New Beginnings

How awful that LaDonna’s computer crashed. I hope it will be fixed soon.
Since the New Year is a time of new beginnings, I wanted to post a story that Dad wrote about a time of new beginnings for Mom and her family.

Richard recently asked me how an Oklahoma girl ended up in Alameda, California. Mom was in her teens when her family moved from Oklahoma to California. This is the story Dad wrote about the Nunley’s move to California:

The Nunleys moved to California in 1940. There were no jobs in Oklahoma. Grandpa couldn’t find work anywhere. The family had it so bad that they couldn’t even afford to pay rent on a place to live. Whenever rent was due, they would move to another house until they had to pay rent again. Your mother would go to high school without a lunch because they didn’t have any food for her to take. For breakfast, the family ate water gravy and biscuits. There wasn’t even any milk to put in the gravy. They lived in Shawnee at the time.
Lloyd and Inez’s dad, Uncle Joe went to Oakland and got a job. He took his large family with him. Uncle Joe wrote Grandpa and told him to come out to California. He told Grandpa that the shipyard was hiring. Grandpa and Grandma loaded their eight children up in a car that they hadn’t been able to keep up the payments on and they all headed for California. As the Nunleys pulled up to Uncle Joe’s house, someone was there to repossess their car. As soon as everyone and everything was out of the car, the car was taken away from them.

Thousands of people from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and other states came out to California at that time because there wasn’t any work in their home states. These people were all called Okies. They were all poor because they couldn’t help it. The Californians looked down on the Okies.

Grandpa went to work in the shipyard right away, but he hated California. He wanted to move back to Oklahoma. Because of the lack of jobs there, he couldn’t go back. Grandma and your mother went to work in the cannery. The Nunley family lived with Uncle Joe and his family, plus I think Uncle Claud and his family came and lived there also. They had a house full. I’m not sure how many months they lived with Uncle Joe until they were able to get another car and move to Alameda. I met your mother when they moved to Alameda in the summer of 1941.
Grandpa worked in the shipyard until 1943. They moved back to Sand Springs, Oklahoma and Grandpa got a job working at a place that made oil derricks. In 1945, Grandpa went to work for Oklahoma Tire and Supply as a maintenance man of stoves and refrigerators until Oral Roberts started his work in Tulsa. Oral Roberts hired Grandpa as the head of his building maintenance and repair on typewriters and such.

Bad things happen, but good can come out of hard times. Because of the Nunleys hardships, our parents met, married and had all of us. I think the picture above is of Mom, Louvena and Grandma after they moved to California. Judy