Finally! Bakersfield, California. But no job...

After the dust storm in Winslow, Arizona, the desert settled back down and the sun came out. It was the fiercest sunshine I'd ever seen. It was a very dry sunshine, but hot. Mighty hot, in a '55 Oldsmobile four-door sedan with Daddy, Mama, four kids and no air conditioning.

We entered California. Yay! The land of opportunity. It was my turn to sit by the window on the right in the back bench seat. I could read all the signs along the way. I read them aloud, as I had been doing with the Burma Shave signs across the desert. There were a lot of Spanish names of streets and towns which I didn't know how to pronounce. A while after Barstow we started descending into the San Joaquin Valley.

"San Joe-a-kwin Valley." I read the sign aloud.

Daddy laughed. "It's a Spanish word. I think they say it 'Waw Keen' or something like that." Hmm. Spanish. I was soon to learn there was a lot Spanish stuff in California. And Spanish people. I thought they just didn't know how to spell. We were coming into a whole new world. California.

We drove on into Bakersfield and rented a small motel apartment. Daddy went off to see his friend who had promised him a job in his mattress company, and Mama went to a laundromat to do the laundry. We kids enjoyed playing outside in the sunshine and/or watching TV, again black and white, and programs like Lucy and Ricky. Or westerns.

Anyway, when Daddy came back, we didn't hear his conversation with Mama, but their faces were mighty serious. Later we learned that the mattress company where Daddy was going to work had burned down to the ground during the week we were traveling across country. There was no job for Daddy.

You might think we could have had a little warning ahead of time. All the man had to do was call us... But remember, there were no such things as cell phones in those days. Not even car phones. And certainly we could not have afforded one had they been invented. Our phone in Pine Bluff didn't even have a dial on it. You just picked up the receiver and the operator would say, "Number, please." You would give her the four-digit number, and she would plug you in to that person's phone. We had been on what they called a "party line." That didn't mean people were having parties over the phone. It just meant there might be several families who could hear your conversation if they happened to pick up their phone. Lots of telephones were on the same "line." If you picked up your phone to call and some people were talking, the polite thing to do was hang up.

So anyway we were in Bakersfield with no job, very little money, and a beautiful car that must be delivered to Los Angeles in two or three more days. What to do? That, of course, wasn't for us kids to worry about. We had us a Daddy.

He rented a one bedroom (that's right, One-Bedroom for six people) apartment on South Chester Avenue. It had a tiny kitchen, a big living/dining room, and a bedroom/bathroom in the back. They put two mattresses on the floor in the living room, one for Jim and Ray, one for little Richard and me. (I'm smiling.) I think there was a bed frame for our parents' mattress/springs. The kitchen table that seated six completed the living room space, and we were set. We had a place to live in California. But no job.

Daddy drove alone to Los Angeles to deliver the beautiful Oldsmobile to its lucky owner. Then he rode the bus back to Bakersfield. I don't know the details of how he accomplished it, but he returned to the apartment with a family car. It was an old 40-something Chevy four door sedan, probably about the same age as the old cardboard-window Ford in Arkansas. It was light green I think, sort of nondescript, roomy inside but not as roomy or nice as the beautiful Oldsmobile in which we had just ridden across country.

The first thing Daddy did was go look for a job. He was a hard worker, and willing to do anything to feed and house his big family. He found a job picking up potatoes. Work like that was plentiful in Bakersfield and all the "San WawKeen Valley."

I never actually saw how the process went. I think a machine would be driven through the field to plow up the potatoes and workers would follow down the row(s) dragging a roughly woven tow-sack, and filling it with potatoes. When the sack was full, the workers would leave it and just grab another sack and continue down the row, filling it. Another crew of workers loaded the sacks on a trailer to be taken to the "Shed," where the potatoes were transferred by other workers to the "Belt" where they were sorted by size and bruised or damaged ones sorted out. Eventually all those crews of field and/or shed workers got the potatoes from under the soil and into stores for people to buy.

Picking up potatoes in the field was a very hard job. Since you had to bend over, way over... or squat down and move along like a duck-walk kind of thing, meanwhile dragging a tow sack that was continually getting heavier, the job was very hard on the worker's back and legs. Jim made it through one day, and couldn't walk, in fact could barely move the next morning. Daddy, who was more accustomed to hard work (carrying big mattresses) continued picking up potatoes for several days. Bear in mind this hard job was accomplished out in the middle of a HUGE field, in the blazing June sun. The temperature was above 100 degrees every day he worked out there. There was no shade.

He brought home potatoes, and we had beans and fried potatoes every night. Cornbread, too. It was so good.

Daddy got so sore he would come in at night and Mama would help him sit down on the side of the bed, where she would take off his shoes, socks, and clothes, because he couldn't. She would then help him into the bathtub where he would soak for an hour or so. She would help him out of the tub, dry him off, dress him and help him lie down in bed. And then he would get up the next morning, barely better, and go out there again.

Eventually, someone with clout noticed his persistence amidst his pain, and got him a different job, loading 100-pound sacks of potatoes off the trucks and onto the shed. That, too, was an immensely heavy job, but didn't involve bending over so much.

Thank you very much, Lord. We were in California, Daddy had a job, and we had a place to live, food on the table. We were happy. At least for a week or so...

But we wanted to find a Church. And that is another story...