Longtime Benicia resident Jim Higginbotham moved to the area in the ’40s. (Photo courtesy of Ramona Higginbotham)

Longtime resident Jim Higginbotham has memories of Benicia dating back to the “invasion of Arkies and Okies,” as it was referred to at the time, that occurred toward the end of the Second World War in the early 1940s.
“We took over Benicia without ever firing a shot,” he said with a laugh.
Higginbotham came to Benicia from Arkansas as a young boy, along with many other military families from Arkansas or Oklahoma who were assigned to Benicia or other nearby coastal military locations. A good way for a kid to make money here, he recalls, was to sell newspapers.
“I don’t remember if there were routes for the Benicia paper,” he said. “I didn’t have one. We’d just pick up the papers and sell them for a nickel. We’d get to keep two cents a paper.”
Higginbotham later took on routes for “the Vallejo paper” and the Oakland Tribune.
“Vallejo was two papers a day, and you had to deliver both papers,” he told the Herald Friday. “Boy, they were heavy. Especially on Sundays.”
Non-military families also came to Benicia and other parts of California for a better way of life, he said.
“My dad made more here in six months than he did a whole year farming (in Arkansas). Everybody made a good living. It was a second ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ really,” he opined, referring to the 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by John Steinbeck about a poor family in Depression-era Oklahoma who relocated to California in hopes of finding work and a more stable future.
“When the war was over, a lot of people went back home.”
Higginbotham remembers well the First Street of the post-World War II era.
“My cousin and I used to deliver groceries from Rankin’s Grocery between H and I Streets (on First Street). The sidewalk was boarded, elevated about four feet between 2nd and 4th streets. In winter the tide would come in and flood the street.”
Higginbotham met his wife Ramona through a group of friends that included some of her cousins.
“We started dating when I was 19 or 20,” Ramona recalled. “We married in 1960. We have lived on the same block the whole 60 years of our marriage.”
The couple’s sons attended middle school at what is now the Benicia Community Center.
Jim attended Benicia High School when it was located downtown.
“We saw the high school built, saw the middle school built,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of changes.”
Jim Higginbotham lives in Benicia with is wife Ramona. He worked for the city of Benicia for 34 years and has been enjoying his retirement here since 1996.

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