NY Times: Trying to Save Merle Haggard’s Old Home (a Boxcar)

[petronius]

OILDALE, Calif. — The tanker trains loaded with crude oil still rattle down the tracks at the end of the alleyway where Merle Haggard, a living legend of country music, grew up in a boxcar that his father transformed into the family home.

“The walls were thick: cool in the summer and warm in winter,” Lillian Haggard Rea, the musician’s 93-year-old sister, recalled of the boxcar that their father, James Haggard, a carpenter with the Santa Fe-Southern Pacific Corporation, converted by hand during the Depression. It was, she said, “just a wonderful home to live in.”

Like much of the music associated with the Bakersfield sound, an unvarnished form of country that thrived in honky-tonks here in the 1950s and ‘60s, Mr. Haggard’s is rooted in the making-do values of the Dust Bowl. His parents migrated from Oklahoma in 1935 and, like thousands of Okies, they sought refuge in Oildale, a ragtag collection of camps and settlements on the outskirts of Bakersfield.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/us/preservationists-aim-to-save-merle-haggards-childhood-home.html


Photo caption from the NYT: The campaign to “Save Hag’s Boxcar” would involve disassembling and restoring it to its 1940s glory, as well as building a new dwelling for the current occupant. Monica Almeida/The New York Times.

[Politicalboi]

1. Oildale hasn't changed much

Except I bet when Merle lived there, there were no bars on the windows.

[hollysmom]

2. that was the fist thing I noticed. sad n/t

[bayareaboy]

3. Things are A-OK for Merle now

I understand you could put several of the Boxcar houses inside his place in Redding.

He used to bring his extended family to a State Park where I used to volunteer. It is called Russian Gulch and its close to the town of Mendocino on the coast. A lot of folks wanted him to do the sing along thing, but he just kind of didn't listen to much to other folks.

[mackerel]

4. wow, cool story. i hope they do save it.