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Winters Express
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THE TWO DOLLAR BILL: Some folks consider Friday the Thirteenth as unlucky, and some consider a two dollar bill unlucky, and a combination of both would be double unlucky.
On Friday, August 13, 1943, Ida and I went to the Tama County Courthouse in Toledo, Iowa,
obtained a marriage license and I paid for it with a two dollar bill.
I had been in Bermuda for almost a year, and in returning to the States I went to the bank to close out my account. The banker in St. George, anxious to get rid of those pesky American two dollar bills, paid off my account in the unlucky currency.
The wedding was a couple of weeks later. It was held in the bride’s home, guests were gathered in the living room. The bride-to-be was upstairs with her father, who was to escort her down the steps while a college classmate was to sing “Because.”
I was in the parlor with my father, a Presbyterian minister who was to officiate, when Ida’s mother came and remarked: “Ida is mule-headed, but she’s a hard worker.”
Mule-headed? Now she tells me. Mule-headed! Who wants a mule-headed wife?
The hard worker bit sounded pretty good, the
license was paid for and the preacher was free, so what the heck.
It was the best two dollars I ever spent.
— Reprinted from Aug. 12, 1999

DOROTHEA LANGE: A new biography about the famous depression photographer entitled: “Dorothea Lange, a Life Beyond Limits” by Linda Gordon, came out last fall, and includes photos of the Berryessa Valley, along with a couple of snapshots in Winters, showing her and I assume her son, John.
She came to Winters during the construction of the Monticello Dam where her brother Martin and her son, John Dixon, both worked on the project.
I remember her son John, who worked in the
Bureau of Reclamation office in the building at First and Russell streets, recently vacated by the Winters Library. I used to stop in each Tuesday to cover the progress of the dam, including how many yards of concrete were poured.
John Dixon built the house at the end of Russell Street now owned by Kay and Al Graf.
Lange proposed a photo essay on the Solano project to Life Magazine and received a commission of one thousand dollars.
According to Linda Gordon, in 1957 Lange sent Life 175 photographs of the dam construction and the Berryessa Valley, and the magazine rejected them.
She then teamed up with Pirkle Jones and they printed a number of the pictures in a booklet: “Death of a Valley.”
It wasn’t in the book, but Pirkle Jones had worked for Ansel Adams as an assistant. Jones died in March, 2009, at the age of 95.
Gordon describes in detail how Lange took her most famous photo “Migrant Mother,” while working for the Federal Farm Security Administration.
Not mentioned in the book was the fact that Lange made at least two trips to Winters in the 1930s while working for the FSA.
In 1935 she took pictures of people camped along Putah Creek near the bridge, and in 1936 took pictures of migrants in what is now Yolo County Housing east of town.
Dorothea Lange died in October, 1965, at the age of 70, and her husband, Paul Taylor, donated her collection of photos to the Oakland Museum.v