Grapes of Wrath - Unknown County, Oklahoma Submitted by: Gene Phillips 7 Nov 2004 Return to Unknown County Archives: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ok/okstate.html ========================================================================== USGENWEB NOTICE Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm ========================================================================== THERE'S A LOT OF SONOMA COUNTY HISTORY IN 'GRAPES OF WRATH' Published on September 22, 2002 The Santa Rosa Press Democratt COLUMN: Gaye LeBaron We almost starved to death. My Dad picked cotton. I picked cotton. My sister picked cotton. They didn't pay us in money. They gave us scrip to buy food and we couldn't make enough to live on." Sounds like something right out of John Steinbeck, doesn't it? It isn't. It's Santa Rosa businessman Glen Crownover talking to me, 20 years ago, telling the story of his family's exodus from Oklahoma and their tortuous journey to Camp Windsor in Sonoma County in the 1930s. It could well be a line from Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Grapes of Wrath." I am revisiting the Crownover experience because there's an awful lot of Steinbeck's "Grapes" going around these days. This is the centennial year for the Salinas-born writer who is often credited with raising the consciousness of the state and the nation to the plight of migrant workers. In tribute, there is to be a statewide celebration of his birth next month, including scholarly lectures and seminars and mass readings of his magnum opus. Here in Sonoma County, we got a jump on the rest of the state. At Saturday's book fair, people took their turns reading aloud in Old Courthouse Square from the book. Our public television and radio stations, KRCB and KRCB-FM, have enlisted citizens, some well-known, some less so, to read 90-second segments on TV and longer spots on radio. And then there's Gerald Haslam, who will be the busiest author-scholar in the state in October. The Penngrove resident and Sonoma State University professor emeritus, who is acknowledged not only for his books about the Dust Bowl migrants but as an authority on Steinbeck and his work, has a dozen or more talks scheduled throughout the state next month, including in Santa Rosa and his native Kern County. Haslam, who is often compared to Steinbeck for his "rural realism," modestly declines the honor but acknowledges the influence. "`The Grapes of Wrath."' he says, "was the first novel I ever read all the way through." He was 15 and "it was the first book I'd read about real people and real events." Living in Oildale, a working-class suburb of Bakersfield, with a father who had come from Texas and a mother who was the only native Californian on their block, Gerry could relate to the story of the migrants. "I didn't know any Joads," he says, referring to Steinbeck's fictional family, "but I sure knew a lot of people who said they were that bad off." NOW, FOR migrant kids grown up and their descendants, "Grapes of Wrath" is where the stories begin. Haslam quotes his friend Clyde Nance, who worked as a security officer at SSU. His family was a lot like the Joads, Nance would say, "but we didn't have no damn mattress on top of the car." The image of that old truck with the mattress on top, from the film version of the Steinbeck story, is the symbol of those terrible journeys. Opal Garrett Young, a Windsor resident who was one of the people I interviewed 20 years ago, told me, right off, that her family was different. "We didn't have a mattress on top of the car, we had a chicken coop. With chickens. When we stopped, my mother would get out and gather eggs." While the setting for "Grapes" is the Central Valley, there's a lot of Sonoma County history reflected in Steinbeck's 1939 novel. The stories have happier endings than the Joads', but they were Steinbeck stories in the beginning and the middle. Their arrivals at Camp Windsor, a government labor camp on Windsor River Road, could have been the Joads'. There is a kind of magic interlude, about two-thirds of the way through Steinbeck's story, when the Joads discover Weedpatch Camp on Highway 99, where there were clean camp sites and hot water and showers and laundry facilities and flush toilets and, most important, kind people, and Ma Joad wept for joy. Camp Windsor was the same kind of camp, and its story attests to the fact that Steinbeck's novel is more than a work of fiction. It's the truth -- with made-up names. And stories like it were told all through the agricultural valleys of California -- up to and including the hopyards and orchards of the Russian River Valley. I TALKED to Bill Crownover last week. Bill was 6 years old when they left Calumet, Okla., in their Model A. The images of schoolyard fights are still vivid in his memory. "Imbedded," is the term he uses. "We stopped in Yuma (Arizona), and I was too young to pick cotton, so they put me in school, in the first grade, and I was getting all this crap and getting in fights. "The same thing happened in the Imperial Valley and again when we got to Windsor," he says. But in Windsor, the boys he fought for calling him an "Okie" became his close friends. Bill talks about the closeness of his family, their faith in God and how important it was to keep a sense of humor. He remembers his father, Hyrum, as a "250-pound powerhouse of a man" who found work as a guard in the orange groves of the Imperial Valley once they reached California. His sister, Ann Baughman, remembers how welcome a sight Camp Windsor was after the open ditches and floorless tents of the Imperial Valley and how hard it was on her mother, Jessie, who strived to keep her children clean and healthy. "She had to go into the fields, too," says Ann, "to pick cotton and, when we got here, prunes and hops. One year Glen and I didn't go to school because we had to pick to help the family." Like Ma Joad in "Grapes of Wrath," Jessie Crownover was more than happy to see the showers and laundry and tent floors of Camp Windsor. THE GREAT Depression was old news and the Dust Bowl migration was waning by the time Camp Windsor was established. It was the last and the northernmost of the coastal valley camps built by the Farm Security Administration (one of FDR's "alphabet soup" agencies that were the New Deal's answer to the nation's economic problems). The camp was established in 1938, late enough for a substantial number of workers to have pushed this far north, but still a small number compared with those who settled in Orange and Kern counties. Haslam suggests the numbers reflect the fact that many migrants "just ran out of gas, literally. Their cars broke down before they got this far." In 1935, labor statistics show that 20,000 workers were required for the harvest of Sonoma County's many crops -- hops, prunes, pears, apples and grapes. About one-third of this number were migrants. Of those, roughly 1,000 were Dust Bowl migrants. Although they had come to be known by the generic (and originally derisive) term "Okie," they came from several states -- Arkansas, the Texas panhandle, Missouri and southern Kansas as well as Oklahoma. To say they were not welcomed is understatement. Immediate and organized opposition greeted the prospect of a labor camp in the county. Sensitized by the labor unrest that led to a tar and feathers incident in 1935, conservative growers and community leaders feared a camp would be fertile ground for union organizers, which they equated with socialists or "Reds." (Again, a chapter from the Steinbeck work.) The Associated Farmers of Sonoma County led a vigorous campaign against the camp, but FSA officials turned a deaf ear to the protests and selected the site on Windsor River Road, convenient to both the hopyards and the prune orchards where labor was in short supply. Once opened, it proved to be a dependable labor source and the very growers who had opposed it were among the first to use it as a "hiring hall." World War II ended the Depression. And, in some ways, improved our attitude. "We were an unjust society," says Haslam. "The war democratized us some." Good jobs were available. As Coates told me, "we could look at the jobs we'd been doing and know we didn't have to do that anymore." Ironically, Haslam points out, the number of "migrants" from the Dust Bowl area doubled and even tripled after the war began, coming to California to work in the shipyards. And Camp Windsor became a German prisoner-of-war camp, once again providing labor for the growers. Many of the former Camp Windsor residents I interviewed in the 1970s have died. Several of them are buried near one another in a plot in Windsor's Shiloh Cemetery. The last vestiges of the camp remain on private property. One resident used the foundation of the community building as a base for his barn. Will the attention to "Grapes of Wrath" raise any consciousness this time around? Probably not, says Gerry, "at least no more than the extent to which more people read it." "We've become inured," he says. "As a society, we are so relatively affluent that we try not to see poverty." The connection between the Okie experience and the Mexican laborer of today is not lost on either. Weedpatch Camp is still a labor camp, now called Sunset, where the population is primarily Mexican. At the annual Dustbowl Festival there, Haslam says, some of the Mexican workers take part, interested in the Okie stories and encouraged by the success of the migrant families. (Glen Crownover is a good example. Glen and his brother-in-law, Grant Baughman, are founders of Malm Fireplaces Inc., a highly successful Santa Rosa industry that is now run by Glen's sons.) Bill Crownover makes reference to this connection, too. "When I look at Mexicans now, I think, `I was there,"' he says. And the term "Okie" is no longer an insult. Haslam talks about his childhood friends, now school principals and lawyers, who consider the term a badge of honor. "Heck," he says, "I know people who call themselves Okies now who weren't."