With their childhood home sitting on a flatbed nearby, Merle Haggard and his sister carefully climbed up on the raised foundation near the train tracks at the Kern County Museum and searched for a private moment together as dozens of observers, fanning themselves in the brutal heat, kept a respectful distance.
“This is a blessing to our parents because they’re not here to do it,” Lillian Haggard Rea, 94, told her brother.
“I never saw that window before,” Haggard remarked, pointing to the front of the boxcar his mother and father converted into the family home in 1935, two years before the singer was born.