Okies joining a sort of ‘Grapes of Wrath’ in reverse.

What with all the bad air in the East Bay of San Francisco, and what with Mabel Rafferty’s asthma, her doctor told her that she needed to move to the California desert.

She thought that one over for a while and decided to move, all right, but not to the desert.

“I said: ‘Nuts, I’ll just go back where I came from,’ ” she recalls. Where she came from was Oklahoma.

And therein is a tale. For decades, since the Great Depression, thousands of Oklahomans packed their belongings and headed to California for better jobs, better homes and a better life. Many succeeded. Now, the flood is headed the other way.

Mabel Rafferty, who once was a cook for the Tournament of Roses (and once met Dwight D. Eisenhower in that capacity), bought a house in Elk City in western Oklahoma. For a three-bedroom brick house she paid the grand total of $39,500, which comes to a $354-a-month house payment. In the Bay Area she had been paying $800 a month for a small apartment.

Her project for the spring will be landscaping the acre that came with the house.

What could she have gotten in the Bay Area for that price?

“I couldn’t have bought a pup tent,” she said.

Down the road a piece in Sayre live Fannie and Harold Gray, late of Westminster, Calif., in Orange County. They are Okies who made the migration to California in 1967 and returned to the place of their youth last year. It was a nice enough life in California, but both of them knew they would have a problem making their house payments after Harold retired from his teaching job.

Then the Grays heard about a great house for sale from their cousins, Wallace and Billie Vincent, late of Placentia, Calif., and now good citizens of Sayre. They only had to look at it once when Fannie said she wanted it. The house, on an acre in the country, was $65,000.

“We stole this one,” Harold said.

The Grays also went back to California and sold their home there for $150,000. In 15 minutes.

The Oklahoma Department of Commerce has estimated that about 50,000 of the 900,000 people who left the Sooner State between 1930 and 1960 returned in the last 10 years. Most of those returning are retirees moving back to Oklahoma to live out their golden years.

For many of them it is a matter of pure economics. They can sell their houses in California, pay cash for homes in Oklahoma and have money left over for retirement nest eggs.

Others find the quality of life back home more appealing after years of living with smog, gridlock and the faster pace in Southern California.

“I played nine holes of golf this morning,” said Harold Gray. “I can go hunting and fishing any time I want to. The one thing I miss most is that if there is some little thing I need, I can’t go down to a big hardware store and buy it.”

Billie Vincent said there was something else that was appealing: “If you want to go outside and yell, you can.”

Now, western Oklahoma could hardly be described as lush. And it was hit hard by the oil bust of the ‘80s that decimated the economy of the state. But it does offer cheap housing--incredibly cheap by California standards--and that fact was not lost on the town of Clinton, the self-described “Hub City of Western Oklahoma.”

Clinton has mounted a campaign, something of a “Grapes of Wrath” in reverse, to lure Okies back from California. The core of that drive so far has been to run in California newspapers classified ads extolling the virtues of Clinton and environs.

“This is really healthy for both states,” said Dale Jones, a Clinton business leader and one of the prime movers in the campaign to attract new residents. “Once they retire, what has California really got to offer?”

Since the campaign began, the Clinton Chamber of Commerce has sent out 36 packets to California residents who have requested information about the town. The goal, as Jones put it, is to convince people that Oklahoma is no longer a place “with Indians and cowboys running all over the place.”

The rest of the bait is real estate information, multiple listings showing photos of homes at prices ranging from $20,000 up to $225,000 (for a 5,000-square-foot house).

Jones concedes that the plains of western Oklahoma might not be for everyone. Oklahoma City is an hour and a half away. There are no professional sports teams, no beaches and no mall the size of, say, Orange Coast Plaza. But the area does seem to have an appeal to those who have lived here before.

People like Mabel Rafferty.

“For me, there were no surprises,” she said. “I grew up 30 miles from here.”