<Begin Segment 10>

MN: And then in mid-September you returned to Brawley. What was the first, one of the first things you did when you returned?

DM: Get ready to go to school. That means buying clothing.

MN: Where did you buy your clothes at?

DM: In those days, most of our shopping were done from the Sears-Roebuck catalog.

MN: So you didn't go into Brawley to go buy new clothes.

DM: We did occasionally, but like I say, most of it was done through mail order.

MN: How did you prepare your farm?

DM: In September, we'd get the farm ready. We used to hire this contractor who had big tractors, the equipment to dig the furrows up and down the ranch. So then we'd prepare to plant after the furrows were made.

MN: Is this also when you flooded your fields?

DM: That was done during the summertime, in June, July and August. My dad would run the water onto the field and just flooded the field, so it'd be all wet, to give the ground some moisture.

MN: Why did you have to flood the field?

DM: To give the ground the moisture.

MN: And that's the only reason, to keep it wet?

DM: No, so the plants would grow.

MN: But at that time, you're not harvesting anything, you're not growing anything.

DM: Just preparing the land for planting.

MN: Now, this water that you're using, you also eat and cook with it. How did you, your family, purify the water?

DM: We didn't; we just, I remember having a tall, galvanized tank, round tank, which our job was to fill from the pond that we built, and after the water settled, sediment settled, we'd just use water from the top. That was drinking and cooking.

MN: Now you're coming of age during the Great Depression. How did the Depression affect your farm?

DM: Well, their income was very low. So we lived poorly. We had enough to eat, but then other luxuries were not there.

MN: But did you understand that you were poor?

DM: Oh, yeah. Like taking lunch to school, some of these kids from the well-off families, they had meat in their sandwiches, and they had to... well, those with better-looking lunch. So we would, the farm boys would eat separately with those city boys.

MN: You know in the Los Angeles area, the Work Progress Administration bussed in some of the city people to help out on the farm so they could get some food. Did they do that in the Imperial Valley?

DM: I never saw them.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.