Those of us who recall Christmas during WWII know that metal toys were scarce due to the war. In fact, many of us children at the time contributed our metal toys for scrap drives. Naturally I don’t know what girls were looking forward to, but one of the first things boys were looking for after the war was cap and BB guns being made available again.

My maternal grandparent’s small church on the corner of Cottonwood and Padre in Southeast Bakersfield was the social center for the Dust Bowl folks in what we called “Little Oklahoma.” Grandad (John Bradden Caldwell) had built the church himself largely from the material of a wrecked boxcar at the nearby rail yard. It is my good fortune to have some “before and after” photos of it, one showing it as a structure wrapped in the ubiquitous tarpaper, the primary construction material throughout our small community. I had the privilege of driving some of the tacks attaching the tarpaper to the studs. Another shows the completed structure with an actual belfry with bell which I enjoyed the honor of ringing Sunday mornings. Such pictures and memories I put into the writing of books have enabled me to make a contribution to the Weedpatch Memorial Library. I do, after all, have bragging rights having been born in Weedpatch.

As to Christmas in Little Oklahoma during the war years, not only cap guns but toys of any kind were scarce. Not that it took a war to make them so to the folks commemorated by Steinbeck; at a time when pennies were real money and any kid with a quarter was rich, poverty was endemic to our small community where women actually did make dresses of flour and grain sacks, and both women and children often went barefoot. One thing about poverty, it does not discriminate among the poor and there was never any stigma attached to making do with what one had, or did not have. “Learn to do with or do without” was a mantra heard and used from childhood on.

But despite the cruel poverty in our community Christmas was a time to celebrate the hope of peace that the birth of Jesus declared to the world. Of the utmost hope was the peace of a successful end to the war because of the many small flags in windows with their blue stars proudly declaring for all to see some loved one in the service; and, tragically, sometimes the blue stars were changed for gold.

As all us natives know Kern County can be bitterly cold at Christmastime. But even during WWII Christmas was Christmas, and kids have a remarkable facility to deal with freezing temps at this time of year especially.

My brother and I escaped most of the real poverty of our little community because of our grandparents being so very industrious and entrepreneurial. They had an ice house on the corner of 4^th and Chester, a small grocery store, four small rentals, and my grandmother had a dress shop in Arvin next to the theater. My grandfather also had a job with the post office, so it isn’t surprising we were considered “rich” by the standards of Little Oklahoma.

But grandad really related to Santa Claus. Before the church was built he would dress like Santa and all the neighborhood children would come to our house where grandad dressed as Santa would dispense toys to them. And where did the toys come from? Most of them came from a magical place called “Owen’s Toy Store.”

While Ronnie and I loved our place in Little Oklahoma, we always looked forward to trips into Bakersfield. One of the reasons for this was that no trip to Bakersfield was complete without a visit to Owen’s Toy Store. A magical place with more toys than you ever thought existed outside the North Pole! It seemed to me that grandad enjoyed trips to the toy store as much as Ronnie and I did. He would pick up various toys examining them with genuine pleasure, all the while laughing and joking with Mr. Owen

Every Christmas Grandad would be given a large amount of toys by Mr. Owen to distribute to the children in our dirt poor community. Many children of Little Oklahoma would never have gotten a toy for Christmas had it not been for this. And grandad always made a delivery of toys to the Negro church across the railroad tracks to the north from us for distribution to the children there as well. As you can well imagine this endeared grandad and grandma to that whole community as well as our own.

Grandad did have real influence with the powers in Bakersfield, and often helped some of the Negro people in his official capacity as a Special Deputy Sheriff for Kern County. His reputation for being fair and never patronizing together with being a preacher enabled him to mix freely in both communities separated by the tracks from one another without trouble from either.

When the church was built, remarkably grandad would still dress as Santa for this distribution of toys Christmas morning from the church. His reasoning was he did not want the giving of toys to children confused with his role as a preacher, nor did grandad want to give the impression that Mr. Owen favored his church over any other.

Many children would show up for this giving of toys that we would never see in our church otherwise. But grandad would never question this. As “Santa,” his genuine concern was making children happy; and there was no mistaking the joy it gave him to play the role of Santa.