Depression Dust Bowl sparked migration west

Published online on Saturday, Dec. 20, 2008

The Great Depression began when the stock markets crashed in October 1929, sparking more than a decade of economic turmoil.

It taught some hard lessons about frugality.

Len Goldberg, 87, of Fresno, is one who learned. "Even my neighbors who aren't that much younger than us can't understand what it was like not to have anything," he said.

Goldberg was from Philadelphia. He remembers jobless World War I veterans -- "they called them 'doughboys' " -- standing on the street corners in the 1930s.

"They were there wearing their old army greatcoats, selling apples for a nickel apiece," he said. "You felt real sad for them, and for yourself, too, because you didn't even have a nickel to buy one."

Bread lines and soup kitchens were common.

Elizabeth Holcroft, 89, of Miramonte said she clearly recalls her youth in Fargo, N.D., where farmers hard-hit by bank closures and drought lined up for bread and soup.

"Later on, I was a relief case worker in western North Dakota, and almost every farmer was on some kind of relief," she said. "And there was a lot of surplus food shipped out to unfortunate people."

Life on the move

The Dust Bowl -- a drought that created thick, choking dust storms to devastate the Midwest breadbasket -- added to the nation's woes and created a westward migration of misery, perhaps best documented in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."

Cecil Perry, 81, of Clovis said he remembers the yearlong trek his family made from Kansas to California in search of a better life. Perry's dad was a hard-rock miner in southeastern Kansas.

"In March of '31 my father threw the family of six and everything we owned into the old Model T and headed to California," Perry said. "My father did everything he could to make money along the way, from selling beer in Texas to putting my older sisters on crosscut saws to cut firewood to sell, to picking cotton.

"We lived in garages, ate anything we could get -- blackbirds, squirrels, rabbits."

The itinerant life continued once the Perrys reached the West. The family worked lettuce fields in Salinas, panned for gold in the Sierra foothills and followed the crops into Oregon and Washington.

Willard Nissen, 84, of Visalia said that for men roaming the country looking for work, mealtimes were sometimes few and far between. But, he said, people who had little to spare did what they could to help others.

Nissen, whose father came from Iowa to California in 1929 to deliver a truckload of hams to San Francisco with his wife and five sons following in a Model T, said the family eventually settled in a home in El Monte, not far from the railroad tracks. It was a haven for hobos who rode the rails in search of a job.

"I remember some of them stopping at our house willing to work for something to eat," Nissen said. "I don't remember any of those men being turned away. My ma always had something [for them] to eat."

Helen Condit, who was born and raised in Fresno, said her mother also fed the downtrodden.

"I remember men used to knock at the back door -- never the front -- to ask for food," said Condit, 84. "They looked like tramps. They looked pretty shabby, but they were just hungry. ... I remember my mother making sandwiches for them. She never refused to give them food. They would sit on our back steps to eat, then leave."

One such railroad "bum" was Randolph Jordahl, 93, of Fresno, who rode the rails and hitchhiked his way from Iowa to California after his dad's family farm went bust.

"I did a lot of hitchhiking and quite a bit of bumming on the railroad. And some of those old dudes taught me a few things," Jordahl said. "They showed me how to put a buck in my socks so I wouldn't get robbed, how to ride in the reefer cars to keep warm.