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Virginia Munger’s father was from Germany, her mother was born in Española, New Mexico, and that’s where they married. He was a mechanic and was infected with the California dream. He set up shop as an Imperial Valley pioneer and fetched his wife and daughter. They came across the Old Plank Road, an experience Mrs. Munger recollected for me when we met for lunch at the Barbara Worth Resort. Mrs. Munger was in her nineties then, almost as old as Calexico. That first trip west was in the late 1920s, as best as she can remember, when she was about seven years old. The Valley was still settling. She shared some fleeting memories of those days, back when her father worked at the CM Ranch, just east of Calexico. “We lived on Second Street, and the block that we lived on had about ten small houses. Each house had a living room, a bedroom, the kitchen, and a porch. They were all screened porches for the summertime . Most of them had a bathroom, but it was on the outside. There was water, but it was on the outside. At that time everybody was poor. But nobody felt poor, because we all had the same thing. We didn’t have welfare, and people did well. Most of the men, with the exception of my father, worked in the fields. Most of our neighbors were Mexican people, but my Dad was German, so we cooked differently from them. We always had bread and made sandwiches, and we’d go over to the next-door neighbor, and they had tortillas and chili.” She laughed. “We’d exchange.” She stopped and then mused, “We didn’t have air conditioners.” No air conditioners? One hundred seventeen in the summers? “We didn’t know the difference. That’s what I was telling my daughter the other day, because she had her air conditioner on in the car, and I get cold. I said to her, ‘I can’t figure out why we were all so happy.’ We didn’t have air-conditioning and we didn’t have a fan.    Thursday Efficiency Is Security Efficiency Is Security 131 At the library—I was a reader, still am—they had a big tub of water and a fan that would hit the water to cool things out. But I can’t remember ever really being uncomfortable. We slept outdoors at night, and nobody locked the doors. We were right next to the border, and we didn’t have any people who would come over and try to hurt us, or anything.” She smiles a sweet, knowing smile. Her short white hair is neatly combed back from a forehead remarkably smooth, given all those desert years. Her short-sleeved tailored blouse is crisp, freshly ironed for this lunch at the resort, her regular spot for the weekly bridge-playing sessions she shares with her Valley girlfriends. George’s wife, Maria, joined us for the lunch. Mrs. Munger was her friend, and she had arranged for me to meet with her. As an Imperial Valley girl, Maria had her own stories and memories of the bygone days. “I remember my dad saying they would wet a sheet and wrap it around them to fall asleep at night. And, like, in ten minutes it would be dry.” She and Mrs. Munger laughed. We stayed in the late 1920s with her, soaking up those old days, and I asked her if she just walked across the street to Mexicali when she had something to do in Mexico. “We didn’t walk across. There was a ditch and we would get in the ditch and bathe in it or just play in the water. The Mexican kids would come to this side, and we’d go to their side. We didn’t go that far, just across it to play with them. We didn’t try to go to their homes, and they didn’t come to our homes either. But we played out there.” Mrs. Munger went to grammar school and high school in Calexico just a few blocks north of her house, close enough to walk home for lunch. During her schooldays, the Depression hit America, but not her life. “We didn’t know about the Depression. We didn’t have anything to start with, you know.” But they were surrounded by farms; food was plentiful. Fresh out of high school, she married young and moved with her...

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