I came/come from Kern County, the home of former Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America’s Congress: Kevin McCarthy. Who cares that I was educated, in part, in Pumpkin Center, and my mother’s family arrived in Kern County 16 years before the “dust bowl.” She grew up in Weedpatch, CA, at this time. (In 1932-1933 she was five or six, as opposed to 1935, when the great migration across the nation happened.)
I never got how or why, my mother did not want me to assort/consort or be friends with any children from the dust bowl. Indeed, I could not fathom how pre-Okie even came about in my child’s mind given this was her defense. Growers, ranchers, farmers, and drillers combined to call the migrants that name in attempts to break their spirit. Oklahoma, or what I saw of it in the 1970s, was all-white. Plus, men, not women ruled the roost. Meanwhile my mom supported Planned Parenthood. It made no-sense until I read Carey McWilliam’s Factories in the Fields published a couple of months after John Steinbeck’s penetrating The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.
Trusting her completely did not solve my dilemma. I could not comprehend the what and the why, where, and how could my mother even tell who was pre- and who was post- Okie? The dustbowl affected not one but at least three states: Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. I didn’t get “it.” I was mystified.
On top of that I was descended from the Swiss Frick fam(ily). Surprise, surprise, I start trying to unravel the body, mind, and the soul of what I can call the far-west Frick clan (yes-Henry Clay Frick’s branch, though not close enough to get free tickets, let alone free entrance to Henry’s former house that is a museum now on Fifth Avenue and East 70th Street, NY NY 10021).And lo and behold, one of my sister’s said that our family knew former Speaker of the House of Representatives as well as his family. And they too, would have considered themselves pre-Okie.
Close enough to play or sit and play with both him and/or his papa, daddy or father Owen had something to do with managing property along the grapevine – or the steep four thousand feet ascent from the San Joachim valley to the former ridge-route or as Shawn Casey O’Brien (no relation) it was Highway 66, Bob Dylan’s long and winding road across the U.S. It was American soldiers who wrested Fort Tejon from the Spanish who conquered it and stole it — now the largest contiguous piece of property going back to 1854 — Owen shared some part in.
