He and other members of the local Dust Bowl Historical Foundation are now trying to raise money to restore the remaining original buildings of Weedpatch camp, which opened in 1936 as a response to unsanitary living conditions among migrants.

But, in this year of the centennial of John Steinbeck's birth, the vestiges of Okie culture are vanishing, as the Dust Bowl generation ages and the texture of the community changes. Every morning, Doris Weddell, a retired librarian who is spearheading the preservation effort, picks up her scissors to clip the obituaries: Ann M. Heid (1929, Cici, Okla.), Alice R. Terry (1912, Anadarko, Okla.), Roy Earl Livsey (1913, Thayler, Tex.).

There are new migrants now, who have altered the face of small towns like Arvin and Lamont, Calif. In Lamont (population 13,295), not far from the corner where a young Buck Owens used to play hard-knocks country music on a cotton truck, Mexican panaderías, or bakeries, open at 5 a.m. while in Arvin (population 12,956), the old Safeway is now a supermercado.

In 1950, 33 percent of the population in the southern San Joaquin Valley were whites from the Southwest; today, just under 10 percent is, said James N. Gregory, an associate professor of history at the University of Washington and the author of "American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California" (Oxford University Press, 1989).

"It's a generation passing," Professor Gregory said. "Because their experience was memorialized by artists and writers, they are an important and very special part of the American memory."

Every Thursday morning, several Dust Bowlers have breakfast together at a bowling alley in Bakersfield, 90 miles north of Los Angeles.

"We called ourselves rich Okies, because we had two mattresses," said Billy Ross, 66, a retired high school teacher. "It made me not want to look at a farm the rest of my life."

Discrimination was rampant. Although "Grapes of Wrath" is now required reading in California schools, in 1939 it was burned in downtown Bakersfield. The Arvin Federal Emergency School, an innovative school for Okie children known locally as the Weedpatch School, was created in 1940 largely because of public resistance to educating migrants' children.

"I remember coming home dirty from the fields and going to a store in Upland," Mr. Ross said.

"Mother went in to get some milk, and they didn't want to sell her anything," he said. "But it was clean dirt she had on. Clean, honest dirt."

The Weedpatch camp, now the Sunset Migrant Center, has continued to operate, housing migrant workers who are mostly from Mexico by way of Texas or the Coachella Valley. The Kern County Housing Authority, which runs it, is replacing 100 termite-infested, substandard modular cabins, hauled in by truck in the 1970's, with permanent stucco houses with foundations. The new houses are being paid for by $6 million in state and federal money.

Preservationists hope to raise $250,000 to restore the historic buildings and create a small historical park.

Half of seasonal agricultural workers in California have incomes below the poverty level, according to the Department of Labor. In the Lamont area, which is 89 percent Latino, and in Weedpatch (population 2,726) — a dusty intersection down the Weedpatch Highway — about 95 percent of students are eligible for a free or reduced-cost lunch, compared with 60 percent in the rest of Kern County, said Roy Malahowski, a lawyer with Greater Bakersfield Legal Assistance, a nonprofit organization.

In some stretches of Weedpatch, three or more families share a mobile home in the summer, and it is not uncommon to see three or four small backyard cabins filled with families, an electrical cord running from the main house to the shacks.

At the former Weedpatch School, now the modern Sunset Middle School, 8 percent of the student body is Latino, a quarter of them migrants, said Miguel A. Gonzalez, the principal.

Seventh graders there read "Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp," written by Jerry Stanley, a retired history professor from California State University at Bakersfield.

"It makes you feel there were other people like you," Emilio Vela, 12, said.

An identification with poverty still marks the lives of even the most successful and highly visible Okies like Buck Owens, who left Texas with his family in a 1933 Ford sedan and spent his childhood as a "fruit tramp." His Crystal Palace dinner club on Buck Owens Boulevard is a false-fronted shrine not only to his music empire, which includes three country radio stations, but also to the "Bakersfield sound," a raw brand of country honed in No. 3 galvanized tin wash tubs and hot tents.

In Tulare, an 83-year-old poet, Wilma McDaniel, the fourth of eight children born to Oklahoma sharecroppers, writes poems in longhand each morning with felt-tipped markers. She stores them in a plastic dishpan. "It used to be a shoebox," she said. "I've moved up."

She has 14 books in print but never finished high school. She has been a maid, a governess and a farm worker in fruit cutting sheds and alfalfa fields. From her small apartment, she writes of hard times large and small, her words as straightforward as twine.

In "Pies," for instance, she recalls 1933, her unemployed father's job prospects dwindling, her mother's mulberry pie the only thing to bring "a crinkle of hope around his eyes."

"I feel that if I do not tell what I know about my past it will be lost," Ms. McDaniel explained the other day. "I wrote what I wrote and I lived what I lived."