A signpost of the past is closing

As a little boy growing up in then-rural South El Monte, Richard Kruse could do a 360-degree spin outside his family’s feed mill and see nothing but open land and hog farms.

That was in 1950. In 2008, the 1.5-acre plot that Kruse’s father and uncle took over in 1935 is within eyesight of warehouses, tract homes and a Carl’s Jr. And today, Kruse Feed & Supply, the 30-year-old retail store that sprang from the family feed mill business, will close its doors on Santa Anita Avenue. And with it goes one of the last remnants of San Gabriel Valley’s agricultural past.

“The demographics in San Gabriel Valley have just changed tremendously,” said Kruse, 62. “The farm animal business has become very small over there. Cities have virtually banned any large livestock. For the type of operation we had, it couldn’t sustain itself anymore.”

Starting in the new year, the company’s operations will be consolidated in La Habra, where Kruse has run a second retail location since 1987.

Kruse had been toying with the idea of closing the South El Monte store for three years and finally decided around September to shut it down.

“It was just too costly,” he said.

“We hadn’t made money there for a couple years and the outlook wasn’t any better. We’ve just been breaking even or [taking] a loss.”

As city ordinances over the years banned large animals, residents raised fewer animals or moved.

And South El Monte, once dominated by agriculture and dairy and livestock farming, evolved into a more industrial and residential area.

When business peaked in the early 1980s, the feed store raked in more than 200 invoices daily. Today, they’re lucky to process 50 small orders, Kruse said.

“In the 1980s, you started to see the handwriting on the wall that things were changing in San Gabriel Valley,” Kruse said.

Wes Alcott, general manager for the La Habra store, has been with the company since 1997. A lot has changed in the last decade, he said.

The South El Monte store used to handle 15 to 20 deliveries of hay and feed each week. Now, they’re down two, three or four, he said.

“Stables started closing down, horse people moved out and non-horse people moved in,” Alcott said.

Signs of the decline are everywhere. The back room that once stored about 3,000 bales of hay is now stocked with 30. A bulletin board with fliers about animals for sale once brimmed with announcements and postings. It’s now half-empty.

But traces of the glory days of South El Monte’s mill activity are scattered throughout the store. An old corn grinder sits in a back corner of the warehouse. And Kruse hangs onto a framed black-and-white photo of the mill’s staff in 1949, which shows him as a toddler in suspenders.

Kruse’s father, Otto Kruse, bought the mill, which began as a livestock sales yard in 1918, for $5,000. Richard Kruse grew up on the property with his brother and sister.

Now, they’re negotiating to sell the land to the city.

Evodio Aguilar, 59, was a loyal customer for 27 years, buying 50 pounds of scratch -- a type of chicken feed that blends grains and corn -- each week for the 30 chickens he used to raise in his backyard in El Monte. But Aguilar sold his coop last year because he grew tired of caring for the birds.

“Maybe it’s good I got rid of the chickens because now where am I going to go chase their food?” he said yesterday, sipping coffee and leaning on sacks of feed.

Aguilar still frequently visits the store to chat with employees and regular customers, whom he’s known for years.

“It doesn’t make me feel good,” he said of the store’s closing.

For the first time in half a century, Barry Monroe, 67, returned yesterday to the store on Santa Anita where he used to buy rabbit feed as a kid.

“Anyone in the area with animals always bought their supplies at Kruse’s because they were the only ones around,” he said.

The last time he visited the store was 52 years ago, when he bought an early 1922 Dodge from Kruse’s father. He was 15, and he paid $10 for the vintage red car.

He sold it when he was 17 but bought a similar model 40 years later. He drove to Kruse’s in his Dodge to retrace his past, even trying to remember the exact spot behind the barn where the car was parked the first time he saw it.

“Things get away from us in time,” Monroe said.

“It was a source of nice memories and I just wanted to walk around the place again, smell the hay and grain. It’s sad to see parts of your past disappear, but it’s the reality of life. Nothing stays the same.”

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