American Photography
An Interview with the Migrant Mother

(previously aired) - On the PBS Online Web site for American Photography, you'll find a fascinating "Image Lab" that features a story about a photograph known as "Migrant Mother." It's a photograph that has become an icon of the Great Depression. We would invite you visit the site, look for the camera icon and participate in the Image Lab. Then come back here for the rest of the story.
    The woman behind the icon was named Florence Thompson. In 1936, Florence was a refugee in her own country. Displaced from her home in Oklahoma in the early 1930s, Florence and her family were travelling from one small California farming town to another, looking for work. From Modesto to Salinas to Bakersfield to Fireball, California -- or wherever the next harvest was ready -- they loaded their tent into their Model T Ford and moved on.
    In the early spring of that year, the family was looking for work in the pea fields outside of Nipomo, California. But a late frost had destroyed the crop, and worse, they had car trouble, so they couldn't move on. The boys were in town fixing it. Florence was comforting her three daughters. She was pregnant with her sixth child.
    A car drove by. In it Dorothea Lange was returning from her first major trip for the Farm Security Administration, documenting depression conditions in the west. Something drew Dorothea back to Florence's lean-to tent. She shot only five photographs, and the last has become famous. Dorothea felt a spiritual connection.

In 1979, NET Online Editor Bill Ganzel tracked down Florence as part of a book project he was doing. He photographed her and the same three daughters from the original photograph and talked with them about those years and the photograph. Click on the control bar above to hear what Florence had to say.
     Florence and her family came through the Depression and worked their way into the middle class. Florence and most of her 10 kids settled around Modesto, California. Her children bought her a suburban tract house like that of daughter Norma Rydlewski, but Florence didn't feel comfortable and moved back into mobile home. She literally wanted to have wheels under her.
     Norma is nealing in front of her mother, with Katherine McIntosh on the left, and Ruby Sprague behind. Florence died in the early 1980s.
[From the book "Dust Bowl Descent," by Bill Ganzel, 1984, University of Nebraska Press.]

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