by Bill Barich
Blackie Ford, another Wobbly, was involved in a riot in Wheatland, in the Sacramento Valley, in 1913. Ralph Durst, who grew hops, had advertised harvest jobs far and wide to draw a crowd of pickers, pit them against one another, and lower his costs. The scheme backfired when about three thousand migrants came to his farm and went into rebellion.
Ford called for a public protest, and when the authorities tried to arrest him during it, a brawl broke out and resulted in the deaths of a deputy sheriff and the district attorney of Yolo County. Subsequently, Ford was caught and convicted of second-degree murder, although he’d never pulled the trigger of a gun.
Between 1930 and 1933, there were almost fifty agricultural strikes in the state. One of the biggest, an attempt to shut down the cotton harvest, occurred around Corcoran and Pixley. More than eighteen thousand workers participated. Ranchers killed three of them, but they did no prison time. The strike was a bust in spite of its size, limping along for twenty-four days before ending in a worthless settlement. Scabs from Mexico were already picking the cotton, and no union members were ever hired to join them.
In another ploy to discourage organizers, growers banded together as the Associated Farmers of California. They accused the unions of being Communist-inspired, a serious charge in the heartland. Thugs from the American Legion served as their hired guns, cracking skulls with ax handles and lobbing canisters of tear gas into rallies.
Cesar Chavez was the first organizer to make any headway against the growers. He was born in Yuma, Arizona, on the Colorado River, in 1926. His father lost a little farm when Cesar was ten, and the family became migrants. Chavez would attend more than thirty different schools before his parents settled in San Jose.
In his early twenties, he went to work for Community Service Organization, a social-work agency, remaining for twelve years until CSO refused to back him in an effort to unionize farmworkers. His ties to the field were still strong. With his eight children, he moved to Delano, where his wife’s family was from, and ran his fledgling operation from a rented house.
He chose an opportune moment to begin. Public Law 78, a keystone of the bracero program, was about to be rescinded. The law had permitted a grower to import fieldhands—bracero means “strong-armed one”—from Mexico if he claimed to be unable to find American workers to pick his crops, but it no longer obtained after 1964.
Chavez had trained well for his crusade. He knew his Saul Alinsky and had read Gandhi and Thoreau. He believed that he could not prevail without the total support of the community. Wisely, he assembled a diverse coalition that had such partners as Robert Kennedy, Jerry Brown, Filipino leaders, liberal journalists, youthful idealists on the left, and the Catholic church. He was smart enough to cloak the struggle in saintliness and cast it as a simple battle of good against evil.
The grape growers never had a chance. You had only to glance at a single newspaper photo of their private security guards threatening UFW pickets with German shepherds to be convinced that they were in the wrong. While the dogs were baring their teeth, Chavez was fasting on water and looking holier with each tick of the clock. ¿Huelga! The grape boycott had succeeded—the first strike-related boycott ever to do so in California.
SLAVONIAN HALL IN DELANO, a plain, auditorium-sized building, had no sign to identify it. A fence topped with concertina wire kept uninvited visitors from dropping in, while a rent-a-cop checked off the names of guests at the door.
The host for the day’s banquet was Kenny Kovacevich, a tall, graying, imperturbable man born in Reedley of immigrant parents from Yugoslavia. He was friendly and slow-moving and happy to do a favor for Jim Crettol, favors being a kind of currency in the valley as they are anywhere else. He walked me about the hall and escorted me to an open bar. The company that bought his grapes had donated the liquor, and local farmers had donated the peaches, cherries, and plums in bowls on the folding banquet tables.
“You might get a few cracked pits,” Kovacevich said jovially. “But it still eats good!”
The banquet had a different host every time. Its purpose was fraternal. Those in attendance were having a laugh and a couple of drinks while getting a little business done. More than a hundred men, many of them grape growers, were in the hall. Maybe two-thirds of them were Slavs.
Six burly fellows were cooking steaks over charcoal on an outdoor grill, turning the meat with forks and tongs. There was something primitive but vital about the scene, a rich carnality. The cooks reminded me of my own relatives, the balding uncles in T-shirts and khakis, stocky and broad-shouldered and quick to indulge a passion. Their faces were rosy from the fire.
The steaks came from National Market in Delano and not from Von’s, where the management supported the grape boycott. Kovacevich made that point. I saw no Hispanics anywhere in the room.
Our meal was served family-style and fell to the tables unceremoniously, a salad first, then pasta with a thick meat sauce, and then the steaks on a platter. Circling volunteers threw down some supermarket bread still in its cellophane sack. Jugs of Gallo Chablis and Burgundy were evenly distributed. The sounds of hearty appetites took hold, knives and forks set to clattering.
The man sitting next to me, George Ezikian, was an Armenian-American product of the valley, who’d bolted from Visalia, his hometown. He sold the growers “agricultural employee benefits,” which translated into medical insurance for farmworkers. In the Delano area, nine out of ten big farms bought it.
Ezikian was of the opinion that such programs had cost Cesar Chavez quite a few members. He stated this flatly as a fact, taking no cheer from it. He was a sophisticated person. The UFW tended to represent the seasonal migrants now, he said, and not the workers who had put down roots.
Ezikian lived in Irvine in Orange County and loved it there—the golf, the tennis, the jogging, and the mild summers that were nothing like the infernal Julys and Augusts in Visalia. His house had doubled in value over the past two years, and he played with the idea of selling it and buying something better. He had just got married for a second time, and he and his new wife were wondering whether or not to have kids. Ezikian had two children from his first marriage, both preparing for college. His worries were the worries of the age in California.
Ice-cream bars landed on the table, thrown from cardboard boxes. One of the bartenders took the floor and rapped on a glass with a spoon. After thanking Kovacevich for the feed, he cleared his throat and told a joke.
“What’s the difference between herpes and AIDS?” he asked. He paused for a minute to let us ruminate. “Herpes is a love story, but AIDS is a fairy tale!”
The laughter was uproarious. At our table, only Ezikian seemed to be cringing a bit.
Another man stepped up to tell some jokes. He was a semi-pro, the sort of lounge act that you might find yourself confronted with in Sparks, Nevada, after you’d lost all your money in Reno, had drunk too much, and had locked yourself out of your motel room.
“Hey, how about the size of those steaks?” he said with a wink. “Even in my fantasies, the meat isn’t that big!”
He hitched up his slacks and told another joke in the form of an exchange on “Jeopardy,” the TV quiz show, that cast Batman and Robin as a homosexual couple.
I felt myself awash in casual cruelty, recalling the sickly sensation of being in a high-school locker room and joining in on some mindless macho posing. With a sinking heart, I understood that the distance between the Slavonian Hall and Ward 5A at San Francisco General was so imponderable at the moment that only a stoop laborer might know how to calculate it.
ON MY LAST MORNING IN WASCO, Jim Crettol materialized at the machine shop looking as if he’d passed the early hours rolling in a field and trying to harvest dehydrator onions with his teeth, but he’d just been crawling in the dirt for a tightly focused tour of two test-plot plantings of sugar beets.
With a pest-control adviser from a chemical company, he had examined the effects of a new treatment that was supposed to increase the a
mount of sugar in a beet by a half percent. That didn’t sound like much, but if you had a hundred acres in beets, as the Crettols did, the gain could amount to two or three thousand dollars a year.
Around Wasco, farmers referred to pest-control advisers as snake-oil men. The PCAs walked a fine line between science and selling, but Jim felt that the reliable ones afforded him some useful information at times. Besides, a test didn’t cost him anything.
He took me with him on the rest of his morning rounds, driving first to Nikkel Ironworks in Shafter to see about a new cotton planter that he and Louie were buying. Lloyd Prather, the manager at Nikkel, was a lean stick of hickory. He was stewing about a shortage of bearings from Japan.
“No bearings, and you’re in a big world of hurt,” Prather said, putting it succinctly.
Farmers are loath to discuss money, but I gathered that the cotton planter would cost about $25,000. Nikkel would build it from scratch and paint it International Red.
Jim and Louie didn’t mind the price, but Art Crettol was up in arms about it—a customary response among the Crettol elders, Jim said, when the younger generation usurped the power. Art’s father, Victor, had howled in pain when Art had insisted on shelling out seven thousand dollars for a new cotton picker in 1949.
In Wasco, Jim bought a tri-tip roast and asked me to a barbecue at his house that night.
On the drive back to the farm, he was acting hyper and said that he’d always been like that, loaded with more energy than he knew what to do with. It had kept him from staying in college, down in Bakersfield. The pace of education had seemed so slow to him that he literally couldn’t sit still and had to drop out. The army had drafted him right away and sent him to helicopter school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in 1968.
Rural Alabama was no dreamland, even for a farmer. Jim was certain that he’d soon be flying over the jungles of Vietnam, but he got lucky and was assigned to a base in Korea instead, where the army put him in charge of the motor pool, which was like tossing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.
Korea made Jim grateful for what he had at home. The resourcefulness of Korean peasants astonished him. They scavenged the military dumps and made use of almost everything that the army threw away. They built houses from cardboard and aluminum cans, lashing the cans together three-deep with wire and stuffing the cracks with insulation against freezing winter temperatures. To amuse himself, Jim became a test-drive ace. He tested every vehicle in the motor pool, whether or not it needed testing, pushing the pedals to the floor.
After his discharge, he had started working on the farm full time, gradually assuming his father’s duties. It was really all he wanted to do.
“Farmers like to farm,” he said cheerfully.
I could hear the satisfaction in his voice, a peace that comes from doing what you want to do. Jim didn’t feel that he was missing anything—no sirens were whistling in his ear. When he had some free time, he played golf or listened to music or took in a Dodger game in L.A. He had a brand-new IBM computer and a subscription to InfoWorld.
Behold the modern California farmer, I thought, not without envy. There was a satisfaction in making things grow. There was a sweetness to the mockingbird’s song. For all its contrariness, I liked this heat-seared, light-blinded country of the San Joaquin. It didn’t need to go searching for a narrative. It still knew what it was about.
Even a farmer who was phasing himself out, such as Art Crettol, seemed reasonably content with his lot. We stopped at Art’s house to bring him some groceries. Tall palm trees lined his block, and he had a cool blue swimming pool in the backyard.
Art had recently remarried and wore a gold chain around his neck, just like Louie did. He knew his local history well and could remember when you had to carry a sidearm at the desert place to nail all the rattlesnakes in the sagebrush.
Art irrigated a couple of almond orchards for the boys and growled at them if he caught them doing something wrong, but that was the scope of his involvement. They still consulted him before making a major decision, but the torch had been passed. Why slave in the fields when you could take your new bride on a cruise to Panama?
In the end, Art said, farming was no picnic. He guessed that about half the farmers around Wasco and Shafter ran good, clean operations and were solvent. Others were getting by on a wing-and-a-prayer, while still others were failing because they were overextended or bad gamblers or just plain stupid.
JIM CRETTOL LIVED IN A RANCH HOUSE on a lightly traveled road, with no neighbors nearby. Dogs poured out the front door, six or seven of them, licking and sniffing at me in greeting.
Barbara Crettol was in the kitchen preparing Rock Cornish game hens from a recipe in the Los Angeles Times. She was a pretty, cultured woman, who had been teaching ballet since she was fourteen and still taught a class in Wasco. She and Jim had married young. That was still the way in California farm country.
Their daughter, Suzanne, had finished her first year at Shafter High. She was a volleyball star and let me thumb through her yearbook and look at the pictures. I read the semisecret scribblings and the vaguely articulated dreams until B.J. dragged me down the hall to his room and showed me the pellet rifle that he used for plugging crows.
“They’re sooo tough,” he said. “The BBs bounce off ’em.”
He had rock tapes scattered around a boombox—Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Run D.M.C. There was a photo of the Alpine Okies’ dragster on his wall and also a poster of a hard-nippled Budweiser girl in a state of perpetual arousal. A big desk took up most of the floor space, though, as if to remind him that he’d never be entirely free from his studies.
Louie came at dusk with his wife and two kids. The brothers socialized often. They were different as men and yet remained closely knit in the blood. We ate at a table on the patio—two tables, actually, one for the adults and one for the children. Like an early marriage or the unbroken link among generations, this, too, seemed like another country thing preserved.
The Crettols served fine food and vintage wines. For dessert, we had vanilla ice cream and homemade apricot cobbler. Crickets chirruped under the gathering stars, and the night was huge and sweeping. I was aware of how softly everybody was talking and took comfort and solace from the mesh of voices. At that moment, it seemed that there was nothing more to life—nothing to be pursued, all cruelty erased.
When it was time to go, I walked down a driveway where candles were glowing inside paper sacks. The kids had insisted on putting them out, and their parents had indulged them. The candles gave my leave-taking a festive edge.
In the dark, I imagined the sleeping cotton fields and heard the sound of water trickling in irrigation ditches. I wondered how long the farm landscape would last in this part of California and how long it would offer such nourishment to those who tended it. In Suzanne’s yearbook, a question had been put to the graduating seniors, and their answer had surprised me.
“Are you afraid of the future?” they were asked, and almost half the students had answered, “Yes.”
CHAPTER 18
ON HIGHWAY 99 the next morning, Dwight Yoakam came over my car radio singing his country hit, “Streets of Bakersfield,” an old Buck Owens tune that told of a well-meaning youth who stumbles into town, gets into a fight for which he’s not to blame, and lands himself in jail. Yoakam might be a slinky-hipped Hollywood cowboy in dry-cleaned jeans, but he’d still put his finger on a pulse. The song’s refrain was an echo and a reminder: “You don’t know me, but you don’t like me.”
Buck Owens was a Bakersfield boy by birth and knew what he was talking about. He and Merle Haggard, who grew up in nearby Oildale, an even raunchier place, had both been married to the same woman, although at different times. They were all divorced now, but the woman kept a job playing backup in Merle’s band. She was a survivor.
That was a Bakersfield story, all right. The city was legendary for its toughness, and you had to be able to swallow your disappointment if you hoped to stay afloat. Th
e central metaphors were all stolen from the oil business, where you set your sights on a target, took one good shot at drilling, and learned not to piss and moan if the bit just swirled in sand and water.
Bakersfield had no tolerance for crybabies. It ate nails for breakfast and might even have hung a few kittens from trees. I’d heard a rumor once that whenever a new franchise opened in town, the home office dispatched its top supervisors to oversee the operation, because you only got one chance to please your customers. Feed them an off-color french fry or a warm soft drink, and you were finished. They’d never forgive you, and they’d never come back.
The Baker in Bakersfield was Colonel Thomas Baker. He brought his family from Visalia to an abandoned cabin of logs and thatched tule reeds in the swampy sloughs around Kern River in 1863. The colonel reclaimed some land and planted ten acres to alfalfa—Baker’s field. In that time before dams and irrigation, the river could be wild and ferocious, and it still recaptured some of its former glory each spring as it dropped steeply out of the Sierra Nevada.
Merle Haggard had paid it a wary tribute in his beautiful ballad, “Kern River”:
I’ll never swim Kern River again
It was there that I lost her
There that I lost my best friend.
Now I live in the mountains
I drifted up here with the wind
I may drown in still water
But I’ll never swim Kern River again.
I grew up in an oil town
But my gusher never came in
And the river was a boundary
Where my darling and I used to swim.
One night in the moonlight
The swiftness swept her life away
And now I live on Lake Shasta
And Lake Shasta is where I will stay.
The Sierra Nevada lay to the east of Bakersfield, but I couldn’t even see the foothills. The entire range was camouflaged in a dense, stinging smog. The southern tip of the San Joaquin was unimaginably hot and dry, the bottom of a cauldron I’d been sinking into inch by inch. Foul air from all over the state got trapped in the tail end of the valley and sat there growing more and more fetid, like dirty socks left under a bed.