Awaiting the opening of orange picking season

August 9, 2026 M.G.

The man in the picture came from Missouri.

His name apparently wasn’t recorded, or at least it didn’t make it into the caption that followed Dorothea Lange’s photograph into the archives.

What we do know isn’t much.

He was a drought refugee from Polk, Missouri.

It was November 1936.

He was in Porterville, California.

And he was waiting for the orange harvest to begin.

That’s it.

I recently took two of Lange’s black-and-white photographs and reimagined them in color, in the style of one of Norman Rockwell’s magazine illustrations. There’s something about seeing him that way that changes the photograph a little. The Depression suddenly doesn’t seem quite so safely tucked away in black-and-white history.

He looks more like a man you might actually have known.

A fellow who had worked all his life, put on his overalls and work boots that morning, and was now sitting on the back of his car waiting for somebody to tell him there was work.

Except he was a long way from home.

And the work hadn’t started yet.

Waiting for Somebody Else’s Oranges

We tend to look at old photographs and romanticize them.

Life was simpler then.

People worked hard.

Families stuck together.

Nobody needed much.

There may be some truth buried in all of that, but there’s another truth sitting right there on the back of that automobile.

A lot of people were poor as hell.

This was 1936.

The country had been in the Great Depression for seven years, and drought had devastated huge parts of rural America. Families from Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and elsewhere loaded whatever they still owned into cars and trucks and headed west.

California had crops.

Crops needed workers.

Therefore, California had jobs.

That was the theory, anyway.

Our fellow from Polk, Missouri, had apparently followed that theory all the way to Porterville.

And when he got there, the oranges weren’t ready.

So he waited.