Jethro Mitchell Swain’s mama din’ raise no Village idiot. The La Jolla chicken and fruit farmer made his mark as a savvy businessman too, at least among neighbors who caught wise to his sense of Thanksgiving one-upmanship. Sell your turkey and all the trimmings at a $4.50 profit, contenting yourself instead with chicken and sweet potatoes? Why not indeed! $4.50 in Swain’s time is worth $103.83 to us, no small change among the workaday. And anyway, chickens are just as tasty as turkeys (for the record, they’re also just as stupid).
The La Jolla of Thanksgiving 1911 had a certain ring to it accordingly. Swain worked an acre east of La Jolla Boulevard he bought for a paltry $1,200 (one commercial real estate company wants that for two square feet now, in the same location), and the neighborhood population was about 850 versus today’s 48,000. La Jolla hadn’t the first clue it would later become one of this nation’s most legendarily wealthy neighborhoods – and one of Swain’s diaries shows as much, reflecting his holiday engorgement in the same light as that among the masses then and since. “Thursday, Nov. 30, 1911,” Swain wrote: “Thanksgiving Day, and we enjoyed it in great shape. We sold a turkey hot from the oven cooked to a charm for 4.50 cash. We ate chicken, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, cheese, pumpkin pie, beets, carrots & fresh ripe strawberries, pickle beets, honey, bread & sugar, tea, cream, were all satisfied.”
The trick is that that $4.50 was well on its way to paying for Swain’s meal and then some (a century ago, $6.39 would get you a 16-pound turkey, three pounds of sweet potatoes, a pound of cranberries, a can of peas, a can of pumpkin, a dozen eggs, a half-pound of butter, two cans of string beans, a gallon of cider, five pounds of flour and five pounds of sugar, if the ad flyers were to be believed). Swain also rejoiced in a lifelong asset named Alice (his wife, whom he affectionately called Pard) – you don’t get to be Ellen Browning Scripps’ dressmaker without some kind of commercial savvy, and Swain’s diary constantly refers to Pard’s solitary trips downtown to do business on her own.
Swain died in 1917 with his straight-shooter reputation intact – but he and Pard knew what was good for them, and their Thanksgivings were the better for it. Though the time and the place are vastly different, La Jolla’s still here, and the enterprising spirit of the world’s Jethro Swains helps make the Village what it is. Carol Olten, historian and docent coordinator at the La Jolla Historical Society, contributed to this story.