Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man: The New Old West

By Frank Bergon

Frank Bergon’s astonishing portrayals of people in California’s San Joaquin Valley reveal a country where the culture of a vanishing West lives on in many twenty-first-century Westerners, despite the radical technological transformations around them. All are immigrants, migrants, their children, or their grandchildren whose lives intertwine with the author’s, including several races and ethnicities: Chicanos, Mexicans, African Americans, Italians, Asians, Native Americans, Scots-Irish descendants of Steinbeck’s Okies, and Basques of the author’s own heritage.

Bergon presents a powerful array of rural and small-town Westerners who often see themselves as part of a region and a way of life most Americans aren’t aware of or don’t understand, their voices unheard, their stories untold. In these essays, Westerners from the diverse heritage of the San Joaquin Valley include California’s legendary Fred Franzia, the maker of the world’s best-selling Charles Shaw wines dubbed “Two-Buck Chuck,” and Darrell Winfield, a Dust Bowl migrant and lifelong working cowboy who for more than thirty years reigned as the iconic Marlboro Man. Their voices help us understand the complexities of today’s rural West, where Old West values intersect with New West realities. This is the West (and America today)—a region in conflict with itself.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Mar 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781948908054

Book preview

Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man

ALSO BY FRANK BERGON

Jesse’s Ghost

Wild Game

The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S

The Journals of Lewis and Clark, editor

Shoshone Mike

A Sharp Lookout: Selected Nature Essays of John Burroughs, editor

The Wilderness Reader, editor

The Western Writings of Stephen Crane, editor

Looking Far West: The Search for the American West in History, Myth, and Literature, co-editor with Zeese Papanikolas

Stephen Crane’s Artistry

Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man

THE NEW OLD WEST

FRANK BERGON

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

Reno & Las Vegas

University of Nevada Press | Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

www.unpress.nevada.edu

Copyright © 2019 by Frank Bergon

All rights reserved

Cover art by Journie Kirdain

Cover design by Frank Bergon

Author photo by Holly St. John Bergon

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

          Names: Bergon, Frank, author.

Title: Two-buck Chuck & the Marlboro Man : the new Old West / Frank Bergon.

Other titles: Two-buck Chuck and the Marlboro Man

Description: Reno ; Las Vegas : University of Nevada Press, [2019] | Identifiers: LCCN 2018039126 (print) | LCCN 2018041047 (ebook) | ISBN 9781948908054 (ebook) | ISBN 9781948908061 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Central Valley (Calif. : Valley)--Social life and customs--21st century. | Central Valley (Calif. : Valley)--Social conditions--21st century. | Cultural pluralism--California--Central Valley.

Classification: LCC F868.C45 (ebook) | LCC F868.C45 B47 2019 (print) |

      DDC

979.4/5--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039126

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Aleksandra, André, Kaitlin,

Gretchen, Caleb, and Madeline

my nieces and nephews

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Working the Dirt

The Vision of Two-Buck Chuck

Illegal Immigrant to Valley Farmer

Basque Dirt

Drought in the Garden of the Sun

Part II: Western Voices in the Great Valley

Valley Tolerance

Black Ranch Girl

Chicano Vet

New Woman Warrior

A Valley Indian’s Search for Roots

Native American Okie

Part III: Marlboro Country

Rebellion in Marlboro Country

West of California: The Marlboro Man

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

To think about the American West in the twenty-first century astonishes me when I look at an old black-and-white photograph taken on my family’s California ranch when I was five. I’m wearing a straw hat and sitting in a wooden float used to compact and smooth vineyard rows for raisin drying. Next to me, a ranch worker from Oklahoma in a small-brimmed Stetson fedora holds the reins to a mule dragging the scraper and us through a vineyard.

Now in the twenty-first century, mechanical harvesters roar through the night from dusk to dawn picking wine grapes in similar vineyards. Against the racket of this mechanized harvest, the remnant of the Old West in the photo glows as if from a distant galaxy. Less distant is how the Dust Bowl migrant behind the harnessed mule and today’s Mexican immigrant on a night harvester might think and feel, sharing Old West beliefs in the power of individual resilience and the future rewards of hard work. In the rural West, core beliefs change more slowly than the surface of people’s lives.

This book is a personal portrayal of how California’s Great Central Valley breaks down distinctions between the Old and New West to create America’s True West, a country where the culture of a vanishing West lives on in many contemporary Westerners, despite the radical technological transformations around them. I write about rural and small-town Westerners, some with ties to Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Texas, whose lives have intertwined with mine, all shaped, as I was, by California’s Great Valley, a place itself shaped in large part by migrants and immigrants. Many I write about see themselves as part of a region and way of life most Americans aren’t aware of or don’t understand. In their myriad voices I hear a vibrant oral history of today’s rural West.

I was born in Nevada, lived in the Rockies, taught in the Pacific Northwest, and came of age in the San Joaquin Valley, where I grew up on a Madera County ranch as a Californian and an American Westerner. I didn’t always understand these connections. One morning as a kid I was riding with my dad in his pickup down a country road when he waved to a lone driver approaching in a black truck.

Who’s that? I asked.

I don’t know.

Why’d you wave to him?

That’s when my father explained the significance of his greeting, not so much a conventional wave, really, as a flick of the fingers upward—the heel of his hand still rested on the steering wheel—in half-acknowledgment, half-blessing. That’s the hospitality of the West.

We were in the center of the San Joaquin Valley. It and the Sacramento Valley form California’s Great Valley, 450 miles long constituting nearly three-fifths the length of the state, an area larger than Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts combined, a massive country of farms and ranches, and—as I was told—the richest, most productive agricultural region in world history.

Nevertheless, a few months earlier, after moving from Nevada, I’d asked my dad when we were going back to California.

We are in California, my father said.

I’d thought California was Los Angeles, where we’d lived briefly before moving to the center of the state.

Once I got my geography straight, I had no doubt that California was the West and I was a Westerner. I lived on a ranch. It had horses, mules, sheep, and cattle. It also had cotton, grapes, and alfalfa, but nobody said farm in those days. Everything was a ranch, as in cotton ranch or dairy ranch. My grandfather and dad were ranchers, even after the cattle business went bust and they farmed the dirt.

To put a twist on what my old teacher Wallace Stegner told us at Stanford, rural California is like the rest of the West, only more so. As a region, the San Joaquin Valley in its extreme otherness from the state’s tourist and metropolitan haunts has caused native-son writers like Gerald Haslam and David Mas Masumoto to distinguish this rural country as The Other California. It’s this other California that best illuminates what playwright Sam Shepard dramatizes in True West, a play set in a rural California ranch house next to an orange grove, forty minutes east of Hollywood at the intersection of a sprawling suburb and a desert of yapping coyotes. Shepard as a boy lived on a ranch in nearby Duarte, raising sheep and avocados, and he later worked as a ranch hand and a lay-up stable boy near Chino. The California I knew, old rancho California, is gone, he once explained. It doesn’t exist, except maybe in little pockets. I lived on the edge of the Mojave Desert, an area that used to be farm country.

This interpenetration of a vanishing Old West and an emerging New West creates the True West, as it always has, dramatized in the aspirations and disappointments of two brothers in Shepard’s play. There was a life here then, says one brother with regret about the disappearing ranch country. The other responds with dismissive toughness, There’s no point in cryin’ about that now. What’s true about their West emerges as paradoxical. A mythical Wild West still exists in their minds, somewhere out in the desert, only to become a violent, immediate reality when the brothers end up viciously fighting each other. An equally mythical West manifests itself at the dawn of a new day as one brother exclaims with a Western whoop of can-do optimism, It makes me feel like anything is possible. Ya’ know? The other brother seeks fulfillment of his True West desires, but elsewhere, farther West, as it were, in the San Joaquin Valley, where embodied in his memory lives a beautiful green-eyed woman he desperately tries to phone but hangs up in True West disappointment because he can’t remember whether she lives in Fresno or Bakersfield. He only knows she’s somewhere in the truer West of the San Joaquin Valley.

Shepard describes the ranch country where he grew up as a weird accumulation of things, a strange kind of melting pot—Spanish, Okie, black, Midwestern elements all jumbled together. The San Joaquin Valley is also such a weird accumulation, only more so. Traditions of nineteenth-century Mexicans, Californios, Chinese, and Japanese, plus twentieth-century African Americans and Okies, as well as more recent Mien and Hmong have all shaped the Great Valley, along with dozens of other ethnic groups, like Assyrians, Azorean Portuguese, Volga Germans, Russian Molokans, and my own family of Basques and Béarnais.

What’s remarkable about this valley’s earlier frontier is its nearness to recent history. When I was a boy riding in a wooden float pulled by a mule on my grandfather’s ranch, I didn’t know I went to school in a town that only seventy-five years earlier didn’t exist. The forty-acre place where Madera at the time was being laid out in auction lots was described as then a barren, dry waste. . .devoid of verdure. . .with the exception of a strangling growth of wild oats. . .a person could drive a herd a hundred miles and not find any kind of habitation. Fourteen years later, after the U.S. Superintendent of the Census officially announced that the frontier had closed, it hadn’t quite closed in Madera, where civilization blessed the growing town with a lumber mill, a hotel, a post office, a school, two churches, and twenty-two frontier saloons with open gambling and prostitution.

A frontier mentality noticeably marked the valley through my high school and college years. When reporting on the Filipino and Mexican grape-pickers’ strike of the 1960s, John Gregory Dunne portrayed the San Joaquin Valley as largely insulated from what industrial America thinks and does and worries about. . . .The prevailing ethic is that of the nineteenth century frontier. Dunne didn’t know that for target practice new Western historians who’d never visited the valley were preparing to hang in quotation marks the concept of frontier and leave it shredded with bullet holes as an antiquated artifact. Neither did Mexicans who crossed la frontera to pick the grapes. Nor did Armenian, Italian, Croatian, and other immigrant children who owned the vineyards their parents had planted in an arid frontier inhabited by jackrabbits and rattlesnakes.

The West of California and Nevada where I grew up continues to be a land of immigrants. While California gold and Nevada silver initially attracted people worldwide, farming was the subsequent lure for immigrants and migrants, who often found themselves in a triangular squeeze of resentment, rejection, and accommodation. While many who came to exploit the land found themselves exploited, many moved to a better life their parents only dreamed of. Not melted into a homogenous American society, they stamped California, Nevada, and by extension the West as pluralistic. Nearly two out of three people currently in the San Joaquin Valley are minorities, and more than two out of five minorities are foreign born, almost like the frontier West once again, when the states with the largest percentage of foreign born were all in the West.

Ethnic stereotyping informed certain proverbs about ranch work and hiring practices during my boyhood: Nobody can herd sheep like a Basque, nobody can prune vines or pick olives like a Filipino, nobody can irrigate like a Sikh. . . A Sikh? Yes, turbaned Indians from India were once more common to ranch life, at least during my dad’s youth, than were Native Americans. Yokut mortar bowls for grinding acorns and grass seeds popped up in freshly plowed fields on my family’s ranch along Cottonwood Creek, accusatory reminders of the not-so-distant Indian past in the valley when some fifty Native American dialects thrived there, before pestilence and guns obliterated native life. Anthropologist William Wallace noted in the Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, No large section of California is so little known ethnographically as the lower or northern San Joaquin Valley. The lack of information concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of this region is due to their rapid disappearance as a result of disease, missionization, and the sudden overrunning of their country by American miners and settlers during the gold rush years.

In the hills, remnants of Chukchansi, Miwok, and Mono survived. Some moved back into the valley to work. Indians played in our town’s softball league, including a Chukchansi with an 85-mph underhand pitch that struck out ninety percent of batters. In contrast, the entire Nevada Battle Mountain Band of Te-Moak Western Shoshone lived a few blocks from my grandparents’ house. Today in Wyoming, modern Wind River Arapaho share sweat lodges with Anglo ranchers.

We’re now in a tumultuous period in which a controversial and sullied presidential election has revealed a widening gulf between the country and the city. The rift isn’t just between elites and the working class but between city and country people of all social classes and ethnicities. The people in this book are immigrants, migrants, their children, or grandchildren—rich, poor, and in-between, of several races and ethnicities. Some have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, and People—in short, figures of national interest. Others should be of equal interest: Chícanos, Okies, Mexicans, African Americans, Italians, Asians, Native Americans, and Basques of my heritage, all commonly evolving into a shared identity as Californians and Westerners. A California-born sixth-grader drove home this point about ethnic transformation when he told writer Gerry Haslam, Oh, my dad used to be an Okie.

In the new millennium, the Great Valley as a place of individual freedom and economic opportunity achievable through hard work, a belief American at its core, remains Western in its intensity, though now harder for many to maintain beyond a wistful dream. A fair shake is all Westerners wanted and still want, in the phrase’s original meaning—a fair-and-square shake and roll in a craps game. The always-suspect dice though appear increasingly loaded against economic fairness. Some workers, like my former school friend Joe Alvarez, found their way out of the fields, as many still do, through military service, though not out of a constrained life of labor. Now when everyone in the military is supposedly considered Our Heroes, many still aren’t treated that way.

Problems from the past still haunt the twenty-first century. The Great Valley made California an agricultural state and the engine of its economy for nearly a hundred years. Today the richest harvest of crops in history accompanies the extreme impoverishment, depopulation, and bankruptcy of valley towns. California’s massive construction of dams, aqueducts, canals, and reservoirs that created an agricultural paradise also altered the land to a greater degree than anywhere else in the West. The problem of vanishing water—a defining characteristic of both the urban and rural West—mars farms and ranches to an extreme. Droughts, acute pollution, silting and toxic salts on a sinking earth have accelerated to the point of threatening a new Dust Bowl and the destruction of agriculture, worse than anywhere in the West. The disappearance of the valley’s underground water and the impossibility of restoring it promise to shock the entire economy of the West, the nation, and world geopolitics.

Today the ranch I grew up on is long gone, its disintegration a kind of explosion that flung my two sisters to the northern and southern extremes of the state, my brother as far away as Colorado, where he landed as a farrier, and me to the East Coast where I taught. As a kid I climbed up into a saddle and waded a horse across Cottonwood Creek to gather cattle from a pasture. Now rows of grapevines and almond orchards cover the dirt. The valley’s farmland disappears at an astonishing rate under suburban sprawl. The northern San Joaquin Valley merges into an extension of the San Francisco Bay Area. In much of the new millennial West, the old extractive industries of logging, mining, and ranching have given way to second homes, vacation resorts, retirement communities, and tourist haunts of the new Recreational and Environmental West. This is the West—and America—today, a region in conflict with itself.

The West, as John Updike once noted, has seemed to this country the essence of itself. The West I write about represents America in the extreme. It’s a land of both bounty and poverty, a country of large history and even larger myth. Certainly the legendary image of the Marlboro cowboy in the famous advertising campaign reflected widespread beliefs nationally and abroad about America and its origins. Behind Marlboro Country’s mythic veneer and carcinogenic reality, the main Marlboro Man riding across four decades was an actual cowboy, who worked on ranches in the San Joaquin Valley, where I came to know him in my teens.

The image of the Marlboro Man was recently and wrongly invoked when the Wild West rose up again in the New West. In 2014, Nevada gun-toting ranchers faced down federal officers in a confrontation over grazing rights. In 2016, Oregon blue-collar rage against economic unfairness sparked a Rebellion in Marlboro Country when armed cowboy patriots seized a federal wildlife refuge for six weeks, ending in a standoff with the FBI and state police until a protester in a cowboy hat was shot and killed. In Idaho, a rebellious hero—or antihero—for this Old West–New West conflict emerged thirty-five years earlier when a self-styled, freedom-loving mountain man gunned down a game warden and a wildlife biologist.

As heirs to this Sagebrush Rebellion, my cousins’ Nevada ranching family ended up on the front page of The New York Times, when they illegally released their drought-starved cattle onto public land. Their populist anti-government anger burns across many regions of today’s West. Like a lot of people struggling to make a living in the rural West they feel left out and looked down upon. With their voices unheard, their stories untold, they continue to saddle their horses and graze their cattle, while their livelihood and way of life vanish.

What abides in the San Joaquin Valley is an Old West code of toughness and hard work that I saw my grandparents and parents continue to believe in: a communal allegiance to Western dreams of freedom and opportunity, an optimistic fortitude coupled with physical endurance, a respect for work with your hands, a disinclination to complain or give up, all the time knowing that the demands of the code in confrontation with the harsh cyclical reality of agricultural disappointment might leave you crushed. Or possibly renewed. It’s what I still hear when talking to a Basque American rancher and former neighbor, whose buoyant pride in the achievement of hard work echoes my father’s conviction that everything turns out for the best, despite the certainty that in ranching disappointment and failure are always part of the deal. An African American ranch girl reinforces that belief when talking about how in a racist society her hardworking father from Alabama found respect in the West. A pervasive Western code of resilience and work as the source of her character is what a Korean immigrant believes she shares with the post-Steinbeck children of Dust Bowl migrants portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath—ethnic Scots-Irish, working-class Americans, whose ties to the American soil go back to colonial times, and sometimes earlier. Many are also of mixed Choctaw or Cherokee or Muscogee or other Native American heritage, like the celebrated Indian novelist Louis Owens. Their roots and adherence to Old West values define much of California’s rural culture and that of the Intermountain West and beyond to provide an understanding of a widespread but neglected base of the nation we live in.

In the Old West, a California settler said about the Great Valley in the 1870s, People generally look on it as the garden of the world or the most desolate place in Creation. They still do, only more so. Too often the West gets jammed into popular stereotypical extremes of the Mythic West or the Debunked West, one legendary and romantic, the other brutalizing and empty, both cartoonish. More complicated entanglements of myth and fact shape the lives of Westerners beyond the technology altering the world around them. The Old West lives on in the valley long after it was declared dead, enlivening the way people think and feel, not so much clashing with the New West as blending into it.

In the San Joaquin Valley, values of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl migrant who became the Marlboro Man overlap with those of the grandson of Italian immigrants, Fred Franzia, my high school classmate and legendary creator of the best-selling wine in history, popularly known as Two-Buck Chuck. His agricultural sidekick, Sal Arriola, a Mexican immigrant who illegally crossed the border with his family when he was three, now farms the biggest vineyards in the country. What’s amazing is how much a current Mexican immigrant can sound like an Italian immigrant of a hundred years ago in what both believe to be opportunities in California’s Great Valley.

I’m now looking at two photos. One is of Darrell Winfield on horseback as a working cowboy in the San Joaquin Valley when I first knew him. In the other I’m standing next to him on his Wyoming ranch some forty years later, when he was still being photographed as the Marlboro Man. In both photos, he looks to be wearing the same silverbelly Stetson, the same cowboy white shirt, and the same boots. In both photos, he’s basically the same guy, spanning five decades of drastic change in the American West.

While the label of Marlboro Man has been applied to a murderous wannabe cowboy and a gun-toting rancher, the real Marlboro Man was nothing like the individualistic, gunslinging, macho rogue so popular in Western fiction and film. Darrell Winfield, featured in the famous advertising campaign, emerged from California’s San Joaquin Valley as an actual American cowboy who behind the ads exemplified the communal values of today’s True West.

I

Working the Dirt

The Vision of Two-Buck Chuck

A friend from my high school days told me, Given that Fred is our most famous classmate, you should write a book about him. Famous for what? He’s brought wine into the homes of more people than Gallo or Mondavi or any other winemaker. In Napa his name is anathema. They don’t like good wine at two dollars.

He was talking about Fred Franzia and the wine called Charles Shaw, better known as Two-Buck Chuck, introduced at California Trader Joe’s in 2002 for $1.99 a bottle, thus earning its two-buck moniker as America’s most popular wine. Without advertising, the wine set a record for a new label within a year when sales shot up to a million cases. Thirteen years later, in 2016, sales hit more than a billion bottles. No wine in history has ever sold so much so fast.

"People create too much

Reviews for Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man

[jamesgwld · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Frank Bergon, in Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man, writes a portrayal of characters from the San Joaquin Valley. The attempt to capture the diversity of characters, as the back of the book says, “all immigrants, migrants, their children, or grandchildren whose lives intertwine with the author’s”. Almost immediately we find a self-indulged boring tromp through the characters as filtered by Bergon’s biases. Historically, the book feels lazy. The historical events were often driving by anecdotal stories told by the interviewees. Throughout the narratives, there was always a John Wayne “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” feel. This is really where the book falls short. Characters such as the controversial, Fred Franzia, is cleaned up nicely to the point where I almost wanted to pick up a “two-buck chuck” bottle of wine so I could finish the book. Bergon is so closely tied to the Valley that his narratives struggle to find their way out of his own story.

[clue_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I requested this book from ER because it profiles people living in the San Joaquin Valley of California. I was curious because my uncle lived there from the early 1960's into the 1980's. As it turns out, Frank Bergon was growing up in the Valley about the same time.The profiles Bergon writes are primarily about people he has known or has a connection with. He is certainly a good writer, has written 18 books, and earned a PhD from Harvard. In addition to writing he has taught at several universities, spending many years at Vassar. While I liked reading the profiles, and they are of interesting people, after awhile they became repetitious. Sometimes he gets rather gushy and attributes a uniqueness to them as if similar people can't be found anywhere else. While that is just silly, I was flabbergasted when he bragged that people in the Valley are of different races and ethnicities. Did he miss that part about AMERICA being a melting pot?

[btuckertx · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man", by Frank Bergon, took me by surprise. Bergon is a talented writer, and he simply talks about life growing up in Madera, California, and by extension California's Central Valley. It's not exciting, but it's definitely interesting. I'd recommend it to anybody interested in rural life in America, especially how it's changed from the '60's to the present day.

[wdwilson3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This collection of character sketches about people with San Joaquin Valley connections held my interest throughout. Frank Bergon lets them tell their own stories, for the most part, and profiles people with diverse ethnic backgrounds – Basque, Okie, Native American, African American, Chicano, and Korean, to paint a complex, sometimes contradictory portrait of the Valley in the past and at present. Bookending these mini-biographies are longer pieces about Fred Franzia, the winemaker who produces, amongst other things, Charles Shaw wines, aka Two-Buck Chuck, and Darrell Winfield, the most famous of the models used by Marlboro. In the course of the book Bergon brings in excellent information about Valley agriculture, water, land ownership and many other important topics. A very good read. I received this book from the publisher as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program, in exchange for an honest review.

[scenik1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

TWO-BUCK CHUCK & THE MARLBORO MAN was a big surprise to me. I re-read the description on the LibraryThing Early Reviewers February List, and the description certainly describes the book. So, why was I surprised? I think what made me request a copy to review was the subtitle. “The New Old West.” See, all I needed was to read “Old West” and I was hooked. The Old West, and all that it gives life to in our imaginations, is a potent expression. So, whether it’s new or old, The West attracted me as it has so many others over the centuries. The gift this particular book about The West has given me are the stories of present-day and recent Westerners who have peopled this region. The book is structured in a series of chapter/essays that lead one into another through the people Bergon focuses on. It is divided into two sections, the first primarily about the San Joaquin Valley and the second about Darrell Winfield, the longest-working and most iconic of the Marlboro Man depicters. Throughout, Bergon skillfully evokes a region in contrast with itself. California, particularly central California, is a kind of “both and” and “either or” kind of place. It is both the fecund garden of the world and the barren deadly desert expanses. It is both the sophisticated mecca of high education and home of the almost completely life educated worker. The author, Frank Bergon, himself is a product of the region and so writes with great insight and compassion. His personal history with the place allows him inroads to the living rooms and barns of the ranches and vineyards he writes about. We meet Fred Franzia, the creator of Two-Buck Chuck, and by way of exploring how THAT happened, we are introduced to the sometimes harsh realities and surprising twists involved with the wine industry. These growers and producers are the descendants of the many cultures and nationalities who made their way to the region in the last centuries, the Native Americans of many tribes and languages, the Scots-Irish Dust Bowl migrants, the Italians, Asians, Chicanos, Mexicans, African Americans and Basques; and Bergon, himself mostly Basque, manages to interview them all and intelligently and intimately bring them to life for the reader. One story leads into another in a stepping stone kind of way, and just when you think you’ve learned enough insights into the wine world, you turn the page and come to Part 2. Here, in the sometimes tragic story of our very real cowboys as well as in the first part, a lot of myths are debunked. Along the way, we are privy to some very scary realities that are illuminated by the voices of those who live and depend on those realities. It was a real education for me and I trust it would be for anyone reading this book; don’t come to it looking for LONESOME DOVE. The real West is nothing romantic, but I don’t think it will ever be able to shake off our romantic ideals about it. Bergon explores the cycles of floods and droughts that have ever plagued California, the odd dynamics of racism and the lack of it in a region made up of so many people-groups, the dark prophecies associated with a permanently lowering water table, and so much more. My favorite passages are the beautiful recreations of the diverse regions of the state, whether it is the barren wastelands or the gorgeous wonder of Yosemite. TWO-BUCK CHUCK & THE MARLBORO MAN: The New Old West is a satisfying read and a real education. It is a significant book for any Westerner and a particularly important voice for the large part of our state that goes unheard of and unacknowledged.

[illiniguy71 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I find this book more difficult to adequately and fairly describe than it was to read and enjoy. It concerns people in or from the San Joaquin (or great central) Valley of California who struggle with modernization and the urbanization of American values and expectations while embodying the values of a West that is disappearing from the American scene. The author, of Basque descent, depicts individuals of widely divergent ethnicities. All are described with subtlety and artistry. All are admirable people. Some are greatly successful while others are only moderately so. All are people one would like to know and admire in person. My only concern about the book is that some of the values ascribed to the Old West seem to be associated with other parts of rural America as well. In the rural Midwest, too, an oral commitment can be as good as a written contract. But do read the book to be informed about the modern problems of the central valley, of the wine industry, of how modern advertising works. There is much here for nearly all readers.

[joycebl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Two Buck Chuck and the Marlboro Man: The New Old West is composed of a set of chapters each detailing the life of someone living in the San Joaquin Valley in California or surrounding areas. I found some of the chapters of the people written about to be boring with too many I saids then she saids, and without much insight into their lives. Other chapters were fascinating accounts of people who believe the romanticized old West till exits, or who are struggling to hold on to their ways of life amid federal regulations of public lands, the disappearance of the water table through over use, and the changing climate.

[rickla-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The title of this book is a bit misleading, as it focuses on the most well-known personalities examined in the book. The subtitle, "The New Old West," is actually more descriptive of the thrust of the story. It looks at the special culture of the Great Central Valley of California, as exemplified in the lives of several people of varying backgrounds and ethnicities. The Marlboro Man is a bit of an outlier, as he does his cowboying in Wyoming, but he came from California, so that's where he ties in to the overall theme of the book.The Valley is the "other side" of California, whose importance is just as great as the better-known coastal part of the state, but the two parts are inextricably linked together, and the book is a valuable and probing treatment of the Valley culture. The author aptly describes the history, geography, and politics of land and water, but it is through the colorful portraits of the individual people he meets that we get a real sense of the Valley life and the issues and problems that they face.I am a lifelong Angeleno, but have studied California history extensively because it is a fascinating subject with so many facets. This is the best treatment of the Central Valley that I have read.

[etxgardener · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Frank Bergon writes a memoir of the San Joaquin Valley and how his memories of this western farm and ranch land has changed in the past fifty years.Through profiles of various colorful characters Bergon illustrates the independence of those who live in the Western United States - sometimes to a toxic degree. He seems to have way too much admiration for those people who staged an armed standoff again the Federal Land Management in Nevada as well as other who have taken the law in their own hands. If this is the behavior I'm supposed to be nostalgic for, I'll take society today every time.