Dinner With the President

I was driving back to Monterey from Turlock a couple of summers ago. Along the way were these shelters for farm workers. As I drove by, I noticed the laundry hanging on the fence. The socks especially struck me. On one hand it was clever and comical. On the other, it was a reminder.

These clothes belong to migrants who work hard in the hot sun all day. The summer temperatures in this area average 100 degrees and if there are any breezes, they are too hot to bring much relief. When the sun goes down, it may cool off to 85 or so. These simple shelters, now being replaced with new, better built units, were hardly air conditioned.

I was reminded of somehting I had read about in Doris Kearns Goodwin's book No Ordinary Time, a history of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt years. In the book, Goodwin explained that early in his first presidency, Franklin sent Eleanor out on these long train trips back and forth across the country. Remember that this was during the Great Depression. When she returned from these trips, Franklin would pepper her with all sorts of detailed questions. She was often frustrated by this because she wanted to tell him about what she had accomplished on these trips, not small details like what was being cooked in the soup houses she had visited.



Once he asked her how the people seemed to be. She started to tell him about those she met along the train route. Franklin cut her off, asking her about the laundry on the clotheslines. Eleanor hadn't noticed and didn't understand why it was so important. Franklin, exasperated, explained to her that people wouldn't actaully tell her much about their troubles. She had to observe. If the clothes on the clotheslines had holes in them, were patched over several times, or looked thin, it meant people were suffering. They didn't have enough money to replace clothing.

I thought of this fact sitting in my car across the street from this laundry. I was also thinking about all of those Works Projects Administration (WPA) photographers and artists like Dorothea Lang who went out to photograph such scenes. The WPA fostered many such artists and helped catalogue an important part of our history as a nation.

When I stepped outside with my camera, I heard rap playing very loudly. The rapper was repeating over and over, "I never have dinner with the president."



(The rapper, I have since learned was Ice Tea. The song is called "No Vaseline" and just about every line in the song but for this one is full of expletives.)