Who grows up wanting to be a soil surveyor? What is a soil surveyor, anyway? Hugh Bennett, that’s who. A man who classifies soil types and decides the vegetation and land use patterns for certain areas of land. The exact person needed during the 1930’s in the Great Plains as topsoil blew away by the […]
Category Archives: Dust Bowl
I grew up knowing about Hoovervilles because my mother made a point of telling me about them. My mother and father were married in 1930. They moved to the Great Plains where my father dug irrigation ditches and spud cellars with a dragline. A wooden trailer that hitched behind their truck became their moveable home. […]
Hobos. Not bums. Not tramps. Hobos. A 17-year-old kid like Gene Wadsworth who caught his first freight train on a winter’s night in 1932. The pain of being orphaned at age 11 followed him to his uncle’s house in Idaho where five other children needed feeding. Like many of the two million plus hobos, Gene […]
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“The Black Blizzards were fearful. A giant wall rolling toward you like a steamroller.” – Floyd Coen Learning to Live in the Desert Growing up in Oklahoma Territory in the early 1900’s, Henry Finnell learned the ways of the semi-arid land on his parents’ homestead. He graduated from the local high school in Stillwater, then […]
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My inheritance from my mother lay in a large grocery bag filled with twelve inch muslin squares cut from feed bags. A transfer depicting each one of the 48 state birds and flowers lay with every white square. With a bit of tenacity, I started embroidering those designs collected in the 1930’s Dust Bowl. After […]
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 in the dust to their detriment. But […]
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Life Through a Lens “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves – for the rights of all who are destitute.” Proverbs 31:8 Ever wonder who took the iconic photos from the Dust Bowl that make our hearts ache and give us nightmares? A few pioneers in a new field of photo documentary brought […]
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Civilian Conservation Corps boys at work – Photo: Library of Congress The family’s farm is in foreclosure. Dust storms blot out the sun and bury the livestock. The older siblings try to share their beans, biscuit and Jack with the younger ones who cry themselves to sleep on empty stomachs. Dad’s eyes stare blankly at […]
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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 during the rest of the […]
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Should I steal when I’m hungry? The boys in my class for behavior disordered students always had the same question. Each year. “What do you do when you don’t have nothing to eat at home?” Usually, this led to a discussion on why it is all right to steal from the local 7-Eleven because the […]