maybe he could say he just doesn’t RECALL saying it
I have been to Texas, and I have been to Bakersfield, there are far more similarities than deviances.
I am also somewhat aghast at your failing to consider where those people that lived in the Dust bowl area (Kansas, Oklahoma, West Texas) in the thirties, moved to California to follow the fruit and vegetable harvest in the Central Valley.
Just one Steinbeck novel and your understanding of how that all happened would be changed forever.