A Picture Worth Thousands of Words: The Dust Bowl by Ken Burns
For two hours, Vernon and I watched disturbing, yet stunning visuals flash across our television screen. Frightening images of gigantic black blizzards engulfing barns and cities with devastating results. Plagues of jackrabbits and locusts. Old and young coughing from dust pneumonia. The first DVD of The Dust Bowl, by Ken…
Piecing a Legacy: A 1930 Quilt Story
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…
Radio: The Voices from the Air
5 Lessons for Today’s Teachers from Weedpatch Camp School
During the darkest days of the Great Depression, thousands of Oklahoma families migrated from the Dust Bowl to California in automobiles piled high with their earthly belongings. The grove owners and truck farmers referred to the penniless refugees from drought as “Okies”. The name carried prejudice toward the migrants trying…
Leo Hart: The School for Dust Bowl Refugees
“The people in flight from the terror behind had strange things happen to them: some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that their faith is refired forever.” – John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath Leo Hart refired faith. Maybe Leo Hart, Superintendent of Kern County Schools in the 1930’s, developed his…