Word: bakersfield
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...place. His father, an immigrant from Norway (the original family name was Varran), was a railroad worker in Los Angeles when Earl was born. The elder Warren joined the American Railway Union and was blacklisted in 1894 when he went on strike. He moved the family to Bakersfield, where he got a job and began working his way up the economic ladder to the comfortable perch of prosperous landlord. But young Earl had a keen understanding of the workingman's problems. As a teenage clarinet player, he joined the musicians' union and also worked as a freight-yard...
...hills behind Bakersfield, Haggard has a $700,000 mansion surrounded by 180 acres of grassland and tan, windswept vistas. The property includes an electrified gate, a moat, a swimming pool and a barbecue pit of roughly bullring dimensions. Inside the house are enough walkie-talkies, mobile telephones, cameras, video-tape machines, tape recorders, amplifiers, speakers and other electronic gadgets to keep Haggard occupied for years. He is happiest, however, tinkering with his $50,000 model railroad: 250 freight cars, 35 locomotives and a scale replica of the Bakersfield terminal. Its main line is a kid's dream that runs...
Workin' Man. Life was not always that kind of a joyride for Merle Haggard, even if trains did always seem to play an important part. He was born April 6, 1937, in Bakersfield in a converted refrigerator car less than 100 yards from a heavily used Southern Pacific railroad main line. His father, who had brought the family West after fire destroyed their farm in Checotah, Okla., was a $40-a-week yardman. This and other highlights in Haggard's life are easy to trace in his songs...
...girls came around without his asking, just as the "snuff queens"-the country term for groupies-swarm around him at concerts now. At 16, he set up housekeeping in Eugene, Ore., with one of the girls. It lasted three months, and when it broke up, he went back to Bakersfield on a freight. And he ran into trouble with...
Haggard ended up his stay in San Quentin as a model prisoner. He worked hard in the prison textile mill. "When I got out, they gave me $15 and a bus ticket home." Once back in Bakersfield, Merle dug ditches, and he sang...