Word: cottons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cooks & Giants. Over the years they worked in the rich fields, got jobs as salesmen, short-order cooks, orange-juice stand attendants, worked for wineries, warehouses and cotton gins, bought homes and farms, raised good crops, joined Rotary Clubs, sent their sons to become lawyers, accountants, teachers...
Paul Peoples, who was eleven when his family drove in from Arkansas in a 1929 Overland Whippet, picked cotton, waited anxiously with his mother and three brothers each Saturday to learn if his father had made enough money for groceries. Today Peoples, 32, is a graduate of Fresno State College, works on his master's degree, and is Fresno's deputy probation officer. "There were two kinds of people then," he recalls. "Those who had never had a desire to improve themselves -and those who were looking for some way to better their lot. My father-he didn...
Slowly his luck turned better. He rented five acres of desert land near Bakersfield, began raising hogs. Each night after work, he made the rounds of town restaurants, gathering swill to feed the pigs. With money earned from the hog sales, Roberts bought 15 acres for cotton, potatoes and alfalfa. After each day's work in the oilfields, he irrigated his crops; on hot summer nights he would lie down to sleep at the end of an irrigation furrow in his alfalfa field, and when the water got far enough down the furrow to lap at his body...
...farm full time. "If you want to start over, we'll start over," said his wife Manon. "If your heart's set on farming, you go right ahead." Every month he sent his Texas banker a $22 installment to pay off his Chevy loan. The cotton-gin owners liked him and staked him, and Roberts surged ahead. Today Cotton Rancher Roberts, with 7,000 acres, half owned, half leased, lives with his wife and two daughters in a $100,000 ranch home near McFarland, has a spread of comforts as wide as his cotton yield: a color...
Nothing has held the valley back: in the years since the first struggle to master the desert, Okie farmers big and small, along with the natives, have made San Joaquin Valley responsible for 92% of California's cotton crop (1957 estimated total: 11 million bales) and California the second biggest (after Texas) cotton-producing state in the nation. Valley land, once for sale at $150 an acre, now goes...