But Vera wasn't talking about politics or his leadership role in the local community, he was talking about buying land, and more land - olive ranches in the San Joaquin Valley, stretching for miles along roads with only numbers for names.

Today, just outside the little town of Lindsay, in Tulare County, you can stand and look down one of those hazy, sun drenched roads, way off to where it disappears into a surrealistic horizon and see nothing by Vera Ranches. There are well over two dozen ranches and thousands of acres that he admits to, and the end appears nowhere in sight.

"I'll be honest with you. I don't know how it happened," Vera says. "I was just fortunate to be selected to take care of the land."

And take care of the land he does. In addition to the prudent care a good farmer gives his land, he even offers it little extra signs of affection. Perhaps it's because he's Italian or maybe it's just a sign of the reverence he has for the land, but at the end of each row of olive trees, near the road, Vera has planted a rose bush. Bright red or sunshine yellow, the roses create a splash of exuberant color punctuating the hazy yellows, bleached browns and tawny greens of the landscape. You know at a glance that you're driving by the Vera Ranches.

Like most things Vera does, the land buying happened organically - it grew out of something else he set out to do, then it took on a life of its own. He said that it happened because he'd been buying olive oil for his market, and being Italian and something of an olive oil aficionado, he didn't think that the brand he was carrying was quite up to snuff, as it were. So he began creating his own blend to be marketed with the Vera label. But that was just the beginning.

It wasn't long before it occurred to Vera that he could cut out the middle man and have a better product for less money. So he began checking around and in 1966 based on only a real estate listing, he bought his first olive ranch.

"I bought it sight unseen. When I got there the grass was as tall as the trees," Vera says.

While he had some misty childhood memories of olive groves - his grandfather back in Italy had grown olives - he was basically armed with nothing more than an instinctual feel for the land, and a determination to succeed. But lack of experience didn't slow him down any.

Undaunted, Vera studied the matter, taking advantage of the vast expertise California's academic/agricultural community had to offer as well as hands-on training in the olive groves, and he learned. Today, he's the area's largest landowner and one of its biggest olive produces.

He will also be the first to tell you that he didn't do it by becoming a gentleman farmer, owning the land and expecting somebody else to run the operation. He make no bones about his contempt for absentee landowners.

"They show up two or three times a year in their cowboy hats, then complain when they have to turn the land back over to the bank," Vera says. This assessment may explain why he won't wear a cowboy hat, or any hat for that matter, even in the heat of mid summer.

After buying the first ranch, the crack of dawn became much more than a figure of speech. Vera and his white delivery van were quickly a ubiquitous sight in Toulare County. Today, as he has for three decades, he arrives in Lindsay at dawn at least twice a week, more often during the harvest season, a schedule which means leaving Culver City somewhere around 4 a.m. for the three and a half hour trip.

Driving north toward Bakersfield, the van crosses Frazier Peak with the stars still bright in the night sky and begins its 4000 foot decent into the valley just as the horizon begins to turn from mauve to gold.

It's harvest time and Vera's on hand at daybreak to meet his foreman and other members of his 12-man, year-round crew which can swell to as many as 500 to 700 workers during the harvest. He's sporting the beginning of a beard. A tradition with olive growers, Vera won't shave until the harvest is safely in.

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