Farewell, Frieda
It was the Saturday of this year’s Women’s March. I was about to finish a weekend shift at the Los Angeles Times when my wife texted me the sad news: Frieda Caplan had died at 96.
News organizations around the world quickly published obituaries on her, including one by my colleague Dorany Pineda, for which I received a co-byline for contributing the word “loquacious.” Those initial remembrances and the ones that followed told the same, righteous tale: the “Kiwi Queen” was a legend many times over.
She was the first American woman to own and operate a wholesale produce company, succeeding in an industry that remains so macho, it makes a hot dog factory look like a nunnery. From the headquarters of her namesake company in the wealthy Orange County city of Los Alamitos, the child of working-class Russian immigrants changed how the United States ate.
Caplan and her daughters, Frieda’s Specialty
