Generation Two

Walter and Lila

[ Index | Generation One ]

This is my mother and father's story, and the first part of it is mine too, because I was there. Where I remember something myself I have said so. The rest comes from my mother, who told it to me many times, and from my brother Chester, who was older and remembered more.

Oklahoma

Walter Hubbard was born on the homestead in Garfield County in 1905, the fourth of Theodore and Etta's five children. He went through the eighth grade at the country school and then he farmed. He loved wheat country all his life. But Ralph was the oldest and the farm would go to Ralph, so in the fall of 1925 Walter went south to Caddo County to pick cotton for wages, and at a Sunday singing at a little Baptist church he heard a girl named Lila Pearson sing alto. Her father was the song leader. They were married in June of 1926.

They rented forty acres of cotton ground and a team of mules from a man who owned a good deal of the county, and they worked it on halves. Chester was born in 1927, I came along in November 1930, and Gerald in 1933. We lived in a two-room house with a porch and a cistern, and I remember the smell of my mother's biscuits and the sound of the windmill.

Then the bad years came. Cotton brought almost nothing. There was no rain in 1934 and hardly any in 1936, and the dust storms came through. I remember (this is my own memory) my mother wetting sheets and hanging them over the windows, and the sky going brown in the middle of the afternoon, and the grit in my teeth at supper. Grandpa Pearson died in 1935. In 1937 the landowner bought a tractor, and a man with a tractor didn't need families on halves any more. My father was told to be off the place after the crop was in.

The Chevrolet

My father sold the mules' harness, the plow, the cow and most of our furniture, and with that money and what he had saved he bought a 1929 Chevrolet, a four-door sedan with the six-cylinder engine he was very proud of. He took the back seat out of it to make room. In August of 1937 we tied two mattresses to the roof, a washtub and a chicken coop with no chickens in it to the back, and the five of us left for California with forty dollars in a coffee can.

We went west on Highway 66: through Amarillo, across New Mexico, through Albuquerque and over the mountains to Flagstaff. Here is what I remember of it, being six years old:

• Gerald was carsick all the way across Texas.
• We slept beside the road, my mother and father on one mattress and the three of us children on the other.
• A boiling radiator outside Gallup, and my father walking back from a gas station with a can of water.
• An Indian woman at a roadside stand who gave me a piece of fry bread and wouldn't take my mother's nickel.
• Crossing the desert at night from Needles, because my father had been told the car would never make it in the heat of the day. My mother kept wet rags on our heads. It was the longest night of my life.
• At the California line a man looked all through our things for plants and fruit. We had none. I didn't understand why he looked at us the way he did.
• Coming down out of the mountains at Tehachapi in the morning and seeing the whole valley below us, green and gold, farther than I could see. My mother cried.

The Valley

That fall we picked cotton in Kern County. We lived in a tent by an irrigation ditch at first, and then, when a place came open, at the government camp at Arvin, which had clean water and hot showers, and which my mother always spoke of as if it had been a palace. Chester and I picked too. I had a little sack my mother sewed for me out of flour sacks, and I was very proud of it. People called us Okies, and they didn't mean it nicely.

The next summer we followed the grapes north, picking and laying out trays of raisins in the sun near Fresno, and then went back to Kern County for the cotton. My brother John was born in March of 1939, the first Californian in the family, in a hospital, which my mother said was the first time in her life anybody had brought her a meal on a tray.

Stockton

In the summer of 1941 a man my father had picked grapes with wrote that the canneries in Stockton were hiring. My father drove up in the Chevrolet, and he got on. That was the end of our following the crops. He started on the loading dock in peach season and they kept him on through the winter, and he stayed at that cannery for twenty-seven years, the last eleven as a foreman. My mother worked the line in the summers.

We rented a little house on the south side of town, with a fig tree in the yard. Grandma Hortense came out on the bus to live with us. I started fifth grade in Stockton in a dress my mother made, and I graduated from high school in 1948. After the war my father bought the house we had been renting. He sold the Chevrolet in 1946 for more than he had paid for it, and he never got over that.

My father retired in 1968 and died in 1971. My mother lived to be eighty and kept her own house until the last year. Neither of them ever went back to Oklahoma to live, though they visited. My father used to say California had been good to him, which coming from him was a speech.

The Children of Walter and Lila

• Chester (1927-1993), who served in the Navy in the war, came home, and drove a truck for thirty years.
• Charlene (1930- ), me. More in Generation Three.
• Gerald (1933- ), who lives in Modesto and is still carsick on long trips.
• John (1939- ), who teaches high school history in Sacramento.

Sources for this generation

• My own memories, and my mother's stories, which I wrote down in 1979.
• My brother Chester's memories, which he told me on tape in 1990.
• Federal census, 1910 and 1920 (Walter in Garfield County, Lila in Caddo County).
• Caddo County marriage record, 1926.
• John's birth certificate, Kern County.
• My father's pay stubs and his twenty-five-year pin from the cannery.

The census they took in 1940, which would show all of us in California, won't be opened to the public in my lifetime, most likely. I'll just have to trust my memory.