Drought wants to knock out this small California town. The people who love it are trying to save it
STRATFORD, Calif. — Ramon Chavez was a 7-year-old in Culiacán, Mexico, when his parents told him that they were traveling to the United States. He thought he was going to Disneyland.
They ended up in Stratford.
Chavez spent his childhood and teenage years running around the small farming town in the Central Valley and swimming with his friends in the nearby canals. Everybody, as the saying goes, knew everybody. Small businesses, like gas stations and mercaditos, spoke to a self-sustaining life far from the conveniences of the big city.
"I fell in love with it ever since," said Chavez, now 39.
But like many rural towns in the American West, Stratford, about 40 miles south of Fresno in Kings County, is a shell of even its humble heyday. It's fading amid ever-rising temperatures, years of drought and
