Before Hartranft came to California in 1890 he had been a gardener, unsuccessfully attempting to set up a vegetable market. He was afterward known to recite the jingle
To grow crops to sell is to speculate like hell, but to grow crops to eat keeps you standing on both feet. In 1907 he helped establish the "Little Landers" colony of Tujunga, which was based on the principle that everything a family could need might be gained through farming the property that they owned and that "land had value only if people lived on it." He donated a parcel of land for the construction of
Bolton Hall, which was used as a
community center, a
city hall and, finally, a
historical museum. In 1939 Hartranft published a book,
Grapes of Gladness, as a counterpoint to
John Steinbeck's disturbing work,
The Grapes of Wrath. In it, Hartranft spoke of the "communistic implications" of Steinbeck's "notoriously inaccurate" novel and argued that "California still has room for all who can feed themselves from our endless-chain gardens, instead of from the State Treasury." Hartranft was a member of the California State Forestry Board in 1943, and he was instrumental in persuading officials to stock supplies of fire-resistant pine seeds as a way to reforest areas destroyed by brush and forest fires. ==Personal life==