Hans Angress has many stories to tell, from surviving the Holocaust to helping build the Marconi Conference Center from the ashes of Synanon. But from 1948 to 1968, Hans was a partner with Bill Straus on what is still the Straus dairy in Marshall. There, he and his wife, Dina, raised their children—Eric, Norah, Madelyn and Ingrid, and later, Rachel and Jesse. (The notes in italics were provided to me by Madelyn.) Hans, now 88, lives in Cotati with his wife, Enola.
Charles Schultz: Your daughter asked me to have you tell the story of how you became a dairyman. I imagine this was a bit of a departure.
Hans Angress: Yes, my father was a banker.
Charles: There were restrictions on Jews owning farmland in Western
Europe.
Hans: The way I got interested in it was actually my oldest brother Tom. He was trained in a farm near Pressburg (what is now Bratislava) to be a farmer, because it was deemed—it was known—that Jews could not survive in Germany, and farming is a profession you can take anywhere in the world. He went there in 1936. I was visiting him one week and he got sick and he left. And I stayed. I sort of enjoyed the spirit that was there, the enthusiasm for farming. But then our family moved to Holland, and the Nazis caught up with us. I ended up in hiding.
After the war I was looking for work, and my brother had some friends in Connecticut who had a dairy, so I took a job milking cows.
Charles: Were they also refugees?
Hans: The Franklins? Probably. I don’t know. They were Jewish. I wasn’t there very long. I was engaged at the time to a girl I went to school with, but her parents wouldn’t let her get married until I had a stable job. That first job was not enough to their liking, but [Dina’s] parents knew Bill Straus, who had a dairy on Tomales Bay. When I found out he was looking for someone, I decided to go West. Then my fiancée’s parents could come out and I could get married.
My brothers drove me up the East Coast: the first time I had lobster. [Hans lived through years of severe rationing while hiding in Holland, and recalled in his memoirs that the lobster “….was delicious, but too rich. My stomach wasn’t used to that.”]. Then I went to Chicago, where I took the train out to California.
Charles: I love the Zephyr. Do you remember Roy Erickson?
Hans: Sure.
Charles: He was from Wisconsin. One of his family members told me that, the first time he came out on the train, he thought the golden hills shining in the sunlight as you come through California were sand dunes. So you arrived in Emeryville…
Hans: And Bill Straus picked me up. He drove me over the Golden Gate Bridge, which was extraordinary. He owned a 160-acre dairy, a grade B dairy, for cheese and butter and dried milk basically. Not to drink. And he wanted to expand. The neighboring dairy came up for sale, owned by Harold Johnson and a grade A dairy. This is around the end of ’47 or beginning of ’48. [Hans wrote that Bill’s existing dairy operation—by then, 40 cows—could not sustain two families, so they decided to expand. After buying the Johnson dairy, Bill “offered me a full partnership in the enterprise.”]
Charles: Were you married at this time?
Hans: No, I spent some months in Marshall and then I went back to Holland and got married.
Charles: And you taught yourself how to be a dairy farmer.
Hans: Well, in Connecticut they basically turned me loose on 40 cows. I mean we had milking machines then, but you still had to feel the udder and check for mastitis. There was a learning curve, and I had to catch on fast.
Charles: Ingrid mentioned that you had to do a lot of electrical work as well—all kinds of trades.
Hans: Yeah, I rewired one dairy with knob-and-tube wiring. I enjoyed learning plumbing and electricity.
Charles: So two men, and your wife, and a grade B dairy. How did you divide your activities on the farm?
Hans: Bill was mainly financial: he dealt with the banks, the bills and bookkeeping. He helped with the dairy, but manual things were not his thing. He had two left hands. He milked occasionally, and he helped feeding the cows. I did most of the manual things. And that suited us.
When it was a grade B dairy, the milk was in cans that would go to Petaluma. Then he bought the grade A dairy next door, and that was a whole new operation. You needed refrigeration to bring it to just about freezing, minutes after it was milked. If the bacteria count was too high, the truck wouldn’t take it. Instead of cans, you had an insulated tank.
I think we had ultimately 160 cows. Of course, some of those were dry; there was a rest period.
Charles: Was it just the two of you and all of those cows?
Hans: Later on there was another man, Ronnie Weller, from Colorado. It was a challenge, but I enjoyed it, quite frankly. We built a more modern barn during that time, and added concrete to the corrals, which before were a muddy mess in the wintertime. [ In his autobiography, Hans wrote: “When we first took over the Johnson dairy, all the liquid runoff from the dairy operation went into Tomales Bay. This was not good for the bay, and was also a waste of good fertilizer. So we made a level area near the barn, low enough to catch the liquid coming from the barn area into a 19-wheeler truck we bought with a 2,000 gallon tank on it, our ‘honey wagon.’”]
Then artificial insemination came in. I remember I had just built a new corral for the bulls. I wanted to use them, and now a technology had made it irrelevant. Bulls could always be a mystery: you didn’t know how they would affect the quality of the herd. It took years to find out from their offspring if they were any good or not. Artificial insemination changed all that, but we used that corral later on for cows and their calves. Bill made that decision, and he was right.
Charles: How did you find the culture of West Marin? German culture was the most sophisticated in Europe, and here you find yourself with Irish and Swiss-Italian and Portuguese ranchers.
Hans: I liked them, better than my partner did. He had more trouble with it. I just liked them. I enjoyed the whole idea of farming. Even my father was interested in farming, though he never practiced it.
Charles: I heard it mentioned that your families didn’t mix with the Jews from the Pale of Settlement around Petaluma.
Hans: No, but I didn’t have any feeling one way or the other about them.
Charles: And you started a family during this time as well. Is Madelyn your eldest? Did you put them to work?
Hans: My eldest was Eric in ’49 and yeah, they shoveled a lot of shit, although I tried to let them help with more interesting things.
Charles: It must have been exhausting work.
Hans: Well, one morning I had to get up at 2 or 2:30 a.m. to get the cows home to milk. The next morning, around 6 a.m. Eventually we had help from that fellow from Colorado, and once we built the modern barn you could milk four cows at a time. It took about two and half hours. At first it was Jerseys, because we were paid based on the amount of butter fat. Then it was Holsteins because they produced more milk and less butter fat. I think it was the health thing. People wanted lower-fat milk.
I was dairyman from ’48 to ’68, and then dairies in West Marin had a hard time competing with those in the [Central] Valley. They can grow their own hay, and we had to buy everything outside of a couple months of pasture; some do silage now. The dairymen in West Marin now are producing very high-quality things like cheese and ice cream. At that time, dairies just produced milk. We were not having discussions about making cheese or organic milk then.
Charles: What about the fights over development? The plans to make West Marin into another suburb of San Francisco?
Hans: That was mostly Bill and Ellen Straus, who were strenuously opposed to those plans. I think a lot of the environmentalism that developed over that time was justified, and some of it was absurd. We were saved by the Williamson Act, that agricultural property would be taxed on its productive value rather than the price of the land itself. Without that, we would have been taxed out of existence. Just the small parcel on the other side of Highway 1 from the dairy, just 20 acres, because it was zoned for recreation, etc., cost us more in tax than the 800 acres on the other side of the highway with all the buildings on it.
Charles: That 20 acres is Angress State Park.
Hans: Is it?
Charles: It is on the map.
Hans: I didn’t know that. Ha.
Charles: And your time as a dairyman comes to an end with the close of the 1960s. How did you feel about that?
Hans: At the end, you know, it was a lifestyle. They say if you took the money we invested in the dairy and put it in stocks and bonds, we would have made much more, but I wanted the way of living.