Lou Emma Cox (1928-1989)
CONTRIBUTION TO TULARE COUNTY AGRICULTURE: Lou Emma Cox moved to Tulare County with her family during the Dust Bowl migrations of the Great Depression era.
The Cox family, Lou Emma Cox shown standing in center, was one of many that migrated from Oklahoma to Tulare County during the Dust Bowl era.
Lou was born March 15, 1928 to Mervin Eugene Strange and Beulah May Williams in Tuttle, Oklahoma. She was born at home with her maternal grandfather and nearly twenty aunts and cousins present. After she was born, the doctor told her father he could save his wife or the baby. Luckily for her, one of the aunts was a nurse and worked on her while the doctor saved mom.
Lou’s father loved working in the fields and moved the family to California in the mid-1930’s to look for a job. He got a job working as a “cutter” or welder-fabricator in the Oakland ship yards, but quit his job to work in the fields, picking everything from cotton to fruits and vegetables. The family lived in farm labor camps all up and down the Central Valley, and moved from town to town with other families from Oklahoma. Lou worked side by side with her parents in the fields. They moved with the crops from Delano in the south to Merced in the north, and settled in Oakland during World War II.
Lou married Samuel Elmer Cox in 1945 and raised four children in Visalia (Sam, Ron, Phil and Nancy). She worked in the family business (Cox Sheet Metal) until her death from breast cancer in 1989.