Five Fears of Eleanor Roosevelt

“You have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”                                                 -President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fireside Chat Fear is the mind-killer. Conquering fear is essential in survival. Eleanor realized that at an early age. She spent her life fighting her “fight or flight” responses with detached responses. By facing the experiences…

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Sunbonnet Sue: Her Rise and Fall

My mother married in 1930, just as the Great Depression descended upon our country like locusts on a cornfield. Her life in the Dust Bowl area included a Hooverville, The Black Hand, midwife delivery of my older brother, and feed sack material for hand sewing. While my father worked six…

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Piecing A Legacy: A 1930’s Dust Bowl Quilt

With the perspective of youth, Dennis McCann observed, “Those must have been depressing times, those long ago days of bread and milk, of feedbag clothes, and canned tumbleweed dinners. Of little or nothing.” Jane Tamse countered in her feeble, quivering voice, “Those were frugal days, but they left us with…

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Coloring Christmas Orange: Celebrating in the Great Depression

The one thing that every family in the 1930’s Dust Bowl savored for Christmas was an orange. In our own culture of entitlement and excess, the thought of one orange constituting the holiday pay load is unimaginable. But getting an orange was a big deal because citrus fruit wasn’t affordable…

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