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America’s Great Depression wreaked havoc on most parts of
the nation. In rural Texas and Oklahoma, impoverished to begin
with, the effects were even more devastating. In response to the
Depression and crippling dust storms that destroyed countless farms,
thousands of Texans and Oklahomans, faced with starvation, uprooted
and moved west. That event inspired John Steinbeck’s classic
American novel The Grapes of Wrath.
Young Buck Owens saw no romance in the sharecropper’s life.
“We were sharecroppers…we were a little bit of everything.
We farmed and tried to make something. The landowner furnished seed
and the land we furnished the labor. And you got a share of it,
usually a 50-50 basis on the profit, and sometimes there wasn’t
a lot of profit. In the ‘30’s, it wasn’t the desired
thing. And along comes The Grapes of Wrath syndrome and blows
everybody out.”
In November of 1937, when Buck was eight, the Owenses decided that
their future also lay to the west. Alvis Owens built a trailer
to hold the family’s belongings. He, his wife, and children,
Buck’s Uncle Vernon and Aunt Lucille, their infant son Jimmy
and Maicie Owens’ mother, Mary Myrtle – a total of ten
people – piled into a 1933 Ford sedan and headed west. They
only stopped to cook and sleep along the way.
The trailer hitch broke in Phoenix. Since they had relatives in
Mesa, a Phoenix suburb, the family settled there, doing farm work
as they had in Texas. They worked at Arizona dairy and fruit
farms and occasionally traveled to the rich farming regions of California’s
San Joaquin valley, harvesting vegetables around Tracy and peaches
near Modesto, carrots in Porterville, cotton and potatoes in Bakersfield.
Alvis Owens occasionally drove trucks and dug ditches, too.
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