Having access to all of the Seed Savers Exchange yearbooks (1975 up to the one that just arrived in my mail a few days ago) is something I treasure. Divining all of the amazing horticultural history from them could keep one busy for many lifetimes.

The yearbooks were packed away for our move from Raleigh to Hendersonville, and I just found the box that had the real oldies inside. The very first yearbooks didn’t have a separate list of varieties - just the special name and location code, alphabetically by state, followed by the various things offered.

I just noted that the 1982 SSE Yearbook added an index of seeds by type. This is also, fortuitously, exactly 40 years ago. In 1982, the SSE was 7 years old, and the gardening public was 33 years removed from the launch of Burpee’s Big Boy tomato, the very first highly popularized and widely grown hybrid tomato. In a way, its popularity paved the way for an increasing focus on hybrid varieties and a parallel reduction in non-hybrid listings in American seed catalogs.

I thought it would be fun to poke through the tomato listings to see what sorts of things were being traded about in 1982. The focus will be on (now) well known family heirlooms that likely owed their continued existence to the creation of the SSE.

Big Ben (or Stump of the World), Brandywine, Bulgarian Triumph, Dinner Plate, Dutchman, Dwarf Champion, Evergreen, German Giant, German Johnson, German Pink, Giant Belgium, Glesener’s, Golden Dwarf Champion, Goldie, King Excel, Mammoth German Gold, Mortgage Lifter, Peron, Pineapple, Ruby Gold, Sabre, Stone, Tasty Evergreen, Watermelon Beefsteak, White Princess, Winsall and Yellow Ponderosa.

Leroy Schmidbauer of New Jersey was looking for two very old varieties now thought to be extinct - Fejee and Cook’s Favorite.

There was a pretty hefty list of “No Name” varieties, sometimes with colors indicated - 9 of them. 8 tomatoes started with the word “German”.

In all, about 260 tomatoes were listed - either as available, or as varieties being searched for by SSE members.

part of the dense, heavily coded tomato section of the 1982 SSE Yearbook

As far as listed members, some pretty familiar names grace the pages, such as Gary Nabhan (Arizona), Tom Butterworth (Connecticut), Glenn Drowns (Idaho), Russell Crowe (Illinois), Dale Anderson (Indiana), Howard Cory (Iowa), Clarice Cooper (Kansas), Will Bonsall (Maine), Dorothy Beiswenger and Frank Morrow (Minnesota), Virgil Johnson (Missouri), Jim DeWeese (Ohio), Tom Knoche (Ohio), Barbara Lund (Ohio), Alexander Pal (Ohio), Carl Barnes (Oklahoma), Faxon Stinnett (Oklahoma), John Rahart (Wyoming), Lars-Olov Rosenstrum (Sweden). Since joining the SSE in 1986, I’ve had the pleasure of correspondence with some of these wonderful gardeners, requesting and sending seeds. Yellow Brandywine, one of my very favorites, came from Barbara Lund.

The yearbook has more than just member info and seed listings. The early years of the SSE saw the yearbooks being used for brief articles on all things seed. It is a fascinating read. A few examples are found below.

More than anything else, reading through this reminds me of simpler times. There was no social networking, no email - just hand written (or typed, but definitely mailed) letters. (((sigh)))