Popular radio personality helped save citrus groves

If your livelihood hinged on the health of your Inland Empire citrus grove 70 or 80 years ago, there was no one more popular on the radio on winter evenings than Floyd D. Young.

Young was hardly much of an entertainer, so it’s a wonder anyone listened to him at all.

But at 8 p.m., and especially when the mercury started to plunge, he’d easily beat out Jack Benny or “Major Bowes and the Original Amateur Hour” or even “Fibber McGee and Molly.”

A specialist with the Weather Bureau, Young produced a special forecast from his Pomona home each night during the winter months beginning in 1917 through his retirement in 1956.

He alerted ranchers if frost was expected that night and where and how severe — important news for the thousands of acres of cold-sensitive groves in the Inland Empire. Young’s information was vital and rarely wrong.

Alerted by a frost forecast, growers would summon their crews, mostly high school and college students, to spend the night in the fields, keeping oil-burning orchard heaters — more commonly known as smudge pots — afire. The heaters kept heat near the ground to protect the trees and fruit from freezing.

The result of all that smoke would put the worst of our latter-day smog alerts to shame. The smudge pots blanketed most of Southern California with soot and smoke that often obscured the sun after a night of smudging.

In the most severe freezes, more than half the trees and much of the fruit could still be lost in a couple of days of frost even with the orchard heaters in full operation.

In the days after World War II, the area banned such smudging in favor of pollution-free wind machines.

In the early days, Young, and his predecessor Archibald T. Hamilton of Ontario, had little difficulty predicting a freeze.

What was hard was getting that information to those who most needed it.

They tried posting flags and even using passing train whistles to alert farmers, with limited success. Fire stations came up with a system using whistles to announce low forecast temperatures.

“Two blasts, a pause, then eight blasts meant 28 degrees; three blasts meant 30 degrees,” he explained in a 1956 interview with the Ontario Daily Report. That worked -- as long as you heard the signal.

Early-day telephone systems were partially successful, but the exchanges would soon be gridlocked once the warning was given as ranchers tried to call in field crews or order oil.


By 1924, the growth of radio gave Young a much more efficient tool. He arranged for Los Angeles station KHJ, and then later KNX and KFI, to read the frost warnings he would dictate to them.

After a number of foul-ups due to numbers being transcribed incorrectly at the stations, Young agreed to remotely transmit the forecasts to the station from his home on Garfield Avenue in Pomona.

Young had 12 workers in the field collecting weather data. They would call him at 7 p.m. to discuss their findings and make a forecast for the evening. Using this method, the average error for the low temperature was less than one degree.

“It’s eight o’clock, and this is Floyd Young on KFI radio with tonight’s temperature reports,” was the message all Southern California ranchers heard.

The forecasts would last as little as 10 seconds (“All stations above 32 degrees”) or as long as 10 minutes, which contained all the ominous details of a very busy night for ranchers.

Originally, KNX was only 500 watts meaning that outlying districts would not pick up the signal. Eventually the citrus industry encouraged KNX and later KFI to expand to 50,000 watts so the forecast could be heard into the Imperial Valley and even as far away as Phoenix.

During all the years he appeared on the radio, Young had the same business-like voice with very little inflection or emotion.

Young said he was told that in addition to being the savior of hundreds of Southern California farmers, he had a legacy as the contributor to one of the most memorable phrases in entertainment history. His voice was said to be the model for Jack Benny’s oft-repeated call on both radio and television, “All aboard for Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga!”