“I had been everything from scavenger to president ten or twelve times,” Woody once wrote of his Okemah childhood, growing up with a gang of boys who loved to roughhouse: “Fought on the good and bad side of fifty wars, won, lost, and broke even at every sort of game the mind of a kid can work out.”
Text: Collected in “Pastures of Plenty,” ed. Marsh & Leventhal.
Photo: Woody Guthrie Birthplace, Okemah, Okfuskee County, OK. 1979. Walter Smalling, Jr., photographer. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.