The world is not your oyster. It is your life.

"Whatever happened to him?" I wrote yesterday in an email to two graduate school friends of mine.  The "him" was a graduate school professor of ours, and my dissertation adviser--Harry Richardson.

That was yesterday, and here I am reminded about him yet again because of the story in the NY Times about Merle Haggard and the old boxcar that was home to the young Haggard.

Towards the end of my graduate school existence, my life was transitioning from Los Angeles to Bakersfield.  Harry, who rarely ever talked anything personal with me--I am not sure if that was his nature or whether he kept me at length--talked about how much he loved the Bakersfield Sound.

If it felt odd, there was a logical reason--Harry was from the UK. I am from India, and was moving to a town called Bakersfield. And the Brit tells me he about his fondness for the country music of Bakersfield.

Merle Haggard was a big name, of course, along with Buck Owens, in this genre of Bakersfield Sound.  I could never get really into it; different strokes for different folks!  But, the intellectual part in the stories of the Dust Bowl migration, the migrants, the condescension towards the "Okies," the very different lifestyle in Oildale--with the zipcode of 93308--fascinated me. From the bluffs where our street ended, across at a distance, beyond the oil pumping jacks, was Oildale.

Merle Haggard grew up there.

Like much of the music associated with the Bakersfield sound, an unvarnished form of country that thrived in honky-tonks here in the 1950s and ‘60s, Mr. Haggard’s is rooted in the making-do values of the Dust Bowl. His parents migrated from Oklahoma in 1935 and, like thousands of Okies, they sought refuge in Oildale, a ragtag collection of camps and settlements on the outskirts of Bakersfield.

One of the advantages in migrating and travelling is this: we develop attachments to places that otherwise are mere factoids. Had I not lived in Bakersfield, I might have even skipped the NY Times story, unless I was into country music and the Bakersfield Sound.  Having been to Tanzania means that any news story about the country makes me pause and read that. No wonder then that Mark Twain noted this about travel:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

Thus, reading about Merle Haggard's old home stirs a feeling of familiarity.  I get it.  I can also understand why there is the feeling of urgency to preserve his old boxcar home:

Though occupied, the house today is nearly ruined, sagging under a tangle of vines. The campaign to “Save Hag’s Boxcar” is a recognition of the role of the house and the railroad in Mr. Haggard’s career, as well as a nod to the collective ingenuity of Depression-era craftsmen like his father.

Yes, it is about Haggard.  But it is also about the migrants. Of the conditions they faced. Of their fierce determination.

Boxcar houses were not uncommon during the Depression, as chronicled by Works Project Administration photographers like Arthur Rothstein. The story of how the Haggards acquired the car offers a glimpse of the era’s widespread prejudice toward Okies, though the singer’s own pride in his origins would later inspire his 1969 hit, “Okie from Muskogee.”
The family learned of the boxcar from a fellow church member, who asked James Haggard if he thought he could turn a surplus refrigerated train car she owned into a home, Mrs. Rea recalled. “She asked my daddy where he was from, and when he said ‘Oklahoma,’ she said, ‘I hear Oklahomans don’t work.’ Well, his blue eyes met her blue eyes and he said, ‘I’ve never heard of one who didn’t.'”

I suppose life is about collecting such stories and relating them all. Like how an Indian and a Brit can be connected by a thread that also ties in with Bakersfield and Merle Haggard.  Life is simply fascinating!