Dust Bowl Refugee’s Echoes of History

Almost every day, it seems, another one passes away. More often than not, the capsule newspaper obituaries only hint at their participation in the American epic that was the Dust Bowl exodus: “He grew up in eastern Oklahoma,” goes a typical passage, clipped from the Bakersfield Californian a few years ago, “and came to California in 1938 as a farm worker. From Porterville in the San Joaquin Valley to Santa Paula in Ventura County, Eldon picked lemons, olives, cherries, grapes and cotton.”

Came to California in 1938. . . .

There are novels and poems buried beneath that banal phrase, as John Steinbeck demonstrated with lasting power, stories of struggle and desperation, of perseverance and heroism in hard times. Last week it was Oca Franklin Tatham’s turn to have his stories told.

Born 89 years earlier in Brushy, Okla., this man who once described himself as the “biggest Okie in 50 states” was buried here on Thursday in a cemetery located a few miles west of Fresno and bordered on all sides by vineyards. It was not yet noon when the burial began, but already the sun had driven the temperature up toward triple digits and bleached much of the color from the valley sky.

Family members pressed close together to share what little shade two plastic awnings could provide. They sang three verses of “Amazing Grace,” accompanied by the rhythmic chirping of mechanical sprinklers. “Dear God,” the preacher began, standing beside a heavy oak casket, “we gather today around the body of a giant who has fallen.”

He wrapped it up in a few minutes, and then everyone piled into cars--a Mercedes here, a Volvo there, and certainly not a rickety old Model T in the bunch--and drove back to the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Peoples Church for what was described as a “celebration of life.” And some life it was.

In the 1930s, Oca (pronounced OWE-suh) Tatham had lived in fact the hard passage wrought as fiction in “The Grapes of Wrath.” He rattled out to California from Sallisaw, Okla., in a Chevy flatbed overflowing with mattresses, furniture and 16 family members and neighbors. Tatham would go on to add chapters that might have surprised Steinbeck, rising from the cotton fields to make himself a rich man, the patriarch of what would become one of the Central Valley’s wealthier families.

The story of the Tathams, in fact, would come to be rendered in book form: “Rising in the West” by Washington Post journalist Dan Morgan. In the book, published in 1992, Morgan describes how Oca Tatham climbed the financial ladder, from cotton picker to potato peddler to junk trader and on up to become, as the funeral pamphlet put it, a developer of “property and businesses.”

At the church service, there was much homage paid to Tatham’s later good works: buying church buses, building churches in Mexico for the poor. (A mention of his early dabblings as a bootlegger drew nervous giggles.) At the end of the service, Pastor G.L. Johnson revisited Tatham’s earlier struggles in California. The front benches were filled with the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the deceased, and they began to nod their heads vigorously as the preacher ran through a litany of anecdotes that have become Tatham family lore.

He told the story of the broken arm. On the steep incline that leads out of Albuquerque, the overloaded flatbed stalled and rolled back off a cliff. After the wreck, a baby was found trapped. Oca implored the others to help him lift the truck off the infant. As he was lifting, he noticed a pain in his arm. It was broken. He reset it himself and went on.

He told the story of the peaches. The hungry family had reached Delano and spotted a pile of ripe peaches stacked somewhere near the road. Oca asked if he could buy some and instead was told to take them, no charge. He took it as charity or even as an invitation to steal, and only later would he come to understand that in California fruit sometimes was destroyed as a way to ensure higher prices.

The preacher told the story of the nickel glass of water, and of the tiny house where the Tathams lived amid the bulk sacks of potatoes and the junk piles that were Oca’s way out of the fields. There were other stories he might have told. Johnson did not mention, for instance, the billboard outside Tulsa, erected by Californians in a futile effort to turn back the migrant tide: “No jobs in California. If you are out of work keep out!”

He did not tell of how Oca, fearing prejudice, worked to erase the twang from his offspring’s speech, or of his encounter in Knights Landing with a ranch foreman, described in “Rising in the West” this way:

“You got any work for an able-bodied guy?” Oca asked the man.

“You mind working nights?”

“No, sir. I’ll work any ol’ time.”

“Well, we got work all right. Minding rain machines.”

“Okay. When can I start?”

“Why, buddy, you can start right now.” A pause and a cold stare. “Say, you folks ain’t Okies, are you?. . . . We don’t hire no Okies.”

Of course, those days were long behind Oca Franklin Tatham when he passed away. For some time now, the Dust Bowl immigrants’ place in the fields has been occupied by a different people. They, too, often must come to California by a hard way. They, too, tend to be received with something less than a welcoming embrace, something that might even be described as wrath. Perhaps things don’t change in California as much as we might prefer to believe.