Okies Stayed, Altering California -- Long Road To Mainstream Acceptance Shapes Valley's Descendants

WEEDPATCH, Calif. - There's a scene in "The Grapes of Wrath," toward the end, when Pa Joad had just about reached the point of despair. "Seems like our life's over and done," he said.

"No, it ain't," Ma Joad replied, and spoke a prophecy:

"We ain't gonna die out. People is goin' on - changin' a little, maybe, but goin' right on."

If so, where did they go? What became of those 350,000 Dust Bowl victims of the 1930s, the Okies?

It turns out that the enduring Okies did more to change California than California did to change the Okies.

"Stop in any town in the San Joaquin Valley and you might as well be in Tulsa or Little Rock or Amarillo," said Dale Scales. "Same music, same, values, same churches, same politics."

Scales was the baby in a family of six that arrived flat broke from Oklahoma in August 1936. He nearly died of dysentery on a Bakersville riverbank under one of hundreds of ragged tents.

But the Okies were a resourceful lot. They had to be to make it across the bleached and chalk-dry Mojave Desert on Route 66, past the "bum barricades" at the California border, past the hatred and abuse.

What was not so apparent at the time, though, was that the Okies did not come as the customary migrant laborers to follow the harvests. They came as families looking for a piece of land where they could take root. And did.

Today Dale Scales, 57, owns more than a piece of land. But his 1,800-acre farm is mostly for old times' sake. He leases it out. He makes his living trading in huge tracts of farmland for corporate investors, lives on the highest hill in Bakersfield, keeps a $45,000 custom car in the garage and golfs at the country club.

An exact count does not exist, but one study estimates that as many as 3.75 million Californians, one-eighth of the state's 30 million population, claim Okie ancestry.

Few of the children of that impoverished, homeless army attained the wealth of a Dale Scales, although a surprising number did.

A BLENDED TAPESTRY

Most have simply blended an Okie thread into the tapestry of California.

So they find it unfair that only the inevitable share of misfits and troublemakers among them are still identified as Okies, as though it were a bad gene.

Across the Kern River from Bakersfield, over a bridge that practically spans the site of the long gone Hooverville, is Oildale, a town of 25,000.

Oildale to this day is known as Little Oklahoma. It's a gritty collection of truck stops and beer joints and loud country music over Buck Owens' station KUZZ.

According to Ed Woodruff, a black cab driver, Oildale also is a town of occasional Ku Klux Klan rallies and at least one cross-burning on the bridge from Bakersfield. To Woodruff, the message to blacks was clear: Stay out.

"The whole grapes-of-wrath image formed years ago, and we kind of got stuck in that mode," says Carol Powers, president of the Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce. It's an image, she added, that the city is trying to shed.

Bakersfield is at the southern edge of the San Joaquin Valley, a flat, 200-mile stretch of farms and orchards of epic size. It was along the ditch banks and eucalyptus groves around Bakersfield that most of the Okies clustered in their misery before questing northward.

The irony is that the message they received from the residents there was the same as the one Ed Woodruff received from their descendants. Stay out. But the Okies didn't. Today those descendants number about half the valley's 2.7 million people.

Scenes of the Okie camps, the Hoovervilles, the pitiful, ragged children taunted and shunned, return with striking clarity to Doris Weddell. She is a Californian who witnessed the Okie onslaught during the decade of the '30s.

She watched her native valley, she says, steadily take on manners and folkways of the rural Southwest that weren't there before.

The Okies brought the values they had received from rural pulpits about the dignity of hard work, the moral corruption of power and privilege, and those they heard over the radio from the social justice preachers of the era.

"The churches illustrate one obvious change," Weddell said.

"When I was a girl in Modesto, there were five - Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian and Episcopalian. "Now only the Catholic church is prominent. It serves the Mexicans, today's Okies. Now we have Pentecostals, Evangelicals, various fundamentalist congregations, and there are scads of them all over the valley. What used to be the main-line churches are almost insignificant."

LAST GREAT MIGRATION

Historians aren't sure just how many Okies poured into California in that turbulent decade. It was by all accounts the last great migration of a nation moving west and may have numbered as many as 500,000.

Even the term Okie is imprecise. Only about one-third of the refugees came from Oklahoma, the rest from Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and other states. If they weren't blown away with the topsoil of their farms, they were, as they said, "tractored out." A landowner with a new all-purpose tractor could replace 10 tenant farmers with mules.

What sustained them through their hunger was the deeper hunger to survive with their families intact. Circulars and newspaper ads held out the promise of jobs aplenty in California.

Land reform in Mexico in 1934 had slowed the customary seasonal supply of migrant pickers in California and growers regarded the Okies - briefly - as a godsend. But they came in such overwhelming numbers they quickly became a scourge, and their desperation for a few coins was such that growers discovered that by lowering wages they actually increased the labor supply.

From 1935-39, the height of the migration, flivvers clattered along the 2,448 miles of Route 66 like ants on a honey trail.

One, a rickety Model-A Ford flatbed truck, belonged to Gustavus Faulconer of Coalgate, Okla. After his cotton dried up and blew away, Tave, as he was called, mined coal. When the mine closed, he sold moonshine. When he got caught, he paid a $26 fine, all the money he had, piled his wife and six kids and all their belongings on the truck, swapped his tire jack for a tank of gas and hit the road in 1938.

"We often had nothing to eat, nothing at all, until we got to Weedpatch," recalls Tave's son, Carleton, who was 8.

Weedpatch, south of Bakersfield near Lamont, was the location of the Arvin Federal Migratory Labor Camp celebrated by John Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath." It was the first of 13 set up in California by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration.

The labor camp is still in business. Its two-bedroom plywood bungalows shelter 130 families, mostly from both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, for $3.50 a day from April through September. All the signs are in Spanish.

A half-dozen of the original buildings, including the old auditorium, remain.

"Folks come by often to look around, like, you know, a shrine," said Rigoberto Martinez, who has managed the camp the past 20 years. "They look for the slab where they used to live."

Ten-foot-square concrete slabs, arranged in a semicircle, were the floors for tents and later for one-room tin hovels lit by kerosene lamps. Separate buildings provided - indoor plumbing! Running water! Showers! A kitchen dispensed hot breakfast for a penny. Or you could work it off doing camp chores.

It also provided blessed relief for the Okie soul, relief from the hatreds and insults.

One thing the Okies brought that was not lasting was the stigma attached to their nickname. Mary Lynn Chess's Okie Girl Restaurant at Lebec is evidence of that.

Three generations later, most feel as Betty Faulconer does about the epithet.

"It made me mad to be called Okie when I was growing up.," she said. "But, you know, now I'm rather proud of it."