Tehachapi News

Jim Phillips: child of the Dust Bowl raised in a labor camp

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Many local residents know longtime Tehachapi barber Jim Phillips as a consummate professional, cheerful and precise in his barbershop decorated with Western antiques and collectibles, while others may be familiar with his musical talents as a drummer and vocalist, but few people are aware that he lived in a tent and grew up dirt-poor in a farm labor camp 20 miles west of Tehachapi.

A successful business owner, Jim has been the proprietor of Jim’s Barber Shop in Old Towne for 33 years and has a loyal and appreciative customer base. As a boy, he picked cotton by hand at the base of Bear Mountain for two and a half cents per pound.

Jim was born at Kern General Hospital in Bakersfield in 1941, the son of teenage parents who had each emigrated from Oklahoma with their parents in search of a better life. His father, Monroe “Junior” Phillips was only 15 and his mother, Virgie Bond Phillips, was 17.

Though the two had wed, marriage can be difficult even in the best of  good circumstances and is especially tough for teenagers living in poverty. Jim’s father left his wife and baby son while the family was living on a ranch on Old Town Road in Tehachapi.

Virgie and young Jim returned to live on the Frick Ranch near Arvin with Virgie’s parents, Martin and Tina Perry Bonds. Jim’s grandmother Tina was an Indian woman who spoke fluent Chickasaw and not much English. It was Jim’s grandmother who spent most of the time raising him in his earliest years.

Jim still remembers clinging to his grandmother’s skirt and peaking out from behind her in 1945 on the day his mother came to get him to move into the Arvin Federal Labor Camp located on Weedpatch Highway near the town of Arvin.

His mother had remarried a man named Atwood Risner, a farmhand with a son and daughter of his own who were slightly older than Jim.

Living in a tent, five to a bed

“We moved into a 10-foot by 12-foot tent, and all five of us slept in one bed that night,” Jim recalls. “Here I was with a man and two kids who were strangers to me, and I didn’t even know my mother that well because I’d been with my grandmother most of the time. It was tough for a little boy.”

The Arvin Federal Labor Camp, which residents at the time referred to a simply “the Government Camp,” was one of ten that the federal government built in the Central Valley to provide migrant farmworkers with decent living conditions. Many Dust Bowl refugees were living in squalor, in shacks without sanitation and the labor camps were an effort to improve their living conditions.

Though Dust Bowl migrants may have come from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri or other states, they tended to be lumped together and referred to derisively as “Okies,” whether they were actually from Oklahoma or not. The Government Camp at Arvin became home to about 1,000 of these Okies.

Labor camp was an improvement for most

The labor camp was an improvement in living conditions for most of these poor farmworkers, since there was a sanitation building in the center of the camp that had showers and flush toilets, as well as washing machines and clotheslines for doing laundry. The camp also boasted of a little store, post office, community hall and eventually a highly-regarded school built by the kids and their families.

The tents themselves had a wooden floor and canvas sides, but no stove or heat of any kind. Families cooked outside with wood or coal oil (kerosene).

“Those tents were cold in the winter, Lordy I remember one time when the rain was four inches deep,” Jim recalled. “It melted my mother’s cardboard clothes closet.”

The tents had no electricity other than a light socket hanging from the roof where occupants could screw in a light bulb. They rented for $9 a month.

After a couple of years in the camp, the Risner family was able to move from a tent into what were called “tin cabins,” which were like 10’ x 12’ sheds with corrugated metal roofs. These rented for $12 a month and the Risners leased two of them, one more as a kitchen and the other to serve as a bedroom. In the kitchen was a coal oil stove set up on two orange crates.

Jim’s biological father, Monroe Phillips, was killed in an auto accident in Los Angeles when Jim was 6 or 7 years old. The small Social Security check he got each month was used to help support the family, which consisted of his parents, older siblings Kendall and Sue and younger sister named Sharon, born while the family lived in the labor camp.

When Jim was about 9, the Risner family moved into what were called “the cottages” at the labor camp. These were two bedroom frame houses with their own bathrooms and they rented for $42 a month. After the earlier living conditions, the cottages felt like luxury to Jim and his family.

All during the years at the labor camp, Jim’s stepfather Atwood Risner worked as a farmhand and eventually as a labor contractor himself, obtaining his labor contracting license. Jim refers to him as “Dad” and regards Risner as a good and kind man.

Picking cotton for 2 and 1/2 cents per pound

When Jim was seven or eight years old, he began joining the family as they picked cotton in the Arvin area, including at Sycamore Farms, located where Sycamore Golf Course is today.

“We’d start out at 4 a.m., riding in the back of Dad’s ‘48 pickup truck,” Jim explained. “When we got to the field we’d stand around a tire fire until daylight and then start picking.”

Entire fields would be handpicked  —  this was before the arrival of mechanical harvesters. Pickers would move up and down the cotton rows dragging a 10 or 12-foot-long burlap bag, pulling the tufts of cotton from the split bolls and putting them in the sacks. Small kids used gunny sacks until they were old enough to drag and fill full-size burlap bags.

“The bolls are sharp and they’d make your fingers bleed,” Jim remembers. “When your sack was full, it was weighed and the amount written down and then it was dumped into a cotton trailer and you refilled it. About the most I could pick was 150 pounds a day, but my uncle and some of the men could pick 500 pounds a day. You got paid two and a half cents per pound. When you went home you were tired and dirty.” 

While his Dad provided drinking water for the workers, there were no portable outhouses in those days.

“When you had to go, you went in the cotton field and wiped with cotton,” Jim said. “You’d be careful about picking up any loose cotton that happened to be lying on the ground in your row.”

As a labor contractor, Jim’s father eventually had 300 workers to whom he was writing checks  for seasonal work, and the family was finally able to move out of the labor camp into a house in Lamont that was purchased for $6500.

Parents hid children so they could work

Jim remembers one fall when an early storm arrived and froze hard, naturally defoliating the cotton fields around Arvin, which made the picking process much easier and faster (this was before the widespread use of chemical defoliants).

“The fields looked like they were filled with snow,” Jim remembers. “Entire families would be out picking. We were only allowed to pick on weekends, but other families had their school-age kids working because they were desperate and needed the money. A truant officer would be out there every morning looking for kids but their parents would have them hide down in the fields. The picking went so fast that my Dad made $3500 in nine days and paid off the house he bought for us in Lamont.”

Jim’s older brother Kendall got paid the handsome sum of $10 a day to stomp down the cotton in the trailer as workers’ sacks were emptied into it, keeping his eye open for rocks or clods that an occasional unscrupulous picker would put in his sack to boost the poundage.

“I told my Dad that I’d like to have the job of stomping the trailer sometimes,” Jim laughs. “He told me ‘Jim, you don’t weigh more than a bag of popcorn and I need someone who’s heavy enough to really stomp down the cotton.’”

I’ll continue Jim’s story in next week’s paper, and explore how he became involved in the development of the “Bakersfield Sound” in country music.

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Jim Phillips will be “Honoring Our Elders” guest on December 17

I’ll be interviewing Jim Phillips about life in a migrant labor camp near Tehachapi as part of the ongoing series “Honoring Our Elders: History in the First Person” at Mama Hillybeans on Tehachapi Boulevard on December 17 at 7 p.m. The public is invited and there is no admission fee.

In the second half of the interview Jim will also be playing some brief musical selections to explain the development of the distinctive “Bakersfield Sound” in country music, which included notables like Bill Woods, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

Come early, as special dinner menu items will be offered in honor of the occasion.