It’s time to say goodbye to a Clark County holiday tradition: Local Kiwanis clubs have stopped selling grapefruit.
For the first autumn since 1981, members of the service organization aren’t holding their citrus-flavored fundraiser. The reason will make sense to anyone who has viewed a particular type of TV commercial in the past couple of years.
Those TV spots are advertisements for prescription drugs, and the sales pitches are followed by a litany of side effects. One warns: “This product is not for women who are pregnant or nursing, or who may become nurses” … or something like that. Another advises medication customers to avoid eating grapefruit or drinking grapefruit juice when taking the medication.
And over the years, the client list for the annual Kiwanis grapefruit campaigns have become the target audience for those drug manufacturers.
“Our sales have been going down,” said Orin Swanson, who has sold a lot of grapefruit since joining the Fort Vancouver Kiwanis Club in 1953.
“We hated to give it up,” Swanson said, particularly since a lot of the money benefitted the Kiwanis Doernbecher Children’s Cancer Program.
In 1982, when the Kiwanians started trucking in holiday grapefruit from Texas, their loyal customers weren’t on medications, Swanson said.
At the peak, the Fort Vancouver Kiwanis Club was selling 1,200 cases a year on its own.
“We were selling 2,000 cases between our club and a couple of others,” Swanson said. “Gradually, we’ve all aged.”
And last year, “we were down to 600 cases,” the retired veterinarian said.
When Swanson and other members of the 2014 sales team contacted longtime customers, “a lot of people said, ‘Gosh, we can’t take them this year.’ ”
Swanson even had to deal with the issue himself, he said.
“I checked with my doctor. He said I could eat half a grapefruit for breakfast and take my pill at night.”
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