Doyle Flemming was More Than a Cameo
April 20, 2010 
Some people make such an impact during their lifetimes that the reverberation continues to be felt long after they’re gone. Such was the mark made by Doyle Fleming, a Washington apple grower who I found myself thinking about a few times recently, a full decade after his death.
The first time was on a bus tour during the annual meeting of the International Fruit Tree Association a few months ago. The meeting was held in eastern Washington, but that wasn’t why I got to thinking of Fleming. It was because the growers on the trip were remarking about the extreme densities of some of the apple plantings we saw on the tour. That caused an image to pop up in my mind, an image that may have been one of the most memorable photos to appear on the cover of this magazine.
Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for it. It appeared in 1996, a few years before I came on board. It was a picture of Fleming in honor of his selection as our Apple Grower of the Year. What makes it a great picture is he’s lying on his stomach in his Wee Hoot Orchards, his head squeezed between a couple of apple trees. Talk about a dense planting: 6,000 Fujis on Malling 9 to the acre. And I loved his damn-the-torpedoes quote that appeared in the accompanying story: “When you experiment, you don’t do a cost analysis to study the concept,” he said. “If you did, the answer would always be no.”
A Lead Role
Fleming also came to mind a few weeks ago, when a study was released that stated that Cameo apples were ranked as the crunchiest apple by consumers in a late-season taste study. I’m sure a lot of you read about it, as it was the best-read story on our website, GrowingProduce.com, that week. Anyway, I thought of Fleming because he gave me my first Cameo. This was on my first trip to Washington, in the spring of 1998, the same year Cameo was released, according to www.americancameo.com.
Tim Smith, a Washington State University Cooperative Extension Agent in Wenatchee who now serves on our Editorial Advisory Board, was giving me a tour that included a stop at Fleming’s house. Fleming tossed me a Cameo and asked me what I thought. I told him I thought it was great. Of course, I’m not a complete idiot, and I would have told him that regardless. (In fact, on that same trip another grower gave me a Red Delicious, saying the variety was unfairly being maligned when it was just being stored improperly. He cut into one and handed me a slice. Perhaps he had a point, but he didn’t make it too well because that Red Delicious was kind of mealy. Oh well.)
But Fleming, who according to that 1996 story was also known for the first Gala planting, knew what he was doing. That visit to his house has always stuck in my mind, but I don’t think it was the Cameo. Perhaps it was because it was my first foray not only into the heart of our nation’s apple country, or because the landscape was so breathtaking, but I was also struck by the fact that the Flemings had a relatively modest home, considering the million-dollar view. Smith explained that Fleming could have sold out and lived a life of leisure, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He wants to be an apple grower, Tim said. He’s his own man, I thought to myself, and that’s no act.
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