text: The family settled in Modesto, California, in 1945. Well after World War II, Thompson met and married hospital administrator George Thompson. This marriage brought her far greater financial security than she had previously enjoyed.
  Migrant Mother
  On March 6, 1936, after picking beets in the Imperial Valley, Thompson and her family were traveling on U.S. Highway 101 towards Watsonville "where they had hoped to find work in the lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley." On the road, the car's timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-pickers' camp on Nipomo Mesa. They were shocked to find so many people camping there—as many as 2,500 to 3,500. A notice had been sent out for pickers, but the crops had been destroyed by freezing rain, leaving them without work or pay. Years later, Thompson told an interviewer that when she cooked food for her children that day, other children appeared from the pea pickers' camp asking, "Can I have a bite?"
  While Jim Hill, her partner, and two of Thompson's sons went into town to get parts to repair the car, Thompson and some of the children set up a temporary camp. As she waited, photographer Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, drove up and started taking photos of Thompson and her family. She took seven images in the course of ten minutes.