THE REMARKER • DECEMBER 14, 2018
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HOLIDAY TRADITION
Family tree roots
Literary festival guests named
History Instructor Bruce Westrate’s father started a Christmas tree farm in the late 1940s where they produced 15,000 trees annually.
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ut of those who celebrate Christmas, there are those who set up a real Christmas tree and those who set up a fake Christmas tree. Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Master Teaching Chair Bruce Westrate, however, is in a third group of people. He’s the one who has been growing these Christmas trees. Westrate’s Christmas tree farm was founded by his father in the late 1940s. Growing up with two brothers, Westrate and his siblings helped their father expand the small-scale farm into a much larger operation during their high school and college years. At one point, their farm produced nearly 15,000 trees in a year. “During all my summers growing up with those trees I had to shear them and shape them Bruce Westrate with a machete,” Nancy and Jeffrey Westrate said. Marcus Master “That’s what I Teaching would be doing Chair all through August.” As a child and a teenager, the work and life experience Westrate gained on the farm was invaluable. “My father would get us up to go out in the field to make sure we were going to start work at about 4:30 in the morning,” Westrate said. “He’d leave us out there all day as we worked. Then he’d pick us up at night. There was a lot of quality time with
my father and my brothers. I can’t say I enjoyed working at a young age, but at the same time, it gave me a sense that I was contributing and a valuable sense of responsibility.” Initially, Westrate and his family produced pine trees since they were cheap and easy to grow. However, the quality of these trees was not always the best. “We actually had to spray them green because in the fall they become sort of yellow,” Westrate said. “That was kind of a messy job, kind of stupid too, but that’s what the market called for.” By the 1980s, the market began demanding fir trees, and so they began substituting Scotch pine with Fraser fir. “They tend to be much straighter than pine and hold up better,” Westrate said.
by Han Zhang he 2019 Literary Festival will be hosted Jan. 11, with notable authors from across the country coming to campus for one week. They will be discussing their work with students on a panel that day in after-school assembly. “I think we have a really good lineup this year,” junior Jack Trahan, this year’s Literary Festival Chair, said. “Especially because we have Karl Marlantes, which I’d say is about as big as Tobias Wolff coming, just in terms of the importance of their books on freshman and juniors respectively.” Karl Marlantes, this year’s main visiting author, is also a decorated U.S. Marine Corps veteran and has written books What it is Like to Go to War and Matterhorn, the second being a required reading book for rising juniors. “I would also say that we’re doing a lot more to make the panel discussion more engaging for all the students,” Trahan said. “Other than that, we really promoted the writing contest this year, and we got a lot more submissions, which allows the Upper School to just be more engaged in ‘LitFest’ in general.” Other authors coming to campus include Kimberly Willis Holt, a children’s author from Fort Worth; Joaquin Zihuatanejo, an award-winning slam poet; Montgomery Sutton ‘05, an actor, director and playwright and Amanda Petrusich, an American music journalist and author of three books. “We want people to understand how much you could really get out of ‘LitFest’,” Trahan said, “because having the chance to interact with these authors is something that I didn’t have the chance to do before coming to St. Mark’s, and I really think that it would be a valuable experience for other students.” Trahan and Vice Chair sophomore Max Palys are hoping for a successful Literary Festival that will be able to more fully integrate students and have their voices be heard during the event. They hope that this annual event will continue to bring different literary opinions to campus. “We hope to be able to bring the expertise and perspective of each of our guest writers to St. Mark’s students,” Palys said. “It’s great that everyone will be able to get to know all of these great authors so well.”
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HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Tending to a young tree in 1990, Westrate’s father, William Westrate, works on their family tree farm.
“You don’t need to spray them, they’re just beautiful trees.” Whether it was Scotch pine or Fraser fir, the harvesting process was still a tough task. “We’d cut them in the snow and then we’d have to bale them up with twine in order to pack them up,” Westrate said. “It was cold and icy and there were really nasty conditions, but you had to do it. A lot of my friends worked with me, though. My dad would hire them, and they would come in, so I have a lot of memories of my friends working with me.” Westrate originally planned on continuing the tree farm for future generations, but circumstances pushed him to change his decision. “When my dad died, that’s when I looked elsewhere,” Westrate said. “The purpose did go out of it for me. My dad was what kept me around doing it for as long as I did.” Along with the death of one brother and the personal problems of the other brother, he and his family decided to close down the tree farm since it simply wasn’t being kept up. “It lasted as long as the family, but when the family kind of breaks up, then the real nostalgia around the enterprise fails,” Westrate said. “Things change. People go off and do other things. Just nobody was planting any more trees at the farm. It was time to sell it.” Even though his family’s Christmas tree farm no longer exists, “Work has benefits Westrate still beyond merely keeping body and soul together. harbors fond It provides discipline. It memories of provides an example for his former your children.” farm. And — Bruce Westrate because of this, he favors real trees to artificial trees. “I’ll always favor real trees,” Westrate said. “We have a little fake tree here in Dallas that my wife puts up but that’s because it’s impractical. It’s just the two of us and we’re not even there for Christmas so it doesn’t really make much sense. We do put up a real tree when we get to our farmhouse in Michigan.” STORY Dylan Liu, Nick Walsh PHOTO Courtesy Bruce Westrate