ME AND JOHN STEINBECK
The
plan was that we would paint mailboxes for 25¢ a box, and four, maybe five boxes a good day would get us all the way from Maine to
California where good jobs were supposed to be plentiful. When we got to
Oklahoma, the plan fell apart because those folks who had remained
behind and hadn’t left for California themselves didn’t much care how
their mailboxes looked anymore.
My father and uncle and I eventually did get to California but only
after having several occasional brushes with John law for vagrancy and panhandling, etc. Once in California, desperate and completely out of
money, we found temporary food and tent shelter at a government-run
relief camp in Indio, California, while we waited for the cotton fields
to start picking to the north. It was in that relief camp that I learned
and fell in love for life with the nutritional value of peanut butter!
In one of the fields we picked, we met and became friendly with a man named “John.” John didn’t pick cotton every day: John was a writer; some days John just worked on the book he was writing. One day, more than seventy years ago, John extended a simple act of kindness to me I've never forgotten, so I remember him indelibly. Twenty years later I learned by a chance encounter that John’s full name was John Steinbeck, explaining how my family name, TOBIN, got to be mentioned in the final pages of The Grapes of Wrath.
In one of the fields we picked, we met and became friendly with a man named “John.” John didn’t pick cotton every day: John was a writer; some days John just worked on the book he was writing. One day, more than seventy years ago, John extended a simple act of kindness to me I've never forgotten, so I remember him indelibly. Twenty years later I learned by a chance encounter that John’s full name was John Steinbeck, explaining how my family name, TOBIN, got to be mentioned in the final pages of The Grapes of Wrath.
But more than telling of how two men and a boy all the way from Maine met and became friendly with a guy named "John" in a California cotton field who turned out to be John Steinbeck, this is a story of survival, a story that delineates some of the harsh and
bitter realities that challenged and tested the staying power, ingenuity
and resilience of two men and a boy (and a nation) during the years of
the GREAT DEPRESSION. It is an inspirational GRAPES-OF-WRATH
survival story, a story that has been vetted and broadcast twice nationally to
critical acclaim, a story that brings, in a 30-minute radio-interview format, a
meaningful and uplifting message that all should hear and will never forget
once heard.
It is a message culled from bitter, hard-times adversity and one that should be shared with others for its staying-power significance, especially in these times of GREAT RECESSION and challenge. The message is inspirational & entepreneural. I think of it as my GRAPES OF WRATH AXIOM!
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