ABSTRACT
Tulare, a small farming community in the San Joaquin Valley of California during the 1930s—the Great Depression, which was followed by the great conflagration, World War II—was where, on a twenty-acre farm, I spent my childhood. The farmer’s year of back-breaking labor culminated in transforming green Thomson seedless grapes into browned raisins—that is, if the September rains held off long enough for the sun-drying process to be completed and the bundles of raisins safely transferred to large 200-pound-capacity wooden boxes.
