U.S. 66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land . . . they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.
—The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The time was the early 1930s. Dust-parched, drought-wrung, a steady caravan of humans clattered west over U.S. 66. Piled high in antiquated jalopies and steaming trucks were the precious things of their lives: children, a tacky mattress or two, tattered blankets, a stick of old furniture, cooking utensils, a flap of canvas. Behind them, in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, lay the dead land of the drought. Ahead, at the end of the road of flight: California, the rich, full, well-watered San Joaquin Valley, where vast orchards and fields seemed magically alive with grapes, potatoes, peaches, cotton. Those were the bad years, and the Okies—300,000 of them—were hungry for work. Desolate, they moved from harvest to harvest—scrounging food for emaciated children, bedding down in farm shacks or U.S. Government emergency camps, harried by highway patrolmen and sheriffs' deputies—to become a symbol in fact and fiction of the desperate injustices wrought by drought and Depression.
Last week, a full quarter-century later, the San Joaquin Valley was thriving, and the Okies were thriving. In Bakersfield, Fresno, Visalia, Modesto, the Okies were Californians, still speaking the accents of the Southwest, still voting Democratic, clapping their hands to the hillbilly music of their favorite TV entertainer (''Cousin" Herb Henson), still whacking away at religion, Bible-belt style (Scotch-taped legend on one Oklahoma car: OBEY Acts 2:38). They had, most of them, made good—so good that nobody even thought to ask, "Whatever became of the Okies?"
Cooks & Giants. Over the years they worked in the rich fields, got jobs as salesmen, short-order cooks, orange-juice stand attendants, worked for wineries, warehouses and cotton gins, bought homes and farms, raised good crops, joined Rotary Clubs, sent their sons to become lawyers, accountants, teachers.
B. F. (for Bernice Frederick) Sisk, 47, rolled into the valley from Texas in 1937, took the first job he could find—thinning nectarines near Visalia—and saved enough to send for his wife and baby. He was elected in 1954 (and again in 1956) to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Paul Peoples, who was eleven when his family drove in from Arkansas in a 1929 Overland Whippet, picked cotton, waited anxiously with his mother and three brothers each Saturday to learn if his father had made enough money for groceries. Today Peoples, 32, is a graduate of Fresno State College, works on his master's degree, and is Fresno's deputy probation officer. "There were two kinds of people then," he recalls. "Those who had never had a desire to improve themselves —and those who were looking for some way to better their lot. My father—he didn't wear whiskers and he didn't chew tobacco. There wasn't any reason he couldn't hold his head up and look any man straight in the eye."