Word: valleys
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tacky mattress or two, tattered blankets, a stick of old furniture, cooking utensils, a flap of canvas. Behind them, in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, lay the dead land of the drought. Ahead, at the end of the road of flight: California, the rich, full, well-watered San Joaquin Valley, where vast orchards and fields seemed magically alive with grapes, potatoes, peaches, cotton. Those were the bad years, and the Okies-300,000 of them-were hungry for work. Desolate, they moved from harvest to harvest-scrounging food for emaciated children, bedding down in farm shacks or U.S. Government emergency camps...
Last week, a full quarter-century later, the San Joaquin Valley was thriving, and the Okies were thriving. In Bakersfield, Fresno, Visalia, Modesto, the Okies were Californians, still speaking the accents of the Southwest, still voting Democratic, clapping their hands to the hillbilly music of their favorite TV entertainer (''Cousin" Herb Henson), still whacking away at religion, Bible-belt style (Scotch-taped legend on one Oklahoma car: OBEY Acts 2:38). They had, most of them, made good-so good that nobody even thought to ask, "Whatever became of the Okies...
...Bernice Frederick) Sisk, 47, rolled into the valley from Texas in 1937, took the first job he could find-thinning nectarines near Visalia-and saved enough to send for his wife and baby. He was elected in 1954 (and again in 1956) to the U.S. House of Representatives...
Grapes & Garbage. At length he arrived in the valley, welcomed by a brother who brought a suitcase full of grapes. Then came the job hunting: he carried a lunch pail, as if to assure any sharp-eyed foreman that he was ready for work (even though the pail was empty); once, without being hired, he pitched in on a construction crew, hoping that the supervisor would reward his zeal with pay, and got no pay. When he had only 75? left to his name, he latched on to a job as roustabout in the oilfields...
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...