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We’re so used to the idea of people selling Okanagan fruit on Lower Mainland roadsides that it seems crazy there was a time when it was illegal.

Fruit was meant to be bought at a store and for a set price.

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To sell fruit at the side of the road, for any old price, meant dodging authorities set up between the Interior and the coast, often at night, sometimes at high speed.

To understand this story, we have to go back to the late 1930s. Before then, selling fruit in B.C. was a marginal enterprise. Our fruit is the last to ripen in North America, leaving B.C. orchardists the last to get to market, forced to take whatever price they could take.

But in 1937, the B.C. Fruit Growers’ Association got the provincial government to establish the B.C. Fruit Board to co-ordinate fruit shipments and prices paid for fruit, and decide where that fruit could be shipped from and to.

By about 1950, the board, which had the strong support of the fruit growers’ association and their legal foundation, had established its own force of inspectors — a dozen or so men and a trio of detectives, operating as if they were a true police service — which operated checkpoints on roads leading out of the Okanagan and the Kootenays.