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attributed to innovation within their industries and business practices.
Here’s the story of Stamoules Produce and the Stefanopoulos family, who took delivery of the King Air 360 in November 2020.
Planting the Seeds
Spero Stamoules planted his first cantaloupe crop in 1927, using seeds he’d started collecting from plates while waiting tables at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel after immigrating from Greece as a young man in 1903.
He eventually pursued his dream to farm using those seeds, but it took some time. He was a fruit merchant
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in San Francisco, then moved back to Greece during World War I. He married his wife Helen in 1921 and returned to the Bay Area with her in 1925. By 1927 he was farming on what is considered by some to be the world’s most productive agricultural land – California’s Central Valley.
He was one of the first cantaloupe farmers in Mendota and is credited with helping the town just west of Fresno become known by some as the Cantaloupe Capital of the World. Spero weathered the Great Depression by selling produce door-to-door and at farmers markets, then started to grow his operation big enough to supply wholesalers and restaurants in neighboring states and the East Coast.
While riding the train in 1944 with the first load of his cantaloupes to travel to New York, he died of a heart attack on the platform at Grand Central Station. He was 54 years old and left behind his wife Helen and Peggy, the 13-month-old daughter they had adopted a year earlier.
“My mother continued on and fulfilled his dream,” Peggy Stefanopoulos said on a video produced in 2020 by Textron Aviation. “His legacy lives on through my husband, Tom. We never changed the name. It’s still Stamoules Produce.”
Similarly, Walter Beech was an early aviation entrepreneur and started Beech Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kansas, in 1932 with his
JUNE 2021