“I finished eighth grade and didn’t go on to high school, which wasn’t uncommon in those days for farm boys. Work, except for topping beets, etc., was scarce around Rupert and I heard that California was the land of opportunity so at age 20, with no money for a train ticket, I hopped a freight train to San Bernardino. The trip took about ten days. Food was cheap: $.35 for dinner. Two other Rupert men, Marchant Newman and George Stoneaker traveled with me. We met two Jewish fellows who were going to Los Angeles to work for their uncle. They borrowed ten dollars from me later paid it back when we all met again in a pool hall. We all liked to shoot pool.
“At a stop in Nevada we were put off the train by railroad detectives so we walk down to a beet dump to catch another train–which turned out to be a cattle train. It was cold outside to ride on top so we got into a car full of steers. We each sat on a steer. In the morning when the train stopped a crewman opened the car to see if the cattle were all right. He told us to get off the train so again we had to look for another freight train headed for California.
“We wound up in Los Angeles. We looked for work and I found a job mixing cement with a construction crew. I started at 50 cents an hour, which was raised to 75 cents–good money for those days. We lived in a rooming house called the Piedmont Hotel at Main and Spring Streets.”
-John Joseph Straubhaar
Excerpt from Straubhaar Family History, July 1990
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