The Story of California
In an agricultural area with little cash, trade in products became the primary form of exchange. After struggling with their own crop, Collins and his wife chopped cotton for another farmer but the farmer had no money with which to pay them for their labor. Collins accepted apples as payment because “you could eat them.” However, apples were not enough to sustain them through the whole winter so on Thanksgiving Day 1935, he and his family left for California. Collins summed up his reasons for finally leaving Oklahoma for good: … I think when you can see no advantage in what you’re doing and you can see no way out I was sharecropping … I couldn’t make enough during the summer months to get me through the winter months.
I still had to find a job to partly support me. I think that was one thing that made me come out here. I was looking for a better life. All of us I guess all the way through life are looking for a better life to kind of upgrade ourselves. I think that was the thing. I never had any fears about it. I knew as long as I had my health I knew how to work. If somebody told me how when I didn’t know how to do it I could do it their way. (Collins 1981, p. 25) For Collins and other migrants, the opportunity to learn “their way” required relocating to California. Once in California, learning “their way” often required a life of continuing mobility as migratory agricultural labor. While migrants did not relish this lifestyle, it was typically the means to desired end settled permanence. Despite a recurring lifelong kidney ailment, Odyssey interviewee Frank Manies (1981) began his westward journey at the age of just 17, hitchhiking from Oklahoma to Texas. Although unable to find employment in the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Oklahoma, he managed to convince a Texan to trade places with him and relinquish his spot in the CCC. During his four-and-a-half-year term working for the CCC in Arizona, Manies took advantage of the time to become trained as a skilled mechanic. Throughout his time in Arizona, he held to his greater goal of going to California and upon his release from the CCC continued his journey.
From the time he arrived in California, Manies’ goal was to work. He began in the fields picking the same cotton that had been familiar to him back in Oklahoma and transitioned to pruning grapes and picking fruit. With the rise of the defense industry, Manies was finally able to apply his mechanical skills by working for Douglas Aircraft Company and North American Aviation in Southern California. Eventually, he invested his savings into an auto repair shop in the San Joaquin Valley where he noted that despite being regarded as an outsider by ranchers and farm owners for quite some time, he “was getting a tremendous amount of work from the townspeople because they were people like myself [having Okie roots] … I was really happy. I was prosperous and it was something that I liked to do” (Manies 1981, p. 38).
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