No pictures of Terri Ardullo, which made sense. She wasn’t aTreadway native, had grown up in Modesto.
Carson Crimmins’s name showed up regularly, too. The other rich man in town. From what I could make out, Crim-mins had started out as Butch Ardullo’s ally in the fight for the family farm, but had switched course by the early seventies, expressing his frustration with low walnut prices and the rising cost of doing business, and advertising his willingness to sell “to the highest serious bidder.”
No pictures of him. No comments from Butch Ardullo. The Intelligencer avoided taking sides.
March 1969. An entire issue devoted to Katherine Stethson Ardullo’s funeral.
References to a “lingering illness,” and to the hiking death, years before, of the oldest son, Henry Junior. The article was augmented by old family snapshots and pictures of Butch and Scott at graveside, heads hung low.
August 10, 1974. Orton Hatzler mourned Nixon’s resignation.
The following December, a hard frost damaged both the Ardullo and the Crimmins crops. Butch Ardullo said, “You’ve got to be philosophical, ride out the bad times with the good.” No comment from Carson Crimmins.
March 1975. The death of Butch Ardullo. Two extra pages in a memorial issue. This time, Scott stood alone in the cemetery. Carson Crimmins said, “We had our differences, but he was a man’s man.”
June 1976. Announcement of Crimmins’s marriage to “the former Sybil Noonan, of Los
Angeles. As we all know, Miss Noonan, a thespian who has acted under the name Cheryl
Norman, met Mr. C. on a cruise to the Bahamas. The nuptials took place at the
Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. Maid of honor was the bride’s sister,
Charity Hernandez, and cc-best men were Mr. C.’s sons, Carson Jr. and Derrick. The newlyweds are honeymooning in the Cayman Islands.”
Two photos. Finally a look at Carson Crimmins. Black tie. In the first shot, he and his new wife cut a five-tiered cake. He looked to be around sixty, tall, stooped, bald, with a too-small face completely overpowered by a beak of a nose. The nose bore down upon a fleshless upper lip. A pencil mustache added movie-villain overtones. Tiny, dark eyes glanced somewhere to the left-away from the bride. His smile was painful. A wary owl in a tuxedo.
The second Mrs. Crimmins-she who’d narrowed Jacob Haas’s eyes and hardened his voice-was in her late thirties, short, with full arms and a lush body packed into a tight silk sheath of a sleeveless wedding dress. What looked to be a deep tan. Spiky tiara perched upon a pile of platinum hair. Lots of teeth, lipstick, and eye shadow, a generous offering of cleavage. No ambivalence in her thousand-watt smile. Maybe it was true love, or perhaps the rock on her finger had something to do with it.
The second picture showed the Crimmins boys flanking the newlyweds. On the left was
Carson Junior, around seventeen. Haas had said Derrick was younger, but that was hard to tell. Both boys were thin, rangy, with prominent noses and a touch of their father’s avian look. Better-looking than their father-stronger chins, broader shoulders. The same thin lips. Carson Junior was already his father’s height,
Derrick slightly taller. Junior’s hair was wild, blond, curly, Derrick’s dark and straight, hanging past his shoulders. Neither boy seemed to share the joy of the day. Both projected that immovable sul-lenness unique to teenagers and mug-shot criminals.
April 1978. The front-page story was a visit to Treadway by representatives of a company called Leisure Time Development. Carson Crimmins’s invitation. Scott Ardullo said, “It’s a free country. People can sell what’s theirs. But they can also show some guts and hold fast to the farming tradition.” No follow-up progress reports.
July 1978. The wedding of Scott Ardullo and Theresa Mclntyre. The bridal gown, a
“flowing affair complete with 10-foot train and hand embroidery, including Belgian lace and freshwater pearls, was imported from San Francisco.” No cleavage here;
Theresa Ardullo had favored long sleeves and full cover.
I moved on to the next batch of papers.
A half-year after the developers’ visit, there was still no mention of land sales or negotiation, offers from other companies.
Crimmins’s overtures rejected because Scott Ardullo had refused to sell out and no one wanted to deal for half a loaf?