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As everywhere, there were big men among the Okies who seized opportunity in the midst of discouragement. Burly (6 ft. 3 in., 300 Ibs.), booming Hollis B. Roberts was one. Wiped out after five struggling years in the Texas dust bowl, Roberts sold his runty cattle, his house and farm equipment, bought a 1929 Chevy on credit, and with $75 in his jeans, started out for California. In Yuma, Ariz, he joined other stranded Okies who had run out of cash, cadged a job pitching hay at $2.70 a day. In return for milking his landlord's cows every morning, Roberts got a rent-free two-room shack for eight months.
Grapes & Garbage. At length he arrived in the valley, welcomed by a brother who brought a suitcase full of grapes. Then came the job hunting: he carried a lunch pail, as if to assure any sharp-eyed foreman that he was ready for work (even though the pail was empty); once, without being hired, he pitched in on a construction crew, hoping that the supervisor would reward his zeal with pay, and got no pay. When he had only 75¢ left to his name, he latched on to a job as roustabout in the oilfields for $5.60 a day.
Slowly his luck turned better. He rented five acres of desert land near Bakersfield, began raising hogs. Each night after work, he made the rounds of town restaurants, gathering swill to feed the pigs. With money earned from the hog sales, Roberts bought 15 acres for cotton, potatoes and alfalfa. After each day's work in the oilfields, he irrigated his crops; on hot summer nights he would lie down to sleep at the end of an irrigation furrow in his alfalfa field, and when the water got far enough down the furrow to lap at his body, he would jump up, dam the wet ditch and open the next furrow.
Water & Power. Little by little, Hollis Roberts added to his acreage until he quit his oilfield job for the farm full time. "If you want to start over, we'll start over," said his wife Manon. "If your heart's set on farming, you go right ahead." Every month he sent his Texas banker a $22 installment to pay off his Chevy loan. The cotton-gin owners liked him and staked him, and Roberts surged ahead. Today Cotton Rancher Roberts, with 7,000 acres, half owned, half leased, lives with his wife and two daughters in a $100,000 ranch home near McFarland, has a spread of comforts as wide as his cotton yield: a color TV set, 40-ft. swimming pool, three Cadillacs and a Buick, an estimated worth of $4,000,000. Gazing through his tinted picture windows at his fertile land, he recalls: "Back home we used to sit on the front porch and wait for rain. We'd go to camp meetings and pray for it. Well, out here all you have to do is push a button and you get all the rain [i.e., from deepwell systems] you want. Why, with all this land and all this water, nothing can hold us back."
Nothing has held the valley back: in the years since the first struggle to master the desert, Okie farmers big and small, along with the natives, have made San Joaquin Valley responsible for 92% of California's cotton crop (1957 estimated total: 11 million bales) and California the second biggest (after Texas) cotton-producing state in the nation. Valley land, once for sale at $150 an acre, now goes for $800 to $1,000.
Such, 25 years later, are the vines that grew from the Grapes of Wrath.