Uncle Paul can draw a cartoon lion in less than 30 seconds, using only the letter “u.”

   He is even more famous, however, for Uncle Paul’s Produce Market, the big green and white striped tent on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. The tent is overflowing these days with shiny apples, speckled pears, huge warty squashes and locally grown kiwis, four for a dollar. I didn’t even know kiwis grew in Oregon, but they do wonderfully well in this climate, he assures me.

   Paul Widerburg is a lifelong lover of fruits and vegetables. His father, a Utah farmer, was badly injured when Paul was young. “All us brothers had to go to work,” he says.

   He got a job at a small grocery store, where he was distinguished with the title of produce manager at the age of 15. He remained in the grocery business after moving to Portland, and he was the produce manager at Lamb’s Garden Home Thriftway for 29 years.

   He and his wife, Calla, had a vision, though, of an open-air produce market in Portland. It’s a matter both of aesthetics and of practicality for them to have their business in a tent. Produce simply keeps better outdoors, Paul says. An apple, he says, can age six to 10 times faster indoors than outside. The big tent also keeps down business costs, as well as evoking an old-fashioned, European style of shopping.

   The unusual structure was a hard sell for the city of Portland, though. There’s nothing else quite like it in the city, and it took the Widerburgs a year and a half of negotiations to get what they wanted. “They were really skeptical about doing a year-round tent,” Calla says, but finally, on Nov. 20, 2003, Uncle Paul’s Produce opened for business.

   Widerburg’s already-established relationships with Oregon growers serve him well. He gets his produce directly from them.
 
 “I’ve been buying from local farmers for 30 years,” he says. “It allows us to keep pricing really good, quality really high, and skip all the middlemen. … Our real niche here is local, local, local.”
 
 You can get specialty products like organically grown squash and Winter Banana apples here, but you also can get staples such as potatoes, onions and carrots, all grown nearby.
 
 The Widerburgs are serious about keeping their products affordable. “We’ve been on a budget our whole lives,” Paul says. “It’s fun to help people who are on a budget.”
 
 After a tour of Uncle Paul’s, I head to the Fred Meyer up the street for some informal comparison shopping. Red onions and avocados are the same price at both stores. Lemons are significantly cheaper at Paul’s, and his Oregon kiwis are half the price of Fred Meyer’s, which are from California.
 
 Some of Uncle Paul’s products are more expensive, but he also carries items like small, sweet Forrell pears that you can’t get at the supermarket.
 
 He’s a font of information about produce as well. “I spend a lot of time just talking to customers,” he says. “That’s my favorite part of the job.”
 
 Widerburg also writes about produce for the locally published fitness magazine Walk About. His most recent article discusses persimmons — did you know that worldwide, more persimmons are sold than apples? He’s written about the antiseptic powers of onions, and that coconut water was used in place of human blood plasma during World War II. (See www.walkaboutmag.com for back issues).
 
 Handwritten signs around the store say things like “Yummy Brussels Sprouts” or “Scrumptious Red Onions.” Calla Widerburg also puts out recipes that customers can take home.
 
 Bins are propped up on old barrels from regional wineries. Some of the bins are made from vintage fruit boxes, and the store is colorfully decorated with the Edenic images with which farmers used to label their wares: rosy children under a glowing apple tree, a radiant sun rising over a Technicolor orange grove.
 
 The tent is even insulated, this time of year, with cardboard produce boxes. They make attractive walls. I’m especially fond of the graphics for Lonesome Dove Washington Apples, and the box printed with a jaunty Fred Astaire of a sweet potato, dressed up in a top hat and holding a cane. He fits the music that often fills the store. Widerburg plays mixed CDs that he has made, with old tunes from Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers and Frank Sinatra.
 
 “I picked the happiest songs,” he explains, and was gratified recently to see a group of people literally dancing in the aisles.
 
 If you’ve noticed a big drop in your intake of fruits and vegetables since winter hit and the farmers markets closed, stop by Uncle Paul’s. It provides a similar dose of good food backed up by useful information. And if you’re lucky, you may learn how to draw a cartoon lion.