At just 6 months old, Charlie Olson was already an active farmer in Sunnyvale orchards. His mother would pull him, tucked inside a 3-foot-long prune box, alongside her as she tended to the prune orchards. He doesn’t remember it, but plenty of close family friends have shared the memory with him.
For four generations, the Olson name has been synonymous with farming, mostly cherries, but Olson’s grandparents and parents harvested apricots and prunes for decades. They were Swedish immigrants who purchased their first orchard in 1899 at the corner of Taaffe Street and McKinley Avenue in Sunnyvale. A second orchard was purchased in 1919 at the corner of El Camino Real and Mathilda Avenue, which was farmed until being leased to developers in 1999.