Daddy's Dream... McFarland Mattress Company

Sometimes in later years in Bakersfield, people called Daddy "Mac." He said it was because they thought he had named his mattress company after his own last name, which they thought was McFarland. He never corrected his customers or business associates; he just smiled and let them call him Mac. He hoped they would recommend McFarland Mattress Company to potential customers.

McFarland was the tiny town about seven or so miles south of Delano where he discovered a small empty store front suitable for starting a mattress business. This endeavor had been his dream ever since the job he'd been promised had gone up in smoke in Bakersfield a week before we arrived from Arkansas. Even though he had settled into working construction (putting up button-board lath inside the new houses being built all around the southern San Joaquin Valley), he dreamed of starting his own business, a mattress business.

God was working it out for Daddy behind the scenes, laying a foundation that would greatly help him eventually when he started the business, or "bidness" as he called it. For instance, God provided the construction work which started in Delano but later took him to many of the surrounding small towns all over the southern part of the Valley. He became familiar with the areas. He met a lot of people. He was the kind of person who never met a stranger, but quickly befriended people.

Then, when the landlady asked us to move out of house we were renting on Cecil Avenue because her friends or relatives wanted to move in there, Daddy had to find another house for rent quickly. It turned out there was nothing suitable in Delano. All he could find was the tiny house on the West Side. During the few months we lived there, Daddy scoured the surrounding towns looking for a better place to live. He was a little hesitant to move out of Delano, not wanting to make us kids change schools, nor to live too far from the little church in Earlimart where we had continued to attend.

It was in looking for a house that he found the tiny store front in the tiny town of McFarland. It was a building in the middle of the one block of "downtown" McFarland. It wasn't even a building to itself, but shared side walls with the other businesses along the street. They called it "store front" because the whole walls facing the street were floor to ceiling windows, where the goods for sale could be displayed. Then there was a large open area, probably twenty feet wide and thirty or forty feet back, where the "sales" could be made, and behind that another large area (including a very dingy, tiny bathroom) where the mattresses could be manufactured. This store front was vacant for quite a while after Daddy discovered it, but he didn't have the means to rent it.

Not being privy to Daddy's finances, as I was only a young teenager and not interested in those things, I have no idea how he managed to scrape together enough money to rent that building eventually. I do know that he talked and bargained and traded to get together the wooden tables, tools, and machinery required to manufacture mattresses. Then after lathing all day, he worked nights making mattresses for people, some that we already knew, and some that he discovered in all his travels. He delivered these mattresses using the trailer we had brought from Arkansas, the one that almost lost a wheel in the dust storm in Arizona in 1955.

While we lived in the tiny house on the West Side, Daddy scraped together or borrowed enough money to buy an old blue International pickup truck, his first "bidness" truck. (I'm smiling.) Then somehow he rented the storefront in McFarland, moved his equipment in there, bought a power sewing machine, and opened for business. Many people who knew him years later after the business had been successful for awhile, never realized how much energy, effort, loss of sleep, and agonizing over finances that he had originally poured into that business. Many times when he had to choose between paying the rent on the McFarland store front or buying groceries for the big family, he prayed and trusted, and faithfully tithed, and God always supplied everything we needed.

Oh, how I loved my Daddy, and through his example I learned to love and trust my Heavenly Father, too. 

Eventually, the "shop" outgrew the little store front in McFarland, and we moved to Bakersfield, a bigger city. Even so, Daddy retained the name, "McFarland Mattress Company" and never corrected people when they called him "Mr. McFarland" or "Mac."

But Bakersfield, though, is another story...