Fruits Of Her Labor -- Produce Merchant Lina Constantino Fronda Goes To Market - Again And Again

Lina Constantino Fronda rises at 5 a.m. to prepare for her 12-hour day as proprietor of Lina's Fruits and Produce in Arcade No. 7 at Pike Place Market.

And yet the guys down at the produce wholesalers are hitting midday of their shifts by the time Fronda arrives with the rising sun to pick out her day's choice wares.

"In the produce business, you have to work around the clock," says Louie Cella, manager of Spud's Produce Co. Inc., a big wooden structure at one end of a long loading dock of wholesalers on Occidental Avenue near the Kingdome.

"You can't survive on eight hours a day and go home. It has to be in your blood."

It's in Fronda's blood, says Cella, who has known Fronda since she arrived from the Philippines in 1963 as the young bride of an American in his 60s. The marriage was arranged by her parents, not for happiness but for opportunity.

Fronda has taken full advantage. One by one she has brought family members to the United States to live with her in her Beacon Hill house. She went home to the Philippines to find a new, younger husband after her first husband's death in 1980 and now has found her happiness.

At the crux of that happiness is work - 12 hours a day, seven days a week. She's surrounded by family at work; she's surrounded by family at home. She goes to church two nights a week, goes to a movie once every five months and immediately falls asleep. Otherwise, she works.

She describes her life this way:

"Market to the house to the wholesaler to the market."

It goes on every day, except for Christmas, Easter and other occasional holidays.

She's not alone at the Market or in produce in putting in the long, hard hours required to make this old-fashioned trade profitable. But she is among a rare group that relishes it.

"This is it," says the lithe Fronda, 51, holding her palms up to direct attention to the reds, greens and yellows of the sweet strawberries, fresh asparagus, sweet ripe pineapples. "I thank God I have the energy to do it."

Her pleasure from constant movement helps explain why summertime, ripe with tourists and the delivery of fresh, local crops, is her favorite season.

Produce sales at the Market slow to a crawl in January, February and March and pick up in April and May before hitting stride in June. Fronda's day, which generally starts when she pulls her silver GMC pickup into the wholesaler at 6:30 a.m., starts one to two hours earlier in June so she can be at the stand for delivery of cherries at 5 or 5:30.

She has her own contract with two Eastern Washington cherry producers, who drive through the night to get to her stand. And when she allots the time for viewing, unloading and purchasing, she also mentally pencils in "time for talking."

Talking is part of the business.

Not a schmoozing, exactly. In Fronda's case, it's a continual search for information. She came to her husband's stand at the Market directly from the airport in 1963. Nearly 30 years later, she still goes to bed at night contemplating what she has learned.

That diligence is why she doesn't take a day off.

Her 29-year-old son, Donnie Constantino, helps out at the stand some days, takes a break to work on his muscles - Fronda rolls her eyes when she tells this - and then works from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. somewhere else.

Her 42-year-old husband, Edmund Fronda, labors relentlessly and cheerfully, as do her brother and sister-in-law and any other family member who can fit in time before or after their regular jobs.

But they don't have the interest in learning or the drive to take over the business.

"I trust them, but still I have to be with them to guide them," she said. "How to talk to customers. How to organize."

Her dedication has earned her respect from the men in the business who have served as her mentors. They speak of her in short, straightforward sentences, and then they do what they can to tease her into smiling, a rewarding but difficult task.

"She's quite a worker," says Cella at Spud's.

"I've been taking care of Lina since she was a kid," says Spud's owner, George Stilnovich, who nods when Fronda describes him as her "second dad."

Then he takes off with fists raised after her easy-to-tease husband, Eddie, who is wearing a jacket from Rosella's Fruit and Produce Co., the competition down the loading dock.

Fronda moves from cool room to cooler room to a room that is cooler still at Spud's.

Lemons, red potatoes, carrots are kept at 35 to 40 degrees. Apples and cantaloupes live in the mid-30s. Broccoli stays packed in ice.

Fronda opens the boxes, scrutinizes the fruit and vegetables, tries to strike a hard bargain.

At Rosella's, she deals with another mentor, Pat Boone. It's give-and-take. You take this, which we want to move out of here by today, and we'll throw in this.

"Take a look at this strawberry papaya," Boone tells her. When she's away, he gives her the ultimate compliments: She buys good produce, she works very hard, she's one of the first up and at it every day.

Forty-five minutes later, the open bed of the pickup precariously packed with produce, including a handful of red-yellow peppers from Canada that wholesale for $35, and she's on her way with this advice from Spud's:

"Drive slowly and don't go up any hills."

It's not yet 8 a.m. and life is just getting started at the 85-year-old Market.

At Lowell's Restaurant across the aisle, hash browns sizzle, espresso lures. The silver truck gets parked in the cobblestoned lane behind the arcade, where the clatter of a push cart, the arrival of a creamery truck and the shouts of a lively workplace freeze time.

Eddie, a young fulltime worker named Exzar Centeno, and Fronda's brother, Alfredo Constantino, go to work unloading the truck, moving cucumbers, apples, oranges and ginger to be set out on the stand or moved in bulk to a cooler across the lane, a task that will take two to three hours.

Fronda starts divvying up work orders for the eight restaurants they supply.

Customers trickle by.

"What can I get for you today, sir?"

Centeno is the most outgoing. He wears bright green shorts, a striped top, untied court shoes. He has a charming grin beneath his mustache, eyes that are bemused.

"Can I help you, madam?" he says to one older woman, who tells him to just keep up that smile. "What can I do for you, princess?" he asks a younger woman, who gives him an icy look.

Centeno swings and sways, opening paper sacks with a pop. Constantino carefully arranges. Centeno wheels his handcart or stops to make neat "Two for $1.50" signs. Fronda bustles. Her dark hair is swirled in a loose bun on her head and is home to her pen. Her heavy-duty black athletic shoes never stop moving.

She'll have no pains at the end of the day. Oh, maybe a slight tenderness in one knee, she says. But she'll take a hot 10-minute shower, rub a little oil on the knee, "and I'll be ready to go again tomorrow."

Next door at Arcade No. 8, a young man and woman whistle in harmony the Gillette Razor jingo. They, too, hustle with their work.

Arcades No. 5, 6, 7 and 8 all are topped with the same fading message. "Quality Fruits and Vegetables. Fresh picked daily." The signs are decades old.

At Fronda's stand there are bags out front, and you can touch and pick your own vegetables.

Her stand is connected physically to the combined Arcades No. 5 and 6, where the produce is displayed in short neat rows, like an exhibit at the Puyallup Fair, and comes with the warning "Do not handle."

Whatever people's preference, business seems to be about the same at each stand.

Fronda has only one rule: Don't squeeze the avocados and tomatoes. She tries to handle this delicately. She doesn't want to offend, but a squeezed avocado bruises and can't be sold the next day.

"Just remember that's an avocado," she says.

"Be careful, that's a tomato."

Trade starts to pick up around 11 a.m. and rushes through the lunch hour. Fronda, chopping and washing greens in the small space behind the stand, senses the rush and begins to spell her workers for their own lunches. By this time Centeno is shaking his ankles to restore the feeling.

A street person walks by wearing a cap that reads, "I Am Spending My Children's Inheritance." He's followed by a man pushing a shopping cart repeating, "If I run into you, you can't sue me because I ain't got nuthin'. If I run . . ."

It's a United Nations meeting. A blending of tourists, business suits, eccentrics.

"What else? What else do you need?"

When Fronda's first husband died, she returned to the Philippines, leaving her stand temporarily to Harry Calvo, who grew up in produce but has spent the years before and after his stint at Lina's working with Pure Food Fish Market.

Most of what Fronda knows about the business she learned from Harry, she says. The key things she got down well are this, he says:

-- No. 1 is waiting on customers.

-- No. 2 is setting up early.

-- No. 3 is finding the right buys.

Late in the day a man who plays the produce stand like a virtuoso stops at Lina's, his hands raised like a conductor as he carefully picks what he wants to serve for guests that night.

Gene L. Henry, owner of a nearby rare-coins shop, said he was tempted to Lina's by the strawberry papaya. They are small, but they are well-priced and rare, he said. He was disappointed by the basil, but Fronda found him a fresher bunch in the back.

He liked the stand because it was friendly and because he likes to pick out his own produce. Fronda is not above a bargain, though. He could tell she had cut the dark spots out of the cauliflower.

What's left of the produce at the end of the day will be carefully repacked and carted across the street to the cooler. What's past its prime will go for free to the hungry.

Fronda has many repeat customers, she says, but business in general has been down since the mid-1980s, when grocery stores began stocking more varied produce and parking became more difficult at the Market.

It's still possible to make a living, but not without making work your life. Fronda has one more sibling to bring from the Philippines before she can consider her duty done.

She's tried to interest other family members in taking over the business, but with no success. That doesn't make her unhappy. Where would she go? What would she do to occupy herself?

At the Market the days are long, but she doesn't recognize that until she sees other stands starting to pack up. That's often her first indication of the time. She's never tempted to look at the clock.

Her family is harmonious. On rare occasions she'll get mad and storm off to fool around at Nordstrom for an hour, and then she's fine. She doesn't fight with her husband. She has happiness, at last.

"Life is easy," she says, 12 hours after starting her workday, a crate of mushrooms on her head, ready to be transported to the cooler for the next day.