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Near Manteca, California. November 1938. Farm Security Administration (FSA) tenant purchase clients, Greeks, from Isle of Crete, formerly rehabilitation clients. Taken from ditch-bank. Had fifteen cows, now have fifty-five
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Title and other information from caption card.
Photo shows William (Greek name: Vasilos), an immigrant from Crete who was born April 1890 in Cambous, Crete, and died 5 June 1967. He originally went to Utah where he worked in mines before moving to Davenport, Ca., where he worked in a quarry. He later moved to Manteca. This was his second farm in Manteca, Ca. The Dimotakis family farm was virtually self-sufficient and grew a variety of fruits: figs, apricots, peaches, loquats, dates, oranges, lemons, limes, mulberries, melons and grapes; vegetables and nuts: peas, beans, zucchini, avocados, olives, pecans, walnuts, almonds. It also included a functioning olive oil plant, dairy, and aviary, and livestock, and there was an outdoors wood-burning oven for bread baking; and they kept bees for gathering honey. Most weekends there was a social gahtering around food and drink that often included a goat or lamb rotating on a spit. (Source: Cathy Rundell, descendant of the Dimotakis family, owners of the farm in 1938.
Transfer; United States. Office of War Information. Overseas Picture Division. Washington Division; 1944.
More information about the FSA/OWI Collection is available at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.fsaowi
Temp. note: usf34batch2
Film copy on SIS roll 27, frame 2007.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, Dorothea Lange contracted polio as a young girl. She learned professional photography skills while working in New York in her early 20s, and then landed in San Francisco where she ran a portrait business catering to the city's wealthy elite. Her second husband, Paul Taylor, helped her to get out into the fields with the destitute pickers, who she'd treat like portrait subjects with empathy and identification with her subjects. When the Depression hit, she captured crowded breadlines. In the late 1930s Dorothea Lange had been hired by the photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration - to photograph Dust Bowl refugees escaped into California from the Midwest and her images went far beyond bureaucratic reportage. A skilled portraitist, Lange might not have been able to change government policies, but her images for the FSA were picked up by newspapers across the country. John Steinbeck used them for inspiration in his 1939 Dust Bowl tale "The Grapes of Wrath."
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