Kyle Wood and Tillie Lewis Make the Papers

Tillie Lewis's Leopard Coat worn by Kyle Elizabeth Wood. Photo by Lori Gilbert: Stockton Record.

The 'Tomato Queen' of San Joaquin: Chronicling the untold story of pioneering businesswoman Tillie Lewis

Tillie Lewis, founder and president of Flotill Products Inc., is honored at a testimonial dinner in Stockton, site of her first cannery, on March 4, 1952. ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE 1952

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Author Kyle Elizabeth Wood in the leopard skin coat Tillie Lewis wore when Tillie Lewis Drive was dedicated. A great niece of Lewis bequeathed the coat to Wood, who wrote the new "Tillie Lewis: The Tomato Queen," for 75 years. LORI GILBERT/THE RECORD

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Posted Dec 17, 2016 at 1:20 PM

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By Lori Gilbert

Record Staff Writer

Not a building in the vast area she called her own bears her name, and the street, which the city of Stockton begrudgingly named in her honor after relatives shredded a lot of red tape and paid a hefty price tag, is temporarily one-way as it undergoes construction.

But Tillie Lewis, gone since 1977, lives on vividly in the minds of those who called her boss and in a new biography, "Tillie Lewis: The Tomato Queen," written by Kyle Elizabeth Wood.

"Tillie Lewis began to call," Wood said of her decision to write the book. "I know that sounds ridiculous, but Tillie Lewis had not been written about. She wanted a real book. There's an anthology with her included, a synopsis, and another historian with a Ph.D. is including her as one of three women being chronicled. It's not enough. This woman has enough going on about her from the beginning of her life to the end of her life and beyond to deserve a singular book."

"The Tomato Queen," who started a tomato growing and canning business in Stockton in 1935 and employed as many as 800 people at a time, came to Wood's attention when she was a college student, having started school in 2002 after the last of her children had grown up and moved out.

Not wanting to write one history paper after another, she seized on the idea of writing about one topic that she could expand on every time another paper was due.

Her late husband suggested Lewis.

The canning company for which he worked took over the plant formerly owned by Tillie Lewis in 1979, and he'd seen a portrait of Lewis when he first toured the facility. He wondered who she was and how she'd created such an impressive, yet feminine plant with unique carpeting and furnishings.

Wood had not heard of Lewis but latched onto the idea.

A year later she began volunteering at The Haggin Museum, archiving the boxes of Tillie Lewis materials that had been donated to the museum by her family upon her death in 1977.

"For someone looking at this, it was a treasure trove," said Wood, who attended San Joaquin Delta College and graduated from California State University, Stanislaus.

She said inside the boxes was "greatness."

The material offered more than a timeline of Lewis' life: birth to Jewish parents in 1896 in a Brooklyn, New York, tenement; work as a Ziegfeld girl with headliner Fanny Brice; meeting and becoming a lover of Florindo Del Gaizo, the womanizing son of a Naples, Italy, family that grew and canned pomodoro tomatoes; and bringing that tomato to the San Joaquin Valley and setting up Flotil, her own tomato cannery in Stockton in 1935. It told a rich story not only of Tillie Lewis, but of the people who worked for her.

Wood knocked on doors, spoke to her surviving nephews, Albert and Arthur Heiser, who worked in the company with her, and to their wives and former employees.

"It was all about me to begin with," Woods said with a laugh, reflecting on her approach to history classes. "By the time I got to my senior year of college, I had interviewed so many wonderful people, I owed it to them, not just to Tillie Lewis, to write the book. This was more than the story of Tillie. It was the story of Tillie and Flotil and the greatest generation that Tillie was smart enough as a choreographer to find. These people were as loyal to her as any family could possibly be. It was to say those names, out loud and in public."

Names like Ralph Garcia, the first of six members of his family who worked at Flotil. He was there from the start, in 1935, and stayed more than 50 years.

"I never thought I'd work anywhere else," said Joe Garcia, Ralph's brother, who dropped out of high school when he was 16 to work for Flotil. "I was in awe of her, like Mother Teresa. I heard so much about her. I knew who she was and I liked the way she ran a company."

He was a low man on the totem pole when he started, working the worst shifts in the cannery, and he left after about five years when his dad left the company, but he never lost his esteem for the lady boss.

"I've read about Mahatma Gandhi and a lot of great people, and she belongs up there for what she did," Garcia said.

She fed, clothed and housed a good number of families by opening her business in Stockton during the heart of the Depression. She endured hostility because she was a woman and because she was Jewish. She turned the other cheek, though. As Kyle's book points out, she had more important things to worry about than people who would call her names.

"She was fabulous," Wood said.

Smart, beautiful and charming, Lewis used all her feminine guiles to make men want to work for her, to take care of the booming business she called "her baby."

While dismantling the Cinderella myth that Lewis created for herself of meeting a kind Italian man on a ship who gave her seeds to start her business here in California, Wood nevertheless paints a portrait of a great woman.

"You talk to people who worked for her, 35, 40 years later and the fondest memories of their lives are being married, having babies and working for Tillie," Wood said. "Those are the three highlights of their lives. Of course, she was amazing."

Wood dreams of a local museum devoting space to Tillie and all of the memorabilia she now has of Tillie, courtesy of family members, including the leopard skin coat Tillie wore when Tillie Lewis Drive was dedicated. Or a statue, Wood said. And she dreams of a movie about Tillie starring actress Amy Adams.

For now, however, Wood has devoted 290 pages to a fascinating, amazing woman, a business genius who endured anti-Semitism, hostility from jealous women and investigations by the FBI, often instigated by locals with hate in their hearts. Tillie Lewis gracefully rose above it all, and Wood thinks it is long past time for Stockton to embrace her.

The book is available on amazon.com.

- Contact reporter Lori Gilbert at (209) 546-8284 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @lorigrecord.