Bakersfield Quotes

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.

When people want to win they will go to desperate extremes. However, anyone that has already won in life has come to the conclusion that there is no game. There is nothing but learning in this life and it is the only thing we take with us to the grave—knowledge. If you only understood that concept then your heart wouldn’t break so bad. Jealousy or revenge wouldn’t be your ambition. Stepping on others to raise yourself up wouldn’t be a goal. Competition would be left on the playing field, and your freedom from what other people think about you would light the pathway out of hell.

In his Greenwich Village apartment, Jose Garcia Villa fords his fiords of books and papers on his way to the bar of the anchored angel. In a boxcar to Bakersfield stars beam on Carlos Bulosan papaya blossoms of Mangusmana.

He was the issue of a gritty pod of dustbowl Okies who blew into Bakersfield back when Steinbeck was trolling the lower depths of Lamont and Weedpatch for protagonists.

Women who dance with their eyes closed, smiling, are as near to heaven as you can get on earth, and there I was, in heaven, only in Bakersfield.

Marco, her first boyfriend in LA, called her an exhibitionist, said she should get a job in a strip club if she liked it that much, it paid better. She did like it, but it wasn't what people thought - a sex job. It was the opposite - a statement, personal, frank, without intention to please. Here I am. This is me. My fact. I can do this, can you? Callie with her stretch marks, Frank, who was almost a dwarf. Each body held some truth the baby artists needed to see. Even that of a seventeen-year-old dropout from Bakersfield.

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" What are you thinking about? I am thinking of an early summer. I am thinking of wet hills in the rain Pouring water. Shedding it Down empty acres of oak and manzanita Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun, Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard. Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana Driving the hills crazy, A fast wind with a bit of dust in it Bruising everything and making the seed sweet. Or down in the city where the peach trees Are awkward as young horses, And there are kites caught on the wires Up above the street lamps, And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches. What are you thinking? I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer As slow getting started As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza After a lot of unusual rain California seems long in the summer. I would like to write a poem as long as California And as slow as a summer. Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow As the very tip of summer. As slow as the summer seems On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road Between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus. What are you thinking now? I’m thinking that she is very much like California. When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways Traveling up and down her skin Long empty highways With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them On hot summer nights. I am thinking that her body could be California And I a rich Eastern tourist Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California That I have never seen. Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady, Send them. One of each breast photographed looking Like curious national monuments, One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging In the world’s oldest hotel. What are you thinking? I am thinking of how many times this poem Will be repeated. How many summers Will torture California Until the damned maps burn Until the mad cartographer Falls to the ground and possesses The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding. What are you thinking now? I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

More than a dozen books are dedicated to December 25, 1996, the night JonBenet Ramsey was murdered. But EAR-ONS? Here was a case that spanned a decade, an entire state, changed DNA law in California*, included sixty victims, a collection of strange utterances from the suspect at crime scenes (“I’ll kill you like I did some people in Bakersfield”), a poem he allegedly wrote (“Excitement’s Crave”), even his voice on tape (a brief, whispery taunt recorded by a device the police put on a victim’s phone), yet there was only a single self-published, hard-to-find book written about it.

When he met Buffett, Munger had already formed strong opinions about the chasms between good businesses and bad. He served as a director of an International Harvester dealership in Bakersfield and saw how difficult it was to fix up an intrinsically mediocre business; as an Angeleno, he observed the splendid prosperity of the Los Angeles Times; in his head he did not carry a creed about "bargains" that had to be unlearned. So in conversations with Buffett over the years he preached the virtues of good businesses. By 1972, Blue Chip Stamps, a Berkshire affiliate that has since been merged into the parent, was paying three times book value to buy See's Candies, and the good-business era was launched.7

I had abandoned Elana; I deserved her uncertainty. I closed my eyes and focused on her touch. Perhaps she wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain it to her, but to me Elana was not only Elana--she was the sad-eyed love of mine who used to bag groceries at Woodley's in Buffalo; she was the sweet one who always sat across from me on the city bus in Niagara Falls; she was the girl I'd picked up hitchhiking in Mobile and dropped off in New Orleans, brash, full of sarcastic humor, but truly lonely and scared; she was the one I'd nabbed pinching Newports for her dad from the Marathon station I'd worked at in Bakersfield (I'd softened and paid for the pack myself); yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sisters how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars-she was all of them, and she was so much more that was just her that I still didn't know.

No,” he said. “Go.” He snapped the last snap of Maya’s onesie and lifted her by her underarms, setting her on her freshly dry butt in her crib. Then he took me by both shoulders. “I’ll take tomorrow off work. I’ll call it in as a family emergency. I’ll put the baby’s car seat in my car, and Maya and I will drive out to Bakersfield and pick up your mom.

Bakersfield, after all, is where Merle Haggard lives; they call it Nashville West.)

Little did I know that Tammy was having “visions” in her private prayer at work and at home. Until one day, after she had left her job, she came home and said we needed to pick something up. Apparently, she had partially paid for an RV to travel and felt that her getting let go from her job was a “sign from God”. She told me that I was to be a deacon and we were to leave Bakersfield and like Abraham, were to follow God and move away from idolatry and like the Israelites from Egypt move away from our slavery to self.

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" What are you thinking? I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer As slow getting started As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza After a lot of unusual rain California seems long in the summer. I would like to write a poem as long as California And as slow as a summer. Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow As the very tip of summer. As slow as the summer seems On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road Between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus. What are you thinking now? I’m thinking that she is very much like California. When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways Traveling up and down her skin Long empty highways With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them On hot summer nights. I am thinking that her body could be California And I a rich Eastern tourist Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California That I have never seen. Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady, Send them. One of each breast photographed looking Like curious national monuments, One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging In the world’s oldest hotel. What are you thinking? I am thinking of how many times this poem Will be repeated. How many summers Will torture California Until the damned maps burn Until the mad cartographer Falls to the ground and possesses The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding. What are you thinking now? I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

The audience in Bakersfield was battle-tested. Conservatives had suffered razor-thin defeat for control of the party’s premier volunteer group, the California Republican Assembly, at the convention in March of 1963—a convention, conservatives were convinced, that San Francisco union leader and Rockefeller stalwart William Nelligan had stolen from them. Redeeming that loss became the focus of conservative energies for the rest of the year. The efforts developed along three fronts. One, led by Newport Beach optometrist Nolan Frizzelle and S&L magnate Joe Crail, worked to take back the CRA. “It was like facing a howling mob,” a liberal said of the one hundred conservatives who set upon the Oakland chapter’s convention in December—and, after Nelligan declared the the conservatives’ victory in Oakland null and void, did it again in January. The scene was repeated across the liberal northern tier of the state. And at the 1964 convention, Frizzelle won the presidency of the CRA near dawn with 363 out of 600 votes. (There were only 569 registered delegates.) The next day, portly right-wingers held sit-ins in front of the mikes. Liberals stalked out in a rage. That left the conservatives

But the town of Bishop was far less memorable. It was one of those places that I only ever think of being on the way to someplace else. Like Baker or Barstow or Bakersfield. We have a lot of those that start with Bs.

When people arrive in San Francisco, they often discover there isn’t room in the shelters for them. “People come from all over the United States, thinking it’s some sort of spa here,” said a homeless man, “some sort of nirvana here. And they find out that it’s very expensive to live here.”26 The same was true in Los Angeles. “For the first time in 13 years, Los Angeles opened its housing voucher wait list last year,” said Dr. Margot Kushel. “The city drew 600,000 applicants for 20,000 slots, highlighting the enormous unmet need.”27 And more services attracted more people to Seattle. “I do think we have a magnet effect,” said Seattle’s former homelessness chief. Nearly one-quarter of the homeless in King County, in which Seattle is the biggest city, said they became homeless outside of Washington State.28 Mayor Breed said she opposed Proposition C because she feared that spending yet more on homelessness services, without any requirement that people get off the street, would backfire. “We are a magnet for people who are looking for help,” she said. “There are a lot of other cities that are not doing their part, and I find that larger cities end up with more than our fair share.”29 After San Francisco started offering free hotel rooms to the homeless during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, first responders reported that people had come from across the state. “People are coming from all over the place—Sacramento, Lake County, Bakersfield,” said the city’s fire chief. “We have also heard that people are getting released from jail in other counties and being told to go to San Francisco where you will get a tent and then you will get housing.

in Bakersfield.

The bold, black masked pup goes to a surgeon in Santa Barara with two young daughters. The surgeon’s wife, Jill, takes one look at the pup’s confident gait and names him “Brag.” He’s a handsome fellow with over-sized paws and a serious disposition. The official name for his coloring is sable, which means he has as much black on him as he does brown. Brag grows deeply attached to his new family, never straying far from the little girls and always with one eye on Jill, whom he adores. Before Brag is a year old, Jill’s husband – an amateur pilot – hops in his plain and flies to Bakersfield for business. On his way home later that night, with two friends seated behind him, he miscalculates his position and flies into a mountain north of Santa Barbara. The plan disintegrates on impact. No one survives

All across the state of California, the big growers are taking advantage of the people who work for them. The migrants coming into the state are so desperate to feed their families, they’ll take any wage. There are more than seventy thousand homeless people between here and Bakersfield. Children are dying in the squatters’ camps at a rate of two a day, from malnutrition or disease. It’s not right. Not in America. I don’t care if there is a Depression. Enough is enough. It’s up to us to help them. We have to get them to join the Workers Alliance and stand up for their rights.” There was a roar of approval from the crowd. Loreda nodded. His words struck a nerve with her, made her think for the first time, We don’t have to take this. “Now is the time, comrades. The government won’t help these people. It is up to us. We have to convince the workers to stand up. Rise up. Use any means at our disposal to stop big business from crushing the workers and taking advantage of them. We must stand together and fight this capitalist injustice. We will fight for the migrant workers here and in the Central Valley, help them organize into unions and battle for better wages. The time … is now!