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

[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.

--- Snip ---

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.