Doodlebug Days: An American Family's Ups and Downs as Middle-Class Migrants in the California of the 1930s

Our 1935 black Oldsmobile and heavily-loaded trailer drew hostile looks as we drove into Bakersfield and stopped at a shady park to check the tires. When Mother, Daddy, we two girls and our young brother, Skippy, got out, two work-hardened men in ranch straw hats and short-sleeved cotton shirts stood staring suspiciously at our California license plates.

"Had those plates on long?" the shorter man challenged Daddy.

"Guess you'd say so," Daddy answered pleasantly.

Mother's hands were settling on her hips, a sure sign her indignation would be expressed verbally at the first sign of an insult from the men.

The taller man took a step toward Daddy. "Hope you're not looking for farm work in Bakersfield 'cause there isn't any."

Deliberately the man spat on the curb. "Every damn fool in Texas, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma is either here or on Route 66 trying to get here in some beat-up jalopy. Not enough cotton or potatoes in all of Kern County to keep half of them busy."

"No," Daddy said evenly. "Not looking for work. Just looking to head out of here in a few minutes."

While Daddy circled our car and trailer, Mother glared at the men, snapped open her white envelope purse and drew out a bottle of Coty's Emeraude, dabbing a drop behind each ear.

"It's so much hotter here than in Lynwood," she said loftily. "I don't know how people can stand it."

Turning her back on the Bakersfield men she added, "Come on, children, let's get back in the car. And don't step in that filth on the sidewalk."

As Daddy pulled away from the curb, Mother fanned herself with her purse. "Imagine, Bruce, you, a civil engineer looking for farm work. I'd like to have given those Bakersfield men a piece of my mind, and I would have too if your work weren't so secret. They treated us as if we were Dust Bowl migrants!"

In California in 1935 twenty percent of the country's labor force was unemployed, and hobos regularly knocked on back doors for handouts. To survive in the Great Depression, our father had taken a job with an oil exploration party in the San Joaquin Valley. Our family packed up and left southern California to join him.

Between 1900 and 1936 California led the nation in petroleum production. Oil companies, certain that great reserves of oil still lay hidden, sent exploration crews, called doodlebug parties, throughout California to find new fields. The intense competition among oil companies mandated secrecy concerning doodlebug party movements. By setting explosives off in a series of holes, doodlebuggers would measure the echoes and make a seismic record that might indicate the presence of oil.

Our new life was scary because we girls, Nancy, age 10 and Sunny, 12, had been allowed to make the decision whether to follow our father or remain in comfortably familiar Lynwood, just south of Los Angeles. Still, we knew that our father felt fortunate to be holding a job, even one that worked a hardship on his wife and children.

We left our home in Southern California and headed north over the Ridge Route, towing our possessions behind our car in a small canvas-covered trailer. Even though the security of our family unit buffered us against hardships, we girls were apprehensive. Still, we were excited about the new life that was unfolding.

DOODLEBUG DAYS takes place in a California with a population of only six million. The Valley towns in which we lived were small and agricultural with tight-knit established families. For the employed, life was less complicated than it is today. Radios, not televisions, were prominently enshrined in each living room. In the small towns up and down the Valley, people pulled their kitchen chairs close to their radio to listen to President Roosevelt's fireside chats as he discussed solutions to the problems that marked the era.

We children dealt with the more pressing matter of always being the new kids in school. We played Hearts or Monopoly, read the Oz books and kept a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table alongside the National Geographic. Our family, talked and talked as we sipped giant glasses of iced tea, and the ordinarily socially taboo subjects of religion and politics were favorite topics--along with the meaning of life. We children were never left out. We had our say then sat on our front porches and watched shooting stars while our father pointed out the Big Dipper and the North Star.

One suitcase apiece held our clothes and treasured keepsakes. One pair of brown oxfords, half-soled until we outgrew them, did for all occasions. If a trip to the Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers movie, Top Hat, was suggested, the whole family poured loose change onto the dining room table and counted it to see if it was enough.

Rose water and glycerin soothed chapped hands, and mustard plasters treated chest colds. Doctors made house calls, and most men could fix the family car on a Sunday afternoon. Migrant workers, who earned 15 cents an hour picking potatoes or 50 cents for 100 pounds of cotton, could buy a meal of soup and bread for a nickel. For the more fortunate, Sunday dinner was a well-done rump roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, pineapple and cottage cheese salad, and glasses of whole milk followed by Jell-O and whipped cream.

Despite Mother's determination that we not be taken for one of the thousands of Dust Bowl families that were daily abandoning their homes to look for work in California, we were, as fair-minded Daddy pointed out, migrants of a kind. We were middle-class migrants joining the wage-earner as he moved from town to town with the doodlebug party.

In the 1930s the solid citizens who had pioneered in the San Joaquin Valley were steadfast in their values. Newcomers, such as our family, were not accepted until it was deemed after years of community observation that they would fit in and uphold the local mores. Migrants of any kind were a threat.

The distasteful incident in Bakersfield was our first introduction to the San Joaquin Valley.

Our second introduction to the Valley, an encounter with a real Dust Bowl family a little further up the road, made it clear to us children why Mother didn't want us to be mistaken for migrant workers.

As we pulled off the highway behind an old black Ford sedan heaped with cardboard boxes, pots, farm tools and mattresses, Mother viewed the scene with distaste. A tall thin man wearing a cap was looking under the hood of the car, and a gaunt young woman in a faded cotton dress leaned in what little shade the car provided, nursing her baby. Two fair-haired girls were sitting on the rear bumper straining the wires that held it to the car's frame.

"Bruce," Mother pleaded, "we need to be on our way. Don't you imagine someone else will stop to help these people?"

"I doubt they'll get any offers of help," Daddy replied, climbing out and locating his tool kit. "They probably didn't get any warmer reception in Bakersfield than we did."

DOODLEBUG DAYS gives a personal nostalgic vignette of California from 1935-1937 from the fresh and amusing perspective of the two sisters in this middle-class family.

In the book, Many Californias, Literature from the Golden State, published by the University of Nevada press in 1991, editor Gerald Haslam identifies five geo-literary regions: The North Coast, The Great Central Valley, Wilderness California, Southern California and Fantasy California, "...each of them reflecting regional frontiers with distinct terrains, patterns of settlement and literary outputs." As readers of DOODLEBUG DAYS travel to each of these regions, the areas come to life as they were in the 1930s--and will never be again.

While the family lives in the port town of Stockton, DOOD