Apparently when Daddy and Mama had been considering leaving Arkansas and coming to California, they had talked to people whose advice they trusted about several different aspects of such a big move. One of the things they were concerned about was finding a church in our denomination in or near Bakersfield. When Daddy had been in Bakersfield right after World War II, he hadn't been attending church.
Our pastor in Pine Bluff had grown daughters who were also preachers and who had toured California a couple of years before. They told Daddy they didn't know about Bakersfield, but there was one of our churches up the 99 Highway about 30 miles north of Bakersfield, where they had visited. They thought it was Delano, but were not very clear on the exact town.
So when Daddy had completed the horrendous week of hard labor in the potato fields/shed, on Sunday morning in the middle of June, 1955, we piled into the faded green Chevrolet four door sedan with no air conditioning and started up the 99 Highway looking for a Church of God, wearing our Sunday Best. For me, that was a starched and ironed dress, socks and Sunday shoes, my auburn hair all shiny and curled. The boys wore shirts that were starched and ironed with blue jeans that had been stretched on stretchers, socks and Sunday shoes, and hair greased and combed down all neat and shiny.
Before we arrived in Delano that morning, though, all these starched and shiny duds were limp and sweaty. The boys lobbied for the car windows (all four) to be open since it was over 100 degrees outside, but I didn't want my hair messed up after all that sleeping in curlers the night before. The boys won. Even so, our clothes were all limp and sweaty by the time we found a Church of God that Sunday morning.
I think that congregation was between Sunday School and Church when we got there. Daddy got out of the hot car (into the blazing sunshine) and approached a couple of men who were standing outside. He talked with them a few minutes, hands in his pockets at first, and then his head thrown back, pointing and laughing in one direction or another, then listening to them, nodding, smiling.
When he returned to the car, he said to Mama, "This is the Church of God Elders. Our church is in a little bitty town just seven more miles up the road." Even at ten years old, I knew the distinction between our Church of God and this Church of God Elders. We didn't want to go to the wrong church, no, sir. We would find our Church of God. (I'm smiling.)
So after a bit more wind in my curls, we arrived in the tiny town of Earlimart, and found our denomination just off the main drag. It was a rather cute little building, as I remember, actually looked like a real church, though very small. I was used to store-front churches in Arkansas. That's a building that used to be a store in a row of stores on a back street. There might be a little cafe or even a juke joint right next door, but at least on Sunday morning our hand-clapping foot-stomping country gospel music was not in competition with either the cafe or juke joint.
The Earlimart Church of God, though, was in a residential neighborhood. We filed inside, all six of us, Daddy leading the way. There weren't many people, maybe twenty something, in the congregation. The preacher was preaching away, and since everyone turned around to look at us as we came in, he paused and briefly welcomed us, then returned to his sermon. Just like most other preachers I'd ever heard, he preached hard. Loud and hard, pacing back and forth behind the pulpit, sometimes walking out in front getting right in people's faces and making wide, sweeping gestures, as he expounded on the Word of God. He had already shed his suit coat. Even so, his shirt was damp. No one thought anything of that. After all, they were farm workers. They knew people sweat when they work hard, especially in hot weather. That preachers sweat when they preach hard was not offensive to them. We liked it that way, loud, hard, sweaty sermons.
When the sermon was finally over, they dismissed with prayer, and most everyone gathered around our family in the back. They heard our story, and then offered a lot of good information. They said there was a Church of God not in but near Bakersfield, in a little town called Weedpatch. They said there was one family there, the Guinns, who had a lot of kids, and the mother was a long time member of the church. But no one knew exactly where that church was.
Daddy told them about the mattress shop burning down and how he'd been doing field work, was now working at the shed, but needed a better paying job. Some of the people there worked in construction, lathing houses. (Lath was like sheet rock, only full of holes. In the fifties, they hadn't invented sheetrock yet. They smeared plaster over this lath, and the plaster would smoosh through the holes and dry and make the wall very strong. Lathing was a great construction trade in those days.)
They offered to let Daddy work with them, paying him "by the piece" of lath that he nailed up. He took them up on it. We went to dinner at someone's house, dinner being what the midday meal was called in those days. (We always had breakfast, dinner and supper on Sunday back then. Dinner is the big meal. Supper is the lighter meal, usually left-overs from dinner. Nowadays if you eat three meals a day, it's breakfast, lunch and dinner. Dinner is still the big meal.)
At dinner, someone offered to rent us a house. It belonged to part of their family who had moved away ... And so it was decided. We would move to Earlimart. Daddy would become a lather and ... Life was good.
Living in Earlimart made for a very interesting summer. But that is another story...
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