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…
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…
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…
“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…
“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him–he has known a fear beyond every other.” John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath Sunshine in a Jar Having been raised in farming country…
Dust Pneumonia Dust pneumonia. A respiratory illness that slithered like a snake across the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, and Colorado during the 1930’s. The continual coughing jag, high fever, nausea, chest pains and shortness of breath signaled the dreaded condition. Old people succumbed. Those afflicted with bronchitis, asthma or tuberculosis breathed…
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