EDITOR’S NOTE: Several months ago, we received a cache of little-known photographs through the courtesy of California historian Richard Steven Street. They were taken by Claude (“Pop”) Lavai, a long-time resident of California’s San Joaquin Valley (see Mr. Street’s profile on page 60), and documented life in and around Fresno in the teens and twenties. Since William Saroyan, the Pulitzer prizewinning playwright ( The Time of Your Life ), novelist, and short-story writer, was born in Fresno and spent much of his boyhood there during those years, it occurred to us to send him a selection of the photographs and ask him to comment on them from his own store of memory.
