My memory of the next couple of years is hazy, but I know that early on we lived near Kerman, California for a time. I still have a picture in my mind’s eye of an old-fashioned gas station where my Dad bought his gasoline. Even now I can recall him taking my hand and the two of us crossing the street to a little store where he would buy a chocolate frog for me. I guess that I had a weakness for chocolate even then.

My father found work where he could. It was probably in late 1936, after the harvest season was over, that my parents and my brother Bud and I, as well as Raymond and Alma and Alma’s parents, moved up into the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Oakhurst in Madera County. It is believed that we all lived, at least initially, at Big Cedar Springs, which is about three miles or so north of Oakhurst on Highway 41. There was a general store, a saw mill, and a few “tourist cabins” there, all owned by a Mr. Allen. Bud recollects that all three families lived in the cabins, and that Raymond, Ray Lynch, and my father worked for a time at the saw mill. 

My father soon found work at the Murray Ranch nearby, which was much more to his liking, especially since the job included a house on the ranch property. Dad really liked the job. He liked working with horses and cattle, and it was the first time since leaving Kansas that we were living in a real house, primitive though it was. 

On special occasions Dad would fire up the old Dodge and take us all for a picnic at Bass Lake, only a few miles away. There Bud could practice his swimming skills, while I paddled around with Mom watching to make sure I stayed in shallow water. Other times Dad would accompany Bud and me to a little creek near our house. There, with no one else around, he would join us in the shallow water of the creek. Bud remembers that he was a comical sight in his cut-off long-handle underwear. Even though it was an amusing sight, Bud said he was never brave enough to let him know, by word or look, that he found his appearance unusual in any way as he splashed in the creek with us. Even I remember the stark contrast between Dad’s ruddy face and his tanned hands and arms and the alabaster whiteness of the rest of his body. 

I also have a distinct memory of another time that Dad had taken me swimming. We were on our way back home on a little dirt road when we suddenly came upon a huge diamondback rattlesnake crossing the road. My recollection is that the snake stretched most of the way across the road. Dad picked me up and we moved back until the snake moved on into the brush. He didn’t want to unduly worry my mother about the snake, but when we got home I blurted out the complete story. Mom had been concerned that bears and mountain lions would carry me off, and now she had something else to worry about. She would hardly let me out of her sight the rest of the time we lived in the mountains.

By 1938, Dad’s job at the Murray Ranch ran out, and we moved to the Bakersfield area, following the harvests like thousands of other displaced families from the Dust Bowl. This was during the Great Depression, and my father and mother, like so many others described in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, were migrant farm workers. The growers had advertised heavily in the Great Plains area during the early days of the Dust Bowl era, so consequently there was still an oversupply of farm workers. This was great for the growers, and most took advantage of it by offering starvation wages. On average, they were offering thirty-five cents an hour to pick peaches and nectarines, twenty cents for potatoes and lettuce, and one dollar for a ton of peaches. The average field hand worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, and earned five to seven dollars a week. What California had to offer the migrant workers in those days was misery and deprivation.

During “dead time,” or between jobs, the migrant workers would live wherever they could. Some lived in the bottoms of dry lakes, such as Kern Lake, or along the banks of rivers, such as the Kern, the Kings, or the San Joaquin. Others lived on canal banks, under bridges or in an Okieville, or squatter’s camp in a deserted field. Some of the lucky ones could get into one of the labor camps operated by the Farm Security Administration, an agency of the Department of Agriculture, such as the Weedpatch Camp near Arvin, which was southeast of Bakersfield. Weedpatch Camp was no paradise, but for the families who settled there it was a vast improvement over life in an Okieville.

We were no different. While moving around, following what work there was, we lived where we could and how we could. Part of the time we lived in unorganized labor camps in a makeshift tent; part of the time in a labor camp “cabin,” which was always just one room – usually about ten by twelve feet square – and part of the time we camped temporarily with another family or two as squatters. In today’s vernacular, we were homeless. 

For a while we lived in an abandoned Santa Fe Railroad building west of Bakersfield, which at one time had been the railroad station for Rosedale. We stayed there several months, for what must have been the winter and spring, for I can remember that the barren fields across the road were green and that I dug a “cave” in the soft sandy soil. I vaguely recall that there was a potato packing shed just on the other side of the railroad tracks, and I still have a mental picture of my father crossing the tracks after working in the sheds all day. I would meet him at the tracks where he would take my hand, and we would walk together back to our “house.” 

At times, my mother and father picked cotton. They would go to the fields at sunrise, drape the straps of an eight-to-ten-foot cotton sack over their neck and shoulders and then, bent at the waist, start out down “their” row that would go clear across the field. Picking cotton by hand entailed tearing the fluffy pinkish-white cotton from the bowls on the stalks, using both hands, and then reaching around and depositing it in the cotton sack. Babies and small children would often nap on the end of the sacks as their mothers dragged them along. Many of the pickers would wear thin gloves with the tips of the fingers cut off, but the more tender fingers would invariably soon bleed from the sharp points of the cotton bowls. 

Of course, when the sack was empty the going was not too bad, but as the sack filled it required more and more effort to drag it along the row. When the sack was full or got to be too great an effort to drag, the picker would then drape it over his or her shoulder and carry it to the cotton trailer. There the cotton sack would be weighed with scales that were hung from a two by four that protruded from the trailer. The cotton sack straps were looped over the hook on the scales and a loop on the toe of the sack was also connected to the hook, thus doubling the sack to get it off the ground. Weights were recorded in a small ledger hanging by the scales. The picker would then climb a ladder to the top of the trailer and dump his or her load. A good picker, such as my father, could pick up to five hundred pounds in a twelve-hour day. 

At one point, while we were still living in the abandoned Santa Fe building near Rosedale, California, my father finally admitted to himself that he could not find work of any kind and, much to his shame and embarrassment, applied for relief (welfare). He insisted, however, that he be allowed to work in return for it. So, in contrast to many welfare recipients, Dad worked on local WPA crews until he could again find regular work. He earned a dollar a day working on government projects, more than he sometimes earned working in the fields or in the packing sheds, but to Dad it was not the same. To take President Roosevelt’s WPA money was humiliating.

It was while we were living in the abandoned railroad depot that I struck a neighbor squatter’s sleeping German Shepherd dog with a stick. He awoke with a snarl and bit me on the left side of my face. I still have a scar. I don’t remember the experience as being particularly traumatic, probably because I got an ice cream cone after each visit to the doctor’s office. Soon after the incident my big sister Mary came down from Fresno on the train to visit. The Santa Fe passenger train stopped right next to where we lived. I distinctly remember the conductor getting down from the car and putting a little stool on the gravel, allowing her to step down. I don’t remember how long she stayed, but I do remember that she brought me candy and a present. Mary told me many years later that Dad had told her during the visit, in a very apologetic voice, that for another fifty dollars the doctor could have treated the dog bite wound so that there would have been very little scarring. Dad was just barely able to sustain us at the time, and fifty dollars was probably as unattainable as fifty thousand dollars would have been. The scar never bothered me, and in my adult years I have come to realize what a tremendous struggle it was for us just to survive. 

During those tough years I was oblivious to most of the problems, and occasional crises, that my parents faced just to survive. Perhaps to blank out what was going on around me, and perhaps to exercise my itchy foot, I recall that I made a game of taking little sojourns into a nearby field, all the while pretending that I was a mountain man or an explorer. Big brother Bud often made fun of me, but I didn’t care; I was in my own imaginary world.