Dubois Produce

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Sunday, September 14, 2008

For people who work the land, there are some mysteries that simply cannot be explained, only described.

For the DuBois family, it was a little pink cloud that showed up one chilly dawn a few years back, providing just enough insulation to protect hundreds of acres of their peppers against a hard frost. That year, theirs were the only peppers in Palm Beach County to survive.

Catholic Deacon Lee Levenson (right), DuBois & Son's chaplain, blesses the farm west of Boynton Beach before Billy DuBois Jr. (from left), Lee Levenson Jr., Robert DuBois Jr. and Robert DuBois Sr.

More recently it was the awakening of Billy DuBois from a six-week coma after a fall. It was not at all clear that he would survive the concussion, let alone return to the family pepper-growing business in which he had grown up.

It took four years of recovery and rehab, but this month DuBois, 71, is back at work with his brother Bobby, 66, his nephew Robbie, nieces, nephews and assorted in-laws who work at DuBois & Son west of Boynton Beach.

So as workers at DuBois begin to set out pepper plants this month, it can't hurt, even for a family of Baptists, to bring in a Roman Catholic chaplain to bless their endeavors.

The farm's chaplain is Lee Levenson, a family friend. Levenson's son Lee Jr. went to St. Joseph School with the DuBois kids.

This week the elder Levenson, a Catholic deacon, sprinkled holy water on workers, the packing plant and Billy DuBois' favorite field, freshly plowed for planting.

Bill DuBois Sr. and his wife, Lois, arrived in Palm Beach County in 1933 from Oklahoma. Sons Bobby and Billy grew up in the pepper fields, learning to plant seedlings about the same time they learned their ABCs.

When Bobby DuBois was 19, Bill DuBois Sr. sent him to farm some of the family acreage in Jupiter. Every day he asked his son pointed questions about the operation but purposely never visited. When Bobby DuBois produced a strong crop that season, his father was satisfied that he could run a farm on his own.

After 75 years in Palm Beach County, the DuBois family is part of local history. The DuBois packing plant on Flavor Pict Road used to be the Flavor Pict tomato packing plant. The DuBoises retooled the building for pepper packing. A few Flavor Pict employees still work there.

Driving around in a four-wheel-drive Mercedes sport utility vehicle with Bobby DuBois narrating, it is almost possible to blink away the gatehouses and groomed hedges and imagine Hagen Ranch Road as crunchy shell rock instead of smooth asphalt.

He chuckles as the SUV passes a new mall on Hagen Ranch Road. The big sign reads "Whitworth Farms," named after the vegetable farm on U.S. 441.

"There were 150 farmers here in 1960," he says. "Now there are five or six."

Don't mistake the DuBoises for a bunch of hayseeds. Despite their country-fried reminiscences, they have played a key role in the morphing of old Palm Beach County into suburban sprawl.

With well-placed lawyers and campaign contributions, they fought long and hard to protect their ability to control what will happen to their land.

Because they own some of the last open land in the county, they have been knee-deep in the debate over the Agricultural Reserve, 20,000 acres in south-central Palm Beach County that gradually has been suburbanized. The family members stand to benefit at least as much from residential and business growth in the Ag Reserve as they ever did growing produce there.

Until then, DuBois produce, including eggplant, squash, hot peppers, cucumbers and cantaloupes as well as their famous peppers, is sold to Wal-Mart, Publix and other national food retailers.

Billy DuBois had been retired for about a year when he suffered the fall and resulting coma. After therapy, he only occasionally has to struggle for the right word.

Doctors and family agree that the best therapy for DuBois is to return to "the tower," the glass-walled control room that overlooks the pepper packing room.

By Thanksgiving, Billy and Bobby DuBois will be there, overseeing the conveyor belts, boxing thousands of peppers a day.

Robbie, 42, now runs the business after learning from his father and uncle.

The DuBois grandchildren spend their summers riding on tractors with their granddads and learning to plant seedlings. So the elder DuBoises are confident that when the time comes, the kids will continue the farm that bears their name.