Since the previous post, I have been contacted by several individuals who had been involved in farming, going back to the 1930s. Each one was skeptical, to say the least, that anyone would walk from Fort Lauderdale to the bean fields west of Pompano to work in those fields.

Their arguments are that it would take too long to get to and from the fields, that there were closer places to work, that most farmers would transport their worker to the fields, and that not every farmer was harvesting every day -- one would have to know where to go and on what day, and as one person put it "that information was not "conveyed via e-mail or even the telephone."

The book cites a source for the quotation - a videotape; I'll see if I can find and view it and see if the quote makes more sense in context.