Click photo to enlarge.

"One of Chris Adolph's younger children"  Washington, Yakima Valley, near Wapato.   Farm Security Administration Rehabilitation clients. Lange, Dorothea; 1939 Aug. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-020397-C DLC]

Photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) is best known for her work documenting poor conditions of the migrant workers who traveled in large numbers to California during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Her photographs brought much-needed attention to their plight. Lange used photography to document the difficult period of the Depression and to motivate agencies and individuals to take action to improve the situation. With her photographs Lange was able to capture the emotional and physical toll that the Depression and other events took on human beings across the country. She is most known¹ for the photograph of the Migrant Mother and child shown above.

In, Washington, Yakima Valley, near Wapato, August 1939, Lange captures a brief moment when a child reflects upon the living conditions provided by the government. A quote from the child (Lois Adolf Houle) fifty years later explained a portion of her story.

"Back on the Colorado plains it was terrible. We survived there as long as we possibly could. But we had dust storms and droughts—the wind would come and pick up our crops and just absolutely destroy them.… My dad’s sister was out here already, and she wrote back saying this was the land of milk and honey. I guess we were doomed to come to the state of Washington…. [W]e had to go on relief. We got food and sometimes clothes."

Quoted in Bill Ganzel, Dust Bowl Descent (Lincoln, 1984), 29.

Ray & Lois Houle
P.O. 272
Toppenish, Washington  98948
509-865-2890

New photos reunite old chums from the 1930s
Yakima Herald-Republic (WA)
November 17, 2004
Author: Adriana Janovich

Clairene Hood of Yakima was browsing through the Sunday newspaper when she spotted a name she recognized. Then she saw the pictures.

She immediately placed the faces of Chris and May Adolf, who had lived outside the Colorado town where she'd lived as a child. She didn't instantly recognize their daughter, but she remembered her name: Lois Adolf. They had attended elementary school together in Bethune, Colo., in the mid-1930s.

Hood, 76, called Lois Adolf Houle, and the childhood chums reunited. Turns out, they had both been living in the Yakima Valley since the late 1930s.

"We had the nicest visit," says the 75-year-old Houle, who was featured in an August story in the Yakima Herald-Republic about photographer Dorothea Lange's visit to the Valley in 1939. "It was really something."

Houle of Toppenish didn't remember Hood at first, but that didn't matter. They got to talking, and found that Hood's family moved to the Valley around the time Houle's did. In fact, Yakima's Hood rode west with another member of the Adolf clan.

"I thought about (the Adolfs) every so often and I wondered what had happened to all of them," says Hood. "It was just really neat to see her."

They caught up on husbands, kids and careers, and reminisced about their youth.

Since the meeting, the pair have talked on the phone several times. Now, "I'm sure that we'll see each other every so often," Hood says.

Section: Main/Home Front

Copyright, 2004, Yakima Herald-Republic. All Rights Reserved.

Record Number: 1066DACFA7D43B3E

TOPPENISH - When the camera clicked, the girl at the fence in the flowered dress appeared heartbroken, as though she was carrying an unbearable burden around the farmyard and through her childhood.

But that moment, like all moments, passed. And life continued, a sliver of it frozen forever.

Her image, captured by Dorothea Lange 65 years ago, has since appeared in countless books on the Dust Bowl and Depression, on the photographer and photography. It dressed the cover of a 1990s novel and is guarded for the generations to come, with other national treasures, in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

While time stands still in the photograph, the days, months and years keep passing. Lange went on to become one of the most prominent photographers of the 20th century. And that girl, that sad-faced, brooding girl in the flowered dress, grew up.

Today, Lois Adolf Houle, two months shy of her 10th birthday when her portrait was taken, is 74, a grandmother and great-grandmother. She doesn't remember what she was thinking when Lange took her picture, in August 1939, at the farm her parents - Christian "Chris" and May Adolf - were renting west of Wapato. In fact, she doesn't remember the moment, or Lange, at all.

This is what she does remember: Times were hard and she was a tomboy.

Times aren't as hard today. Lois remains somewhat of a tomboy, fishing frequently with her husband, 79-year-old Roy Houle. And she remains in the Yakima Valley, a half-dozen miles from the farmyard where Lange took her picture. This is where she grew up, got married, went to church, raised her two daughters. She's lived in the same home in Toppenish for 44 years.

"I love the Valley," she says. "Everything we need is right here - all the fruits and vegetables, chickens and beef."

Sitting at her dining room table recently, contemplating the portrait of herself as the girl at the fence, Lois says, "It looks like we were on hard times and we were. If we never had help, I don't know what we would've done."

Her family - 10 of them, including eight children - piled into a Pontiac in 1936, their possessions packed in a trailer. They headed west to join two of her father's sisters. Two of his brothers would follow later. They were all escaping the drought and dust of Bethune, Colo., a German-Russian settlement where her father's ancestors settled in 1890, coming from Europe in search of a better life. Half a century later, dire conditions forced a new generation to look for greener pastures.

"The good life started in Washington," Lois says.

The Valley was supposed to be "the land of milk and honey," the place where the Adolfs would prosper, and eventually it was. But first, they struggled, becoming one of thousands of families to receive government aid.

"They called it relief in those days," Lois says. "It was welfare."

Her father fell ill with rheumatism, almost dying the first year they lived here and making hard times even worse. His children worked in orchards, harvesting fruit. Their mother taught school in Parker and Harrah, sewing dresses and bloomers from sacks of government-issued flour. With a government loan, they bought horses and, maybe, Lois says, a couple of cows. They sold cream.

Lange was working for the Farm Security Administration, traveling through nearly two dozen states, documenting lives of migrant farm workers, sharecroppers and tenant farmers of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. When she wanted to take photographs of the Adolfs, "my folks thought it was part of the deal," Lois says.

"The government gave us money and they wanted to see what we were doing with it. It was our way of fulfilling our obligation.

"I heard my folks say she was very sympathetic and compassionate to our problems," Lois says. "She took her time with us. She realized what we were all going through."

Lange's portrait of Lois became part of the family album; the story of her visit, part of family history. Lois can't remember when she first saw the photo; it was simply always around. She grew up with it. Her children - Jody Sellers of Spokane and Michelle Lehr of Mount Vernon, Wash. - saw it hanging in the hallway. And now, her grandchildren, nieces and nephews - and their children - have copies.

"(Lange) captured so much," says Lois' granddaughter, 26-year-old Molly Lehr of Mount Vernon. "It's just amazing for me to see where (my grandmother) came from and what she went through with her family. I have a lot of respect for them to pick up and start all over and build a whole new life and be successful. It must have taken a lot of strength and courage."

The photo of Lois at the fence in her flowered dress isn't the only one Lange took that day. Others, also available from the Library of Congress, show Lois at the same fence, but smiling; barefoot, driving a horse-drawn cream cart down a dirt road; and strapping a harness on a horse with the help from two of her sisters. There's a portrait of her father in a hat, his face tilted toward the sun, and a family portrait, too, featuring Chris and May in the middle, surrounded by six of their children, including Lois, one of two girls who's sitting atop a horse.

Some years later, the Adolfs were able to buy their own ranch, on Progressive Road, where they grew fruit and grapes and lived until they died - Chris in 1963, May in 1969.

Lois graduated from Wapato High School in 1947, and married Roy, whom she had met at a Grange hall dance. He sold cars and is now semi-retired, still putting in two days a week at Yakima Bait Company in Granger. Lois picked and packed fruit, worked in a meat market and as a secretary, and taught kindergarten and catechism.

They raised two daughters on a strong work ethic and Catholic education. They have six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. And they live a quiet life, a good life, an outdoorsy and faithful life. They attend Mass every Sunday at St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Toppenish.

Seeing the portrait of Lois on the cover of the book, "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison, was particularly distressing for her and her family. Lois, along with dozens of relatives - siblings, their children and grandchildren, scattered from Cle Elum and Ellensburg to Yakima and Prosser - didn't want people to associate her image with that title, or its subject matter. The 1992 book graphically describes a girl, born out of wedlock, who grows up in poverty, brutally abused.

In the mid-90s, the family complained to the publisher, which removed the image from later editions. But, when Lois talks of the ordeal today, her pain and anguish are still apparent.

"It made me so angry," she says. "I don't think you could find a more religious, well-brought-up family, morally and spiritually. We didn't want anyone to think of that as us because it's not us."

Today, there are still struggles. Lois has survived two strokes and, since 1973, has been living with multiple sclerosis, a chronic autoimmune disease of the central nervous system.

"It's a good thing you found me when you did," she says.

In 65 years, she's received only three inquiries about the photo: one around the time Lange died, in 1965, and another in 1979, from Bill Ganzel, an author and photographer who featured Lois, along with her daughter, Jody Sellers, and her son, Kevin, in his 1984 book "Dust Bowl Descent." Their portrait ran opposite of Lange's portrait of Lois.

"It's not quite as famous as 'Migrant Mother,' " says Ganzel, in a recent telephone interview from his home in Lincoln, Neb. "But still, it's an evocative photograph. It can be read in many different ways."

Alienation. Separation. Desperation.

"(Lois) may not remember any of it, yet it's there," Ganzel says. "I don't think the photograph lies.

"She's an example of people's ability to survive hardship and come out of it with joy for life intact."

Today, half of the eight Adolf children remain: Phillip Adolf of Ellensburg, Helen Colby of Quincy, Wash., Betty Brownawell of Vancouver, Wash., and Lois.

"We are part of history," she says.

But a picture, even a captivating and moving picture by a famous photographer, doesn't tell the entire story. Throughout the decades, thousands of people from around the world have seen the photograph, but few - including friends - know that Lois is the girl at the fence in the flowered dress.

After all, the caption that accompanies the image simply reads: "Child and her mother, Wapato, Yakima Valley, Washington."

* Reporter Adriana Janovich can be reached by phone at 577-7653, or by e-mail at ajanovich@yakima-herald.com.

Copyright, 2004, Yakima Herald-Republic. All Rights Reserved.
Record Number: 104981A79FACD6E7