I Know My First Name Is Steven Read Free Page B

character from a Steinbeck novel. A folksy, entertaining spinner of tales, Del enjoys people. His favorite subjects are his family, his friends, his work, and the San Joaquin Valley. Inside or out, he is never without a stained gimmie cap, emblazoned with a farm equipment or fertilizer logo, which hides his ever-increasing baldness. Almost a decade older than his wife, Del was born during the Great Depression in dusty, remote Farmington, New Mexico. After the war, while he was still a teenager, his family moved west to California so that Del's father, Tal, could find work in the expanding agricultural industry of the San Joaquin Valley.
    A robust young man, Del worked in the Valley's fruit and vegetable fields himself until his late twenties, when he struck out for northern California and found a job as a laborer at a sawmill in the isolated hamlet of Hyampom in Trinity County. He soon met pretty, black-haired, olive-complexioned Mary Katherine "Kay" Augustine, the eighteen-year-old daughter of local dairy and truck farmer Bob Augustine and his wife, Mary. After four years away from home at a Roman Catholic girls' boarding school in Redwood—four years away from boys, too—Kay had graduated and returned. Quiet but headstrong, she was immediately struck by this no-nonsense man boarding near her home. After a courtship of just a few weeks, she and Del married on July 1, 1960.
    In November the couple moved south to be near Del's family in Merced. With the fruit and vegetable canning season almost over, Del was lucky to find work as a year-round machinery mechanic for the Consolidated Canners & Growers (CC&G) fruit and vegetable packing plant east of Merced on California 140. Del and Kay settled into a small rented house on Charles Street, where they were content with their simple life: nearby relatives, like-minded friends from CC&G, and, in August of 1961, their firstborn, a son they named Cary. Then, at roughly two-year intervals, while Del worked and Kay ran the household, the couple had four more children: a daughter, Cindy, in October 1963; a second son, Steven, in April 1965; a second daughter, Jody, in January 1967; and, after they moved from Merced, their last child and third daughter, Cory, in November 1968.
    What the couple craved was a country setting inwhich to raise their growing family, and in early March of 1967, the lure of rural life led them to buy a modest almond ranch in northern Merced County, near the small agrarian community of Snelling. Del proudly moved his growing family into one of the two older frame houses on the twenty acres of gently rolling land and began dry-farming his orchard of hundreds of almond trees, selling his small crop to the Blue Diamond Cooperative. Even though the ranch required his almost constant attention, Del continued his full-time job at the CC&G plant twenty miles away. It made for eighteen-hour days six days a week during a canning season which corresponded with Del's own harvest season.
    Stevie—Del's pet name for Steven—was a dynamo of a little boy who loved being outside with his father as Del pruned, sprayed, and harvested his almond crop. Reminisced Del, "When he was small, Stevie wanted to go everywhere I went. I wouldn't let him ride on the tractor when I was goin' under the trees because the al-mond"—Del's distinctive pronunciation of the word—"branches was so low I was afraid he was goin' to get hit in the face. But he'd walk behind, and he'd just keep on walkin' . . . he'd walk miles following me. Then, when I'd come in from work and lay on the couch and watch TV, Stevie would come and curl up with me on the couch and I would bite him on the ear and he'd laugh. He was always just like a puppy dog."
    Kay, as much family manager as mother, remarked that Steven liked to follow Del around, because "Papa did all the exciting things . . . and me, all I would saywas, 'Go clean your room, go wash your face, go blow your nose.' "
    Agreed Steve, "Yeah that was me.