Fresno made that? From landfills to pink popcorn, these 10 products have Valley ties

Uniquely is a Fresno Bee series that covers the moments, landmarks and personalities that define what makes living in the Fresno area so special.

Followers of pop culture might call it differently, but Fresno in the central San Joaquin Valley of California has been, historically, an oddly inventive place.

This is after all, the place where Baldassare Forestiere carved an entire house, with gardens, right out of the dirty ground, using little more than hand tools. It’s where a minor-league baseball team helped spur an industry and culture from taco trucks.

Here are a few other products and ideas you may not realize have ties to the Valley.

Patents and inventions

• Fresno Scraper

A precursor to modern bulldozers, the so-called “Fresno Scraper” was an agricultural breakthrough. It was created in the late 1880s by a 29-year-old blacksmith, inventor and businessman named James Porteous, whose company, Fresno Agricultural Works, took up nearly a full city block near Tulare and L streets.

It eventually became Fresno Ag Hardware, which remains open to this day.

As John Walker wrote in his Historical Perspective series in The Fresno Bee, the scrapers were used to dig irrigation canals, solving an agricultural problem in the dry Central Valley.

It took more than a decade for it to become more than a local product, but eventually thousands were shipped across the world. The scrapers were used on the European front in World War I and, more famously, in the construction of the Panama canal.

• Hula-Ho

The Hula-Ho is a home gardening tool used for weeding.

It’s also known as a stirrup or scuffle hoe, sometimes called an oscillating hoe.

It’s a pendulum cultivator per its 1960 patent and the “weeder with the wiggle” in its product slogan and on a billboard that sat for years just off Highway 99 in Kingsburg.

That’s where Donald Towt lived and where he started the Hula-Ho company.

An original Hula-Ho can be identified by the name stamped into the wood of the handle.

• Bumpit

The Bumpit was a product of its time; that being the late 2000s, when women were looking for big, voluminous, teased-out hair.

Turns out the style could be approximated pretty well, using a curved piece of plastic hidden under the hair.

Enter the Bumpit.

Created by a Fresno hairstylist turned mortgage broker, Bumpit became the must-have hair accessory. It was sold at major stores like Walmart and Target and Claire’s, where it became an all-time, best-seller, according to a story in The Fresno Bee. At the height of popularity, it had sold more than 10 million units and made $100 million.

Bumpits can still be purchased on Amazon and video tutorials can still be seen on YouTube.

In pop culture

• Dancing Raisins

In 1992, city officials stowed a metal time capsule inside the walls of city hall as it was being built.

Included among the ephemera were a cassette tape, copies of The Fresno Bee and several California Dancing Raisin figurines.

The figurines were an unexpected outcome of an international advertising campaign created by the Fresno-based California Raisin Advisory Board in 1986. The original TV spot had four claymation raisins dancing to Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”

The raisins (and thus the campaign) became a phenomenon, spawning a full-range of ad spots, merchandise (those figurines) and live performances, plus a lawsuit or two for good measure.

In 1991, memorabilia from the campaign was added to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, where it joined the Marlboro Man and other advertising icons. According to a story in The Fresno Bee, the ceremony was attended by the raisins themselves (or costumed members of Fresno’s Good Company Players).

That time capsule was opened and replaced in 2022. Included in the new collection; some Fresno Grizzlies paraphernalia, an at-home COVID-19 rapid test and N95 mask, and an iPhone 6s Plus.

• Break dancers

Breakdancing has been popular in Fresno – in southeast Fresno, especially – since the 1990s, when B-boys like Charles “Goku” Montgomery and Pablo Flores were competing in international dance battles.

But the culture owes special thanks to Timothy Solomon and his brother Sammy. The pair were part of the Electric Boogaloos, a dance group featured on “Soul Train” in 1979 (check out the video on YouTube).

The group’s name would be borrowed for the 1984 film “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

Sammy was “Boogaloo Sam” and Timothy danced as “Popin’ Pete.” The latter is widely credited with creating and popularizing the body jerking robotic dance style that came to be known as poppin’.

Food

• Fresno Chili

This one should seem kind of obvious, seeing as Fresno is in the name.

The pepper, which is similar to a jalapeno in look and taste, was first cultivated by a guy named Clarence “Brownie” Hamlin in the 1950, in Clovis, of all places.

So, as pointed out in an in-depth history of the pepper in Eater, the pepper isn’t named for the city, but rather the county of Fresno.

The pepper is actually hotter than the jalapeño, somewhere between 2,500 and 8,000 Scoville units, and saw a kind of renaissance with foodies in the late 2010s.

• Wrights Pink Popcorn

For those of a certain age, Wrights Pink Popcorn is pure nostalgia.

The pink blocks of fluorescent-dyed popped corn were sold in vending machines and grocery stores, but were also ubiquitous at high school sports games and the like.

According to a story in Vice, the treat was manufactured by Wright Popcorn & Nut Company, which had been making the treat out of its San Francisco facility since 1940.

The company also had facilities in Sacramento, and on M Street just outside of downtown Fresno. According to Vice, the company closed in the mid-2012, leaving people to mostly reminiscence in online forums.

Fresno firsts

• A sanitary landfill

Let’s not think too much about what it means that one of Fresno’s historic sites (like, on the national registry) was a landfill or that it’s situated next to the city’s regional sports complex.

The Fresno Sanitary Landfill opened in 1937 on three acres just off Annadale Avenue south of the city and established “the prototype for the modern sanitary landfill in the United States,” according to its listing on the site historicfresno.org.

It is considered the oldest planned landfill in the U.S.

Prior to the landfill opening, Fresno’s trash was incinerated.

Jean Vincenz, a city engineer and Fresno’s commissioner of public works at the time, designed the landfill with a series of trenches that would be filled with trash that was compacted and covered with dirt on a daily basis.

When the dump closed in 1987, a farewell party was held atop the mound, featuring a cake made to resemble the heap, according to a story in The Fresno Bee. The site was later listed as an EPA Superfund site, due to the 5 million tons of garbage that was oozing chemicals into the ground.

• Office air conditioning

The Central Valley is notorious for its heat (it’s a dry heat, but hot just the same).

So, it’s fitting that Fresno has a place in the history of office air conditioning.

Carrier pioneered in-door air conditioning more than 120 years ago and on its website claims the T.W. Patterson Building in downtown Fresno was the first multi-story office building in the U.S. to have an air conditioning system installed. That was in 1926. Prior to that, the systems had only really been seen in department stores and movie theaters in big cities like Los Angeles and New York.

So, you can blame Fresno for all those office fights about the temperature.

• Credit cards

Fresno has long been a test market for companies looking to roll out new and inventive products. See: McDonald’s Grand McChicken sandwich, Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco and ...

Consumer credit?

Yes. Bank of America introduced a revolutionary credit-card program in 1958, issuing 60,000 cards (unsolicited, if you can imagine) to residents in what was called the “Fresno Drop.”

The BankAmericard (later Visa) offered a pre-approved $300 limit and was the first time banks allowed credit balance to be carried over month-to-month, according Forbes, which points out that credit card fraud came quickly thereafter.