Life in Pie Town, New Mexico - during the Depression-era time when the Caudills and others met Russell Lee - meant living with dirt and wind and no running water. If someone came to visit Faro and Doris, they could see their guest-generating dust long before the visitors arrived.
Doris tells us what it was like to live in her Pie Town dugout where all the water had to be hand-pumped:
I'd go back to Pie Town but under different circumstances. It would be with being able to have a house and electricity and running water. As old as I am, I like to take a bath now and then. We would take a bath on Saturday night. We had a number three bathtub. I'd get the water all hot and then I'd bathe Josie [her daughter] and then I'd take a bath and then Faro would take a bath. Then I saved it to scrub the floor with, and after we scrubbed the floor, I'd put it on the flower bed. You kind of wore the water out. (Pie Town Woman: The Hard Life and Good Times of a New Mexico Homesteader, by Joan Myers, page 165.)
A couple of years after Russell Lee photographed the Caudill family, Faro and Doris moved to Socorro (not far from Los Alamos where scientists were developing the atomic bomb):
We didn't know what Los Alamos was then. Freight would come in and it would be labled "egg cartons" or something like that, and it would be real heavy. The men would know it was something different.
I was really sorry to leave ... and homesick ... When we were there in Socorro I was so homesick. I missed my friends so much. I just missed everything. (Pie Town Woman, page 169.)
Although Doris and Faro were able to earn a better living, in Socorro, the Caudill marriage was in trouble:
Eventually, the marriage broke apart. For a time, Doris worked for the Hilton Hotel. Then she found a job working for Empire Craft selling Avon products and eventually hired, trained and managed salesgirls all over the state. For Doris it was an opportunity she had never even imagined. In a few years she had 165 girls working for her and was bringing home a steady $750-1000 a month, an amazing income for the time. Faro, working for the Teamsters on the loading docks, was lucky to make $100 a week.
She and Faro were each so involved with their work, they were rarely home at the same time and no longer worked together to make a life. The inequality of income and their different schedules and needs were suddenly a story of the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth. Homesteading had been simpler. They had not depended on income or material possessions because they had nothing. They had simply needed each other and shared what they had ...
Doris married again. That marriage lasted 39 years but, for her, losing a husband to death was less difficult than losing one to divorce:
...Doris tells me [Joan Myers, author of Pie Town Woman] that the divorce from Faro was even harder than death. The wounds festered and stayed open longer. (Pie Town Woman, page 169.)
Click on the image for a better view.
Credits
Image, reproduced from a color slide, by Russell Lee. Online, courtesy Library of Congress (LOC).
This photograph was not part of the LOC's "Bound for Glory" exhibition, like other photographs of the Caudill family. The LOC describes it, as follows:
Faro Caudill drawing water from his well, Pie Town, New Mexico.
Digital ID: (digital file from original slide) fsac 1a34103; Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-fsac-1a34103 (digital file from original slide) LC-USF351-324 (color film copy slide); Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540.
Quoted passages from Pie Town Woman: The Hard Life and Good Times of a New Mexico Homesteader, by Joan Myers.
