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Special Reports - Out of the Dust - Day 2

Monday, Sep. 15, 2008

Newcomers had to beat many obstacles

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Thirteen days on the road brought the Whitfield family, late of Beeville, Texas, to the little town of Tracy in 1935.

Andrew Whitfield, the father, set out to find work. Tom Whitfield, one of seven children, set off for school and found a harsh reception.

"I didn't conform too well and the teacher referred to me as a 'dumb little Okie,' " the Modesto resident recalled.

It mattered little that the Whitfields were not from Oklahoma. They were lumped in with other people who had been driven from the Plains to California by drought, dust storms and the Depression.

For the newcomers, the first few years in California were a time of unease. Some longtime residents of the San Joaquin Valley resented the competition for jobs in the fields, canneries and elsewhere.

Others were more welcoming. They sympathized with what the migrants had endured on the Plains, and they admired their willingness to work hard in their new home.

"No one looked down on them," said Agnes Picha of Modesto, whose father, Lee Swope, hired them to harvest his peaches along Floyd Avenue. "These were really good people who had been forced off their property."

The second half of the 1930s — between the low point of the Depression and the boom brought by World War II — would be a crucial time in the lives of the migrants and the history of the region.

This was their chance to prove their worth and to put down roots of their own.

The valley had a fair number of Plains people even before the Depression, thanks to migrations during the more prosperous 1910s and '20s.

Census figures show that as of 1935, near the start of the Dust Bowl migration, the valley had about 62,000 people from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas or Missouri, the main sources of the new migrants.

By 1940, the number from these four states was about 135,000 — 19 percent of the valley population.

"It was very profound in the '30s, but it was building up for 20 years," said John Nash, a retired Modesto Junior College history instructor who researched migration trends.

He said that in the north valley especially, many of the '30s migrants had relatives or friends who had come earlier. This could help them find housing and stable jobs.

Some Dust Bowl migrants created new communities, such as south Modesto and the city's airport neighborhood. The houses were bare-bones, the sewers and other services sparse, but the residents at least were owners.

Many newcomers spent much of each year on the road, harvesting crops up and down the state.

Al Menshew of Turlock said he was 5 or 6 when he started working the fields. He recalls grueling days in the cotton and potato fields near Bakersfield. Peaches, big in the Modesto area, were brutal, too.

"There's not a breath of air stirring and you'd get the fuzz," Menshew said. "The farmers would cut the price from 10 cents to 9 cents per box. The farmers were struggling just like we were and they had to do whatever they could."

Menshew's baby sister, Janice, lay in a blanket-lined fruit box while older family members worked crops.

The people from the Plains were mostly white, many of them descended from early English, Scottish and German immigrants to the United States. Some had American Indian blood, too.

In California, they took farm work that, since World War I, had been done largely by people from Mexico. But that did not always bring tension. Menshew remembers sharing food with Mexican workers and listening to their songs.