Odes Herman Erwin, my father and the first-born child of Mike and Minnie Erwin, had a severe case of “itchy foot” his entire life. He sired eight children, and each was born in a different location. Although he would do many things during his lifetime he was a teamster at heart and followed the oil booms of the early twentieth century in Kansas and Oklahoma. Family tradition has it that he never wanted to own real property because he didn’t want to be “tied down.” In fact, he once homesteaded land in Oklahoma, but when it came time to finalize the process by “proving it up” he abandoned it and moved on, undoubtedly following his vision of greater opportunities just over the hill.

It was in 1931, that the rain stopped and the dust began to blow in the Great Plains region. The next eight years or so would come to be known as the Dust Bowl Era. In 1933, my father started having visions of opportunities “out west,” and by 1936, the urgings of his “itchy foot” was something he could no longer ignore.

It was in some of the worst years of the Dust Bowl Era that I have my earliest conscious recollection. It was about the middle of June in 1936, and my family was preparing to leave Kansas and strike out for California. An older brother Raymond and his wife Alma, along with her parents, had already gone there. My father had disposed of all of his farm machinery, blacksmith tools and the family household furniture. He had purchased a 1931 Dodge sedan and a little two-wheeled homemade trailer. All of our worldly goods were packed in the car and trailer. The only piece of furniture that Dad apparently allowed Mom to bring on the trip was her Singer treadle sewing machine. He had placed it in the trailer upside down, and then packed other prized possessions and necessities around it. On top of everything went a mattress, where he and Mom would sleep during the trip.

Goodbyes had been said and everyone was ready to go – except me. I took off down the gravel driveway. The incident is still vividly clear in my mind’s eye. It seemed as if the gravel was a foot deep. My Dad ran after me and scooped me up. My own itchy foot getaway attempt had been thwarted, and the trip to California had begun.

There were five of us: Mom, Dad, Mary who was eighteen (she had been staying with my oldest sister Goldie and husband John in Topeka until she graduated from high school), my brother Bud who was eleven, and me. My father had heard stories about the hardships of early-day pioneers, as well as about the experiences of previous depression-era travelers who had become stranded while crossing the Mojave Desert. Hoping to avoid the heat he elected instead to take the “northern route” through Utah and the Donner Pass to California.

The trip must have been a tremendous undertaking in 1936. Money was limited so there was no possibility of staying in “tourist cabins” or eating in restaurants. We camped out each night and cooked on a Coleman gasoline stove. Mom and Dad slept on the mattress in the trailer, and Bud, Mary and I slept in the car. I recall very little about it, but I do have whimsical flashbacks of “camping out,” and of gazing out at the Great Salt Lake as we passed through Utah.

About the only things that really stand out in my memory about the trip was the seemingly endless expanse of white “dirt,” and of standing on a bucket in the back of the car to see out of the car window. Bud tried to convince me that the white stuff on the ground was snow, but even at three I knew that it was cold when it snowed, and it was hot! The white dirt was, of course, the salt of the Great Salt Lake Desert, west of Salt Lake City, Utah.

I feel certain that my father hadn’t bargained on the heat of the Utah salt plains, or the high passes in the western mountain ranges. The 1931 Dodge was the model that still had wooden spoke wheels. In dry weather, the oak spokes would dry out, the wood would shrink a bit, and the wheels would squeak and creak. Bud remembered that Dad was always afraid that the wheels would collapse. He would frequently wet them down to make the oak wood expand. He also had little moon-shaped spacers that he would pound in between the end of the spoke and the rim. We made it across the blistering Utah desert okay, but then we had to cross the ten thousand-foot-plus passes in the Rocky Mountains, and finally the Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

On reflection, I’m sure that about this time my father wished that we were all back in flat old Kansas. Picture if you can, that my father had only learned to drive about fifteen years previously, and that he had never in his life seen real mountains. The Ozark Mountains of northwestern Arkansas, where he was born and lived until he was ten, can be compared to the low foothills of the Sequoia Nevada Mountains on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley in central California. Before the trip to California the only “mountains” that he had been exposed to were the rolling hills of northern Oklahoma and southeastern Kansas. Add to this the reality that in the 1930s there were no freeways or four-lane highways on the way to California, only narrow two-lane winding roads, and sometimes they weren’t even paved. There were places in the mountains where, when two cars met, there wasn’t room to pass; one or the other would have to back up. In addition, Dad often felt the wrath of other drivers because he drove so slowly. He constantly worried about the fact that he had just enough money to get to California – if he had planned right, and if nothing went wrong.

But we made it. The trip took about three weeks. According to Bud and Mary, Dad didn’t drive very fast, probably about twenty-five miles-per-hour, and if he got up to thirty he was really moving. Nothing drastic happened, but my father always said that he had exactly twenty-five cents in his pocket when we arrived at my brother Raymond’s house near the little community of San Joaquin, about thirty miles south of Madera in Fresno County.

Soon, after we arrived, Mary left us for a regular job and eventual enrollment in Fresno State College. During the next three years my parents were poor migrant farm workers. We moved frequently, not because Dad was exercising his itchy foot, but because he was frantic to find enough work to keep his family from starving. Things did eventually get better – not because of government handouts or help, but because my father was a survivor.