The Other Californians
By Jonah Raskin
California author Gerald W. Haslam inhabits the same rural corner of Sonoma County that I do. Neither of us are natives, but we both consider the rolling hills and farmland home. Haslam’s two-story house, minutes by car from my own, looks much the same as the other houses in the neighborhood, though more old cars line his driveway. It’s only when Haslam, clad in sneakers, jeans, and flannel shirt, opens the front door and invites me in that I feel I’m in Haslam’s unique universe. It’s not characterized by one single thing he owns, but all the mementos gathered throughout his life that reflect the bigness and diversity of California itself. In his home, I find a large collection of battered and tattered baseball caps from all across the West, bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon from little-known wineries in Napa Valley and beyond, and maps of literary California, connecting famed writers to geographic locations, hanging on the wall. Then, too, there are shelves packed with books and magazines devoted to the state. What really makes the place unique, of course, is Haslam himself—a spry seventy-five-year-old—and the vibrant stories he tells about the people and places in his life: his mother, who taught him to read; his father, who taught him the art of football; his friends Richard Rodriguez, Floyd Salas, and Gary Soto with whom he shares the writer’s life; and the town of Oildale, where he was born on March 18, 1937, and a place he knows better than any other on earth.
Over the past forty years, Haslam has been an irrepressible California storyteller, both a creator and destroyer of myths, and it’s nearly impossible now to separate the man from the stories he’s told or the books he’s published. In the 1970s, he made a name for himself when he published a series of eye-opening articles in The Nation exploring the ways in which issues of race and class play out in California, issues which are rarely understood by audiences east of the Mississippi. In “The Okies: Forty Years Later,” for example, he cast a backward glance at the migration of Oklahomans to California in the 1930s, exploring the forces of poverty and drought that led them to migrate and tracing their impact on the political economy and culture of the state. Haslam showed that Okies were not just a part of dusty literary and social history nor characters in a Steinbeck novel, but rather left an enduring legacy still felt in the working class of 1970s California.
This is an excerpt of “The Other Californians”