of the world's 
     cranberries on only about 30,000 acres in the United States 
     and Canada. There are 44 other families that grow the berries 
     in the Pine Barrens, a 2,000-square-mile oasis of forests, 
     wetlands and wildlife in southern New Jersey that in 1979 was 
     designated a federal preserve, which protects the area by 
     controlling development. Last year Pine Barrens growers 
     produced more than 53 million pounds of cranberries, a figure 
     only Massachusetts and Wisconsin farmers surpassed. ``It's 
     not the easiest way to make a living,'' says Lee, ``but it 
     keeps me young.''
       The object of Lee's affection is more American than apple 
     pie. European settlers introduced the apple to this 
     continent; the cranberry is native to North America. A 
     slender vine that creeps along the ground, the cranberry 
     plant produces a tart-tasting, finicky fruit that survives 
     only in very specialized conditions: It requires an acid peat 
     soil, sand, plenty of fresh water, and a growing season 
     stretching from April to November. Under those conditions the 
     vines can live indefinitely; some Cape Cod cranberry plants 
     are more than 150 years old.
       Cranberries don't actually grow in water. Instead, they 
     blossom on the dense mat of vines that make up impermeable 
     beds in marshy areas called bogs, which glacial deposits 
     originally formed. Native Americans in the Northeast picked 
     the berries from the natural bogs and used them to flavor 
     their food and dye their blankets and clothing. Because raw 
     cranberries have an astringent effect that contracts tissue 
     and stops bleeding, the Indians also used the fruit to make 
     poultices for wounds. And they made a tea from the leaves to 
     use as a diuretic.
       Legend has it that when the Pilgrims arrived in New England 
     in 1620, the Wampanoag Indians who greeted them gave the 
     settlers ibimi (``bitter berries'') as goodwill gifts. 
     Apparently the word ibimi didn't roll easily off the Plymouth 
     colonists' tongues, so they coined their own names for the 
     fruit. Noticing that the vine's flowers vaguely resembled 
     cranes' heads, they eventually dubbed their new food ``crane-
     berries.''
       Historians disagree over whether cranberries were actually 
     served at the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, but one fact 
     is certain: They became a big hit with the English settlers, 
     who found the fruit not only edible and useful as a dye but 
     also ``excellent against the Scurvy.''
       Word of the miraculous berries soon spread back to England, 
     and the colonists recognized a good thing when they saw it. 
     With a 

[[Page E2351]]
     bottle of cranberries fetching several shillings in London, the 
     colonists began picking as much of the wild fruit during 
     autumn as they could get their hands on. They even tried to 
     pacify their king with the berries: In 1677 the colonists 
     sent ``tenn barrells of cranburyes,'' along with Indian corn 
     and 3,000 codfish, as a peace offering to Charles II, who was 
     angry with the New World residents for minting their own 
     coins.
       In 1816 American Revolution veteran Henry Hall made a 
     discovery that would change the nature of cranberry-
     harvesting forever. At his seaside farm on Cape Cod, Hall 
     decided to cut down some trees growing on a hill overlooking 
     the beach. Wild cranberries grew in a marsh behind the hill. 
     With the trees gone, the wind whipped sand onto the vines. 
     Hall expected the plants to die, but the opposite occurred: 
     The cranberries flourished under the sand while competing 
     weeds disappeared. Hall began transplanting his vines, 
     fencing them in and covering them with sand.
       Thus cranberry cultivation was born.
       Stephen Lee, a native of Ireland, bought 2,000 acres of New 
     Jersey pinelands in 1868. The area, he discovered, was 
     perfect for growing the cranberries. Woodlands and freshwater 
     marshes pockmarked the landscape, while he could easily 
     flatten the sandy soil to cultivate the fruit.
       During the 1870s Lee and his son, James, carved out a 
     series of cranberry bogs, most of which are still in use. 
     Cranberry farming in those days was not necessarily 
     profitable, and for the next two generations the Lee family 
     struggled. As the Great Depression took hold, the family shut 
     down the farm operation and moved to a nearby town.
       Meanwhile, cranberry growers elsewhere had developed new 
     methods to improve their harvest. Around the turn of the 
     century, Wisconsin farmers found they could harvest twice as 
     many berries by flooding their bogs then scooping up the 
     floating fruit. (Flooding also gets rid of insects and 
     protects against frost.) A Few years later Boston attorney 
     and cranberry grower Marcus Urann had another idea: a canned 
     sauce made from cranberries that, according to the label, was 
     ``like homemade.'' In 1930 he merged his company with two 
     other firms to form the Ocean Spray cooperative, owned today 
     by the very farmers who grow the berries.
       One of those farmers, U.S. Navy veteran Stephen V. Lee, Jr. 
     (great-grandson of the Stephen Lee mentioned earlier), 
     survived both the Normandy invasion and fiery battles in the 
     South Pacific during World War II before returning to New 
     Jersey to pick up the pieces of the family farm.
       Lee borrowed $4,000 from Ocean Spray and began the arduous 
     task of reclaiming the land. Starting with some of the 
     original vines his ancestor had planted, he restored the bogs 
     and constructed new ones. ``It takes about seven years to 
     develop a productive bog,'' he says.
       Eventually Lee's cranberry bogs began to pay off, while the 
     industry itself was expanding its product lines to include 
     juices that were, according to the ads, ``a food drink that 
     aids digestion.''
       Then came ``Black Monday.''
       Seventeen days before Thanksgiving 1959 federal authorities 
     announced that some Oregon and Washington cranberries were 
     contaminated with a herbicide that was known to cause cancer 
     in laboratory rats. The Secretary of Health, Education and 
     Welfare suggested that Americans ``pass up cranberries this 
     year.'' Growers protested, claiming a person would have to 
     eat 15,000 pounds of contaminated cranberries every day for 
     years to get cancer. Vice President Richard Nixon solemnly 
     ate four helpings of cranberry sauce on television to 
     demonstrate that the fruit was safe. But the damage was done. 
     ``We took a terrible loss that year,'' says Lee. ``Nobody was 
     buying the stuff. It took a few years for us to recover.''
       Today, cranberries aren't seen as posing a health threat; 
     in fact, they're widely considered beneficial. In 1994 
     doctors at Harvard Medical School released a study that 
     confirms an old folk remedy: Cranberry juice really does help 
     prevent urinary-tract infections. The researchers reported 
     that the women who drank ten ounces of cranberry beverage 
     daily for six months were 58 percent less likely to have such 
     infections than the women who drank a placebo beverage. 
     Scientists had thought the berries' acidic nature knocked out 
     infection, but the new study suggests that cranberries 
     contain a compound that prevents infectious bacteria from 
     adhering to the bladder walls. The doctors studied only older 
     women because they are most prone to the infections. (Women 
     in general have a much higher rate of urinary-tract problems 
     than men.)
       Motivated in part by such discoveries, Americans now 
     consume more than 340 million pounds of cranberries a year. 
     In the past decade Ocean Spray's sales have nearly tripled to 
     more than $1 billion annually.
       ``When I was young, there weren't a lot of choices with 
     cranberries. You ate sauce--and more sauce,'' says Stephen V. 
     Lee III, who returned home in 1973 to help run the family 
     farm after serving as a flight instructor at the U.S. Air 
     Force Academy in Colorado. Today Stephen III runs the 
     business end of the operation--a task his mother, Marjorie, 
     performed until her death in the early 1970s. ``My parent's 
     policy was that their children should go off and try other 
     occupations before deciding on careers as cranberry 
     farmers,'' he says.
       His younger brother, Abbott, decided on his career several 
     years ago after studying agriculture at a nearby college. 
     Today he maintains the family's 125 acres of cranberry bogs, 
     using innovative harvesting equipment he himself invented to 
     reduce manpower needs.
       The brothers' father, Stephen V., Jr., bounds across a dirt 
     mound bordering one of the bogs and scoops up a handful of 
     berries from a flooded area. ``There's a rule of thumb with a 
     family farm like this,'' he says. ``The first generation 
     acquires the land, the second generation improves it, and the 
     third gets to spend the money.''
       It didn't quite work that way for the Lee patriarch, 
     however, ``My sons are the fifth generation,'' he chuckles. 
     ``And they're the ones who are really getting to enjoy the 
     fruits of all this labor.''

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