I'm taking a "break" from watching Aunt Barbara today. Brother Joe and wife Jean are over there and so decided to come home for awhile! Was thinking about the time that I actually picked cotton! After Cappy started to work for this Farm Security Administration and had been with the Braceros picking hops up in Healdsburg and in Ukiah, Ca. the job ran out and one of the "bosses the Mexicans were working for told Cappy to come down to Bakersfield and that he could get a certain amt of money( the figure escapes me now!)weighing cotton that the Mexicans and black people were picking down in Bakersfield. So we headed out and took Lester Bert, Cappy's son, with us.On the way there we saw what looked like a lot of quanset huts, like an Army Camp but it said on a sign that it was a Farm Labor Camp. So Cappy decided to check it out and the foreman there told us that a guy over in Porterville was looking for someone with Cappy's skills! (Speaking Mexican and English and the fact that we were or just had been working for the Farm Sec. Ad.) So we back-tracked to Porterville and talked to the guy, after the one in Tulare had called him and told him about Cappy! This fellow said "Boy, can I use you!" But he said that it might be about a week before he could hire him but that he was having trouble in some of these labor camps and that he wanted us to call him as soon as we got located with a place to stay in Bakersfild. We moved into housekeeping Motel room and so Cappy got in touch with the guy who was weighing cotton and asked for a job. (We weren't sure if we would hear from the guy in Tulare!) The morning after we got there Cappy was out weighing cotton! So the next day Lester Bert and I asked him if we could go with him and maybe we could pick cotton to help ourselves out financially! So Cappy agreed and here we were in the boiling heat of Bakersfield in August and we were given a sack to put the cotton into. We had to put this thing on our shoulders and drag it behind us and put these little fluffy but treacherous balls of cotton in the bag. This bag was, it seemed at least a block or two long! The ground was damp which made it unbearably hot! And we, L.B. and I would go about three feet and I would send him back for a little jar of water, then we would pick for another three ft. and back to the water!!! We couldn't have worked for any longer than an hour but decided we had picked enough cotton for that day!!! Cappy weighed it up and we had made about 50 cents! I will never look down on those poor people who had to do that for a living with huge families, etc. Anyway we hung out at the weighing station until it was time to go home and I told Cappy, we'd better get something better than that to do! Cappy worked for a day or so and then the guy who told him to come down, took off with all the money, and the scales, etc. and never said anything to Cappy! Needless to say we were frantic! But lo and behold, that night the guy from Porterville called and wanted Cappy to come right up to a town called Fowler,(just a few miles South of Fresno). I asked Cappy, what are we going to do for gas money! So he told me that the cotton weigher had left about 10 cotton sacks in our car and Cappy says" As soon as we get to a roadside stand that buys thing like this we'll sell them and it should be enough to get us to Fowler." We hadn't gone very far when we saw a sign, cotton sacks bought and sold! The guy gave us $10 for the bunch but that got us to Fowler and then the foreman that Cappy was supposed to meet there gave us enough to get a Motel room and food for a week until they decided what to do about Cappy! But they did say that Cappy was in charge of that camp as of that night!!!In a few days, they brought a Quanset hut for us to move into and that is another story sometime!!!!
