Buck Owens' Crystal Palace

Work sometimes takes me to Bakersfield, and if I spend the night there, I try to take in dinner at the world famous Buck Owens' Crystal Palace, on Buck Owens Boulevard. It's a marvelous place, filled with mementos of the musician's long career, plus the food is excellent. Buck was a Dust Bowl emigrant to California and here he made it big. Very big. Perhaps my own Okie heritage draws me to the Crystal Palace. My great-grandparents (born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks) with most of their children came to California from Shawnee, Oklahoma, and spent the Depression years in the Sacramento Valley. It wasn't a desperate life straight out of the Grapes of Wrath, but it wasn't a comfortable life either. My great-grandparents are buried in Sacramento, and their children are buried throughout California.