Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (29 page)

The portrait of a weary migrant mother and her hungry children struck America’s heart and made Florence Thompson an American icon.

T
he famous photograph shows a tired mother staring into the distance, her fingers nervously touching her cheek. Two of her young daughters huddle against her for comfort and a baby rests in her lap. Taken as part the National Farm Security Administration’s (NFSA) photography project during the Great Depression, “Migrant Mother” put a human face on the hardships of that era. The powerful image became so symbolic that people tended to forget that the subjects of the photo were not just symbols. They were real people: Florence Owens Thompson and her three daughters, Katherine, Ruby, and baby Norma.

On a miserably cold, wet afternoon in March 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange drove into a migrant camp near Nipomo, California, after seeing a sign advertising pea-picking work for farm laborers. For over a month, Dorothea, a staff photographer for NFSA, had been documenting the plight of migrant farmer workers. Because of an early frost, most of the pea harvest had been destroyed, and she knew the workers were down on their luck.

Near the entrance to the camp, Lange saw a woman and her children in a ragged tent. As Lange later described:

She snapped six images and hurried home to develop them. She rushed her prints to the
San Francisco News
, along with the story of starvation in Nipomo. The
News
ran two of the photos with the story, which was picked up and syndicated nationally with the headline “Ragged, Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live in Squalor.” As a result of the coverage, 20,000 pounds of federal food supplies were sent to the hungry in Nipomo within a week. But the food never reached Florence or her children because, by that time, they had moved on to Watsonville, California.

Though Lange never asked the woman her name or her history, most people assumed her to be a typical Okie. In the mid 1930s, drought had turned the Midwest into what became known as the “Dust Bowl.” The drought and lack of jobs resulted in small farmers (particularly those from Oklahoma) losing their farms and homes. Many packed up
their cars and headed to California, where there was seasonal work picking the harvest.

Florence Owen Thompson’s story was unique. Most Okies were of European descent, but Florence was a Native American, born in 1903 in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory. Most Okies were new to California, but Florence had been living there for ten years before she was photographed. The death of her first husband in 1931, not the Dust Bowl, had forced her to work in the fields in order to support her six children.

As for the pea-picker camp, according to Florence’s son Troy Owens, they had only stopped in Nipomo because the car broke down. Florence set up their tent near the entrance to the camp and waited while the boys went into town to fix the car. Florence’s family wasn’t starving, although many in the camps were. As for selling tires for food, they had no extra tires to sell. Their car, once it was running again, certainly wouldn’t get very far without tires.

After they had moved on to Watsonville, one of Florence’s sons happened to see a copy of his mother’s photo in the
San Francisco News
and rushed home to see her for fear she was dead. He couldn’t think of any other reason why his mother’s picture would be in the newspaper and was relieved to find her very much alive. He showed her the photo, but she just looked at it in silence and remained silent about it for many years. Perhaps she even forgot about it. The photo’s popularity never helped her family to survive the hard times. Florence and her family continued to move from town to town, harvesting crops and taking odd jobs whenever they could.

In the 1940s Florence took a job at a state hospital and eventually married her second husband, George
Thompson, a hospital administrator. She settled down in Modesto, California, having finally made it along with her family (make that ten kids now) into the middle class.

Florence had moved past those bleak moments in a cold, wet camp in Nipomo, but her photo remained frozen in time. Time, in fact, only increased the popularity of “Migrant Mother”. Finally in the 1970s, after seeing her own face reproduced continually and after hearing her story told incorrectly, Florence wrote to the
Modesto Bee.

She complained that Dorothea Lange had promised that the photos would only be used to help the people in the camp. She had never been consulted about the use of her photo, nor had she made a dime from the many reproductions of the picture. Florence might have believed that Lange profited from the photo, but the photographer never received money for the reproductions either, since the photo belonged to the NFSA.

But Florence did admit that she had lived the hard times Lange tried to capture in photographs. “When Steinbeck wrote in
The Grapes of Wrath
about those people living under the bridge at Bakersfield—at one time we lived under that bridge. It was the same story. Didn’t even have a tent then, just a ratty old quilt.” Florence remembered how she walked miles to work at a diner for scant wages and leftovers to feed her family. And in Fireball, California, she harvested cotton and received only 50 cents for every 100 pounds she picked. Florence summed up those years up by saying, “We just existed . . . we survived.”

Maybe because she was hardworking and proud, Florence disliked what she saw as the photo’s portrait of
her as a victim, a woman who sat still in the face of starvation, almost paralyzed with despair. Only that impression isn’t what most viewers took away from that powerful image.

In 1983, Florence suffered a stroke and needed around-the-clock medical care. Her children, unable to afford the cost, issued a public plea for help. From across the country, letters of good will poured in, along with $15,000. Many grateful people had been helped by the strength and dignity they had seen in “Migrant Mother.” Rather than making her an object of pity, the image made Florence an inspiration and a comfort to people struggling with adversity. Roy Stryker, the head of the NFSA photography project, probably summed it up best: “She has all the suffering of mankind in her, but all the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage . . . She was immortal.”

The Judds didn’t always have it easy. The road to country music success was sure paved with hardship for this mother-and-daughter team.

A
t age 17, Diana Judd was pregnant and worried. Diana and the baby’s father were already having problems—their future didn’t look too bright. And her own parents were coping with Diana’s brother Brian, who was dying of Hodgkin’s disease. How, Diana wondered, could she possibly care for a child with a not-so-great husband and limited support from her family?

On May 30, 1964, Diana, now Mrs. Michael Ciminella, forgot her worries when she held the baby girl she named Christina Claire. As Diana soothed the crying infant with a song and their voices blended, history was being made. One day those voices would create a diva duo that enchanted millions.

Michael and Diana left Kentucky for college and a brighter future. In time they made it across the country to Los Angeles, where they had another daughter, Ashley. Unfortunately, their rocky marriage foundered and the two divorced, leaving Diana a single mother with no college education and two children to support. For a time
she took advantage of her good looks to do modeling work, but the money was too uncertain. So Diana enrolled in nursing school while she worked at other jobs to earn money.

Diana once described her life on the edge: “I was a pay-check away from the streets all the time with a minimum-wage job . . . I was traipsing around with two young children, alone. That film of desperation coats everything when you have no emotional support.” Despite hunger, cold, and constant worry about paying for school clothes and braces, the divorced mom kept searching for a solid future—not realizing it was sitting in the backseat of her car.

Mom and daughters were united as a team against the world. But within their little clan, tempers often exploded, especially between Diana and her oldest daughter, Chris. Both feisty and quick tempered, they’ve been described as “two cats with their tails tied together and thrown over a clothesline.”

One thing did bring them together: music. Noticing Chris’s fascination with her guitar, Diana bought the eleven-year-old a guitar of her own. Mother and daughter started playing and singing Kentucky hill-country music together. Finally there was at least some harmony in their squabbling household—two-part harmony, that is. The new duo gave their first performance on Mother’s Day when they sang for Diana’s mother Polly Judd, who declared that they sang like angels. Even allowing for motherly prejudice, the record does show that Polly was probably right.

Diana and Chris kept singing while Mom was finishing her nursing education in Northern California. Ready to shed her old life, Diana took back her family name and added the biblical first name, Naomi, symbolic of love, loyalty, and, of course, moving on. Chris took a new name too: Wynonna, after a town from the song “Route 66.”

Some of Naomi’s precious extra pennies paid for Wynonna’s professional music lessons. The pair met people in the recording industry who encouraged them to keep singing. By the time Naomi had her nursing degree, she had a new goal for herself and Wynonna. Good-bye, California. Hello, Nashville, Tennessee, the center of the country music business!

As mother and daughter appeared together locally, Naomi vowed they’d make it in Nashville. Even though Naomi had her nursing degree, times remained tough for the Judd family. Still broke, Naomi and family were renting an abandoned farmhouse and burning furniture for warmth before they got an unexpected break.

In 1983, a hospital patient who appreciated Naomi’s nursing and her singing just happened to be the daughter of an RCA record producer. Luckily for the Judds, her dad liked Naomi’s singing too. From there it was live auditions at RCA, a first album, first concert tour, and huge success when “Mama, He’s Crazy” hit number one on the country charts.

For the next eight years, the Judds reigned as the queens of country music, with shining platinum albums and six Grammys. Ashley took her own route to fame from the University of Kentucky to Hollywood, where she would go
from an ensign on TV’s
Star Trek: The Next Generation
to starring in major features like
A Time to Kill, Kiss the Girls
, and
Double Jeopardy.

With all the Judds so wildly successful, Naomi felt herself to be the “Queen of Everything.” Then hard times returned with a vengeance. Naomi was diagnosed with the hepatitis C virus and given three years to live. Forced to retire in 1991, Naomi once again fought to survive, this time using the power of her mind and spirit to aid her body.