DATE: Monday, September 8, 1997             TAG: 9709060119

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Larry Maddry 

                                            LENGTH:  105 lines

69TH STREET IRREGULARS LEAVE NO BANANA PEEL UNTURNED IN SEARCH FOR PERFECT TOMATO

On the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, behind the drone of boat engines, the squeals of children frolicking in the surf and the sand-crunching strides of joggers with Walkman headsets plugged into ears, there are those who march to a different drummer.

They are the 69th Street Irregulars, a loosely organized but often intense band of green-thumbers pursuing an elusive dream: the perfect tomato.

Their patron saint is Thomas Jefferson, who is said to have debunked the myth that the ``love apple'' - as the fruit was known in Colonial times - was not poisonous but delicious.

Without fanfare, the 69th Street Irregulars can be seen on summer afternoons in filthy, smelly clothes, floppy hats or ball caps on their heads, inspecting the tomatoes in their backyard gardens, plucking off tomato worms as they go.

At other times they can be seen patrolling the perimeters of their postage-stamp farms with tomato stakes on their shoulders - instruments for fending off rodent predators.

``Eternal vigilance. . . those are the watch words,'' says Fielding Tyler, a retired U.S. Army officer dubbed ``Secretary of Defense'' by the Irregulars.

The core membership includes Tyler, the director of the Old Coast Guard Station on the Oceanfront, lawyers Morris and Andrew Fine, banker Carl Sewell and wife Brucie, advertising agency co-owner Bill Campbell, and housewife Khaki Mays.

Tyler keeps the Irregulars and their friends informed of tomato news with e-mail on the Internet.

Here's a typical message, written in July: ``Mr. Campbell (Bill) has a problem. The Campbell tomatoes, struggling under too much shade - and battling to overcome their chemical dependency on Miracle Gro - have fallen prey to an errant wind.

``Most plants were tumbled and broken but emergency tomato medics have propped up the survivors. Hopes still run high that he can produce some kind of crop this year. He hopes to pluck the first Campbell fruit - an early planted Better Boy - this Sunday with great reverence and ceremony.''

Tyler said the first Campbell tomato was picked on July 20 with several Irregulars present - drinks in hand - to observe the picking.

``I made a notation that it was free of blossom-end rot but showed imperfections,'' he said.

Campbell says members have tried every growing method and apparatus known to man, ranging from cages made of tiny hoses (which can be used to drip water onto tomato plants) tiny fertility dolls (buried with the tomatoes).

``No incantations,'' Campbell explained. ``There has been a discussion of blood sacrifice, but it hasn't gone very far.''

The Irregulars' reputation has gone far, or at least as far as Hampshire, England, where Diana and Jeremy Cobban have applied for a qualified membership. ``We hope this does not signal the end of rose growing as we knew it,'' they write.

Experimentation is encouraged by the Irregulars. Thus Tyler tried wrapping banana peels around the plants he bedded this spring.

``It produces better-looking leaves and more of them but has had no effect on the tomatoes themselves,'' he reported.

Tyler, whose home backs up to Seashore State Park, has a problem - raccoons that he refuses to trap or injure.

``So I have to plant 15 percent more tomatoes to ensure that the raccoons get their share,'' he said. ``I recently found a raccoon mother with her two babies in the garden.'' They spend so much time with the tomatoes Tyler has seriously considered proposing them for membership in the Irregulars.

Human members have bonded around the likes of Big Boys, Better Boys, Supersteaks, Beefmasters, Mountain Prides and Early Girls since the 1970s.

And there are competitions in the earliest and largest tomato categories.

``We give no prizes,'' Tyler said. ``The winners have bragging rights until the next crop comes in.''

The largest tomato has come from the garden of Morris Fine, who takes his tomato growing so seriously he is dubbed ``Secretary of Agriculture.''

This summer Fine grew a tomato weighing over 2 pounds. A committee of Irregulars observed as Fine weighed the large tomato on the postage scale in his office, where it registered 2.86.

Tyler claims no one was sure what the ``.86'' meant.

To clarify the matter, the tomato was taken to the ``big vegetable'' scale at the Farmer's Market in Virginia Beach. It weighed in at 2 pounds, 1 ounce. The market is sponsoring a vegetable contest with a prize of $50 for the largest tomato. Tyler said Fine has entered the contest and will ``establish a tomato-growing scholarship if he wins the $50 dollars, or, possibly, a home for orphan tomatoes.''

Fine takes little pride in the 2-pound Beefmaster's appearance, describing it as ``ugly, possibly grotesque, resembling the mutation experiments of a mad scientist.''

Nevertheless, it has prompted at least one poem, e-mailed by Tyler's daughter Elisabeth Mathis, a resident of Paradise Valley, Ariz.:

From the street they call 69

Comes a wonder from the vine,

A tomato two-pounder,

Is quite the astounder,

An accomplishment mighty fine.

Fine believes good tomatoes are the result of soil preparation. In the late fall, he skulks up and down streets in Virginia Beach in his foul-smelling gardening clothes, taking away plastic bags filled with leaves that raking homeowners have placed at the curbside. Then he tosses them into the trunk of his car.

Once home he dumps the leaves directly onto his garden, disdaining the compost pit.

``My wife finds the practice disgusting,'' Fine noted.

But it is, he says, a small price to pay. ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY

The Virginian-Pilot

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