The sight of grazing sheep dotting the hillsides of Calabasas on Las Virgenes Canyon Road will soon disappear, as shepherd Luigi Viso is being forced out by development.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
The 21st century might finally be catching up with sheepherder Luigi Viso. The 78-year-old Italian-American, who has faithfully kept a flock of sheep grazing in the hills of Calabasas just south of the 101 Freeway for the past 47 years, will have to seek greener pastures. Those sun-seared hills have been sold for development, he said in his Old World-accented English.
“I gotta get out,” Viso said from the shade of a sheep shed one hot Saturday afternoon recently. “But, I no wanna get out.”
Viso has consistently kept herds of 40 to 50 sheep during the past five decades, following a family heritage that goes back centuries in Sicily. While Viso’s vocation, like his father’s, was stonemasonry, he keeps sheep as a hobby and as a way to keep him connected to the land.
Viso’s family fled Italy after the country’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini came to power in the early 1920s; young Luigi was born in Pennsylvania. His family returned to Sicily in 1933 and lived out the rise of fascism and World War II as anonymously as possible in a small village near Palermo. But Viso’s father wasn’t keen on “Il Duce’s” policies.
“Mussolini put my father in jail for four years,” Viso said. “When I turned 18, my father sent me back to America to go make my fortune.”
He arrived just as the Korean War was gearing up and, as an American-born citizen, found himself subject to conscription. His military career didn’t last long.
“I showed up at base camp and they sent me home three days later,” Viso said. “They said I didn’t speak English good enough to serve.”
But he was able to work as a mason and the post-war building boom of the ’50s brought him to California. His mother had an old Palermo school chum whose daughter was working as a local telephone operator and arranged an introduction. Angela and Luigi were married in 1963. They bought a house in Calabasas the same year.
“That house cost me $13,000 back then,” Viso said. “People have offered me hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. But I’m not gonna sell. Ever.”
During the next 46 years, his sheep became a familiar sight, dotting the steep hillsides above Las Virgenes Road. He started with 10 head in 1963 and kept growing, crossbreeding till he got the sheep he wanted.
“The sheep I have now, they have horns and that’s good for fighting off coyotes,” Viso said, adding that the coyotes were a problem. At one point he hired someone to shoot the predators but it didn’t work out.
“The guy, he was a bad shot,” Viso said. “He kept shooting the lambs instead of the coyotes. I had to fire him.”
Viso’s seasons are divided into the imperatives of sheep husbandry: shearing in May, breeding in October, birthing in March. A well-bred lamb can bring $150 and good fleeces can fetch $18 a pound. While a sheep can produce anywhere from two to 30 pounds of wool annually, keeping sheep is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Veterinary bills are a constant and shearing costs are an invariable negotiation. But Viso likes his sheep.
He no longer shears his own sheep (“I cut off my fingers,” he said) and he is unsentimental about his young charges. As Viso extolled the quality of his lambs, one of his helpers, Nelson Pineda, was busy preparing a large bucket of lamb meat for barbecue later in the day.
“I sold my lambs all over,” Viso said. “I used to sell lambs to Bob Hope for his barbecues. He was very nice man.”
Viso and his wife Angela had two sons, Salvatore and Antonio. “Tony” was killed at age 18 in a bus crash in 1982, but “Tory” still lives with his four children close by. Tory has not followed his father into shepherding.
With the looming eviction from the Calabasas pastures, Viso said he is going to take his herd to a 10-acre ranch he has near Carson City, Nev., transporting them in a white Chevy pickup that has rusty doors and 893,423 miles on the odometer. Viso bought it new in 1962.
“I paid $1,400 for it,” Viso said.
They call the truck “Sheep A-Comin.”
Angela said she is not sure what she will do with her husband in his forced retirement, admitting she’s much more interested in his masonry work than his animals.
“I guess he’ll take the sheep up to our land in Nevada,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him here. I like his sheep -from afar. I like stuffed animals better.”
Viso said he will probably go see friends in the daytime, if he doesn’t have to care for his sheep. He’s not anxious to leave Calabasas, though he said that he has seen “huge changes” come to Southern California over the years.
“Too many people now,” he said. “There should be more sheep.”