I moved to Meade in SW Kansas late in '76. Sometime the following spring there was a massive dust storm that originated in eastern Colorado and blew across the country and 75 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. While the dust involved did decrease the further east the storm went, satellite and radar could still track it out into the ocean. Even with all the windows tightly shut, red dust got into the house and covered everything. The old-timers in town told us young-uns that was what the Dust Bowl days were like. The sky was red from the dust and visibility was about 1-2 feet, if that much. One day of that was more than enough.

One other contributing factor to the severity of the storms was clear-cutting. People took out ALL the trees to have clear fields to plant. The lack of wind-breaks made things that much worse. Driving from Okc to Meade two things let you know you crossed the line from Oklahoma into Kansas, even without signs - the roads improved, and the trees disappeared. Folks in NW Oklahoma have planted stands of trees as wind-breaks. Hopefully, we've learned the lessons needed to insure that we never again have to suffer such complete devastation of the land, in spite of our periodic droughts.

While "Happy Anniversary" might not seem suitable, we can at least pay homage to the brave souls who stayed through the drought when so many gave up and left. I think the detemination and courage that required typifies what it is to be an Oklahoman. We understand that life brings hardship, that we have to be willing to bite the bullet and do whatever it takes to get ourselves back on our feet, and we know that we survive best when we work together and help each other. Oklahoma does not have the most beautiful landscapes in the world, but we certainly have some of the finest people you could ever hope to have as neighbors.

Debra

Thanks for that link, Dawn. I've assigned that to the kids today as part of their social studies. I LOVE history and that period in time is one of my favorites.

Diane

Debra,

I loved your comments.

I've never seen a dust storm as bad as the one you saw in '77 but we'll have a pretty strong dust storm maybe once every 3 or 4 years here, usually from the west. Those are bad enough and they are minor compared to those huge dust storms experienced back then.

Diane,

You're welcome.

I love the history of it all too. I'm glad the kids will have a chance to learn about a period in our history that I think is mostly ignored by areas outside the 'dust bowl' region. I'm just always so completely horrified when I look at the photos from that era and see those big black rolling clouds of dust. Can you imagine being a parent and seeing your young children choking and suffocating on dust they've inhaled/swallowed? It must have been awful. So many people died from the suffocation and dust pneaumonia and such, as did lots of animals.

One of our neighbors told me once about how hard it was to clean the house after these periodic dust clouds rolled through. (Sometimes I think we forget they had smaller dust storms a lot too!) Houses built back them were not even close to being airtight and she'd talk about how hard her mother worked to sweep and clean and even just what a huge ordeal it was to keep the kitchen dust-free long enough to prepare a meal and eat it and how hard it was to do laundry by hand and then have it all covered in dust before it could even dry. Even something as 'simple' as routinely baking bread or churning butter became so much more complicated when the dust filled the air.

Our lives are so incredibly easy by comparison.

Dawn

A book I would highly recommend if you are interested in this subject is "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan.

My family survived the Dust Bowl in the northernmost part of the Texas Panhandle where I was born and raised. Their stories were told matter of factly, but only when you asked, as if it was just something you adjusted your life around. I guess that is exactly what it was.

Marcy

Marcy just curious where in the Texas Panhandle as I have lived in it and still live close and doctor in Amarillo.

My folks talked about it some. Think we still have some of the pictures of some moving in. During that time is when my Mother learned to garden. They lived a mile north of a normally dry river where the ground was tight. They would take the wagon a mile south to the south side of the river and bring back sand to mix in for a better garden.

Farming techniques have improved things greatly. Due to that and recently all the CRP grass the blowing soil hasn't been as bad. I can remember in the late 50's and into the late 70's times you couldn't see with your lights on during the day. I think I remember the storm Debra talked about. One of the stations I was in charge of was in eastern CO. Driving back that day was worse than being in a blizzard. You couldn't see where the road was. And when you ran off it was a guess how to get back to it. I saw a few of them during my early years. Haven't seen anything even close to that since the early 80's. It would blow large areas bare down several feet. My Mother and her Dad found lots of exposed arrowheads. Their Sunday afternoon entertainment.

There was an abundance of rabbits and they had rabbit round ups. I heard an old friend on the Perryton, TX radio station this morning talking about being involved in one as a child when Black Sunday hit.

I know I don't fully appreciate how good I have it today. Jay

I'm glad you shared this. PBS was advertising a couple of months ago for a new Ken Burns documentary about the Dust Bowl. They were looking for people who lived through it and would be willing to be interviewed.

My grandparents homesteaded in the Oklahoma panhandle near Balko. My dad's older sister was born in 1920 and I tried to get her to contribute.

My mother was born in Cotton County in 1911, and I have never heard her mention the dust bowl days, and I never thought to ask. I will have to ask her what she remembers about it. My grandfather was a carpenter and frequently built schools, so they traveled all over but it was always Oklahoma, Texas or western Arkansas, I think. She just never talked much about the past.

During the depression years, my parents left Oklahoma and went to San Diego CA to work in the Defence plants. My mother hated it, so somehow my Dad got transferred to the Consolidated plant (later General Dynamics) in Fort Worth. I don't know how long they were there, but I was born there and lived there until I was 2 years old. My mother never wanted to live outside of Oklahoma again. She visited me in Colorado and even in Alaska, but she was always happy to live in the state of Oklahoma.

One of horrifying things I remember reading about this time in our history is that many people got pneumonia from the dirt. Some people had more than a pound of dust in their lungs. Many folks never really recovered their health after this time. I remember that my grandmother had a history of pneumonia and I have wondered if it was because of the dust storms. I remember my mother telling me about covering the windows with wet towels and sheets and still everything was covered. They lived in OKC at that time.

I tried reading "The Worst Bad Time" and it was just too depressing for me to finish it. One of the things it discussed which I had never heard before was that he plains had been stripped of vegetation to plant great expanses of corn during the 1st world war and after the war the great expanses of land were left fallow. So the planting was on a grand scale and the resulting disaster was on a grand scale as well. I had always thought that all this was the result of irresponsible farmers. I guess I hadn't really thought it throughl

Imp

I've heard stories about a few dieing from dust(dirt) pneumonia. Most I've heard about were infants. I've heard all the stories about wet sheets, ect over the windows. Either hanging something wet over the doors or stuffing something all around it some dirt wouldn't blow in. Keeping a bucket and shovel by the door so you could shovel the dirt up and carry it out.

There used to be an older gentleman who was a retired farmer who wrote a weekly column in our local paper about growing up during those times.

It was the farming practices and what they had available to use. Remember most in not all here still used horses or oxen to work the land and cultivate the crops. Depending on the size of the equipment and how many horses they had 10-20 acres was all they could do in a day. That is from what I've been told by old timers and my family. They said they would plant all day. And get up the next morning and it would all be blown out. Many of them ate lots of young rabbits and knew what weeds ect was good to eat as greens when young. We ate some of both when I was young more showing us how many lived during that time. And I really like young rabbit. My family and friends shared a lot about those years. Maybe it was because I always had a fasination with that time and asked lots of questions when I had the opportunity. I remember the stories of many families only bathing once a week during the winter. They would heat one or two large tubs then everyone would use it. One friend used to say that is where the saying "throwing the baby out with the bath water" came from. But overall I would say most were happy and like my family of that age appreciates things more than many today that have never experienced such times. I've been blessed to have lived in this general area so many years and heard so many stories. Jay

Carol,

My dad was born in Montague County, Texas, in 1919 (just across the border from western Love County and Jefferson County) and he was old enough when the Dust Bowl years hit to remember them somewhat, but he wouldn't talk about them much. Both his parents died in the early to mid-1930s and the kids stayed together (an uncle on the farm next door had legal guardianship and bought them each a new pair of shoes every year) and virtually raised themselves. There were 13 of them. I remember they said the sand filled up their storm cellar and they couldn't use it until they'd cleaned it out. It also ruint their crops and they had very little to eat during those years, mostly pinto beans and corn. For my dad's family, poverty was a constant until World War II came along and, one by one, they left the farm to enter the military or to work in defense plants like Consolidated Vultee (later General Dynamics and now Lockheed-Martin). None of them ever went back to the country really, except the oldest aunt had a few acres in Haltom City in the 1950s-1970s and raised a huge garden every year. They wouldn't talk about those Dust Bowl years much except to talk about how the people suffered, and you had to ask them to get them to talk about those days at all. I think they just put the 'bad times' behind them and kept on going. All of them were fruit and vegetable gardeners and all of them loved rural north central Texas and southern OK along the Red River despite their difficult lives there when they were younger. My dad felt like the Dust Bowl 'ruined' their chances to be farmers because it made them feel like they'd never get ahead and stay there.

Imp, I felt the same way about 'The Worst Bad Time"---it was so sad and so depressing and just so hard to read and hard to 'digest' both intellectually and emotionally because of the depth of the suffering and damage. Until then, I really didn't understand the people's suffering. I understood the financial ruin it brought to so many families, and I understood the great migration of the "Okies" to California and elsewhere looking for a better life (two of my uncles went to Cali and never came back) but I didn't understand the death and the illnesses and, as you mentioned, chronic lung conditions that folks had for many years which probably did originate with their inhalation of all that dust back then.

I thought it was irresponsible farming techniques too, and in a way it was, but the farmers themselves were encouraged by the government to use those methods. Listening to the old timers talk about it decades later, I got the impression many of them felt betrayed by the goverment. After all, they did what the government wanted them to do and they did it the way the government told them to do it, and look what happened! Hindsight is always 20-20, isn't it? One of the oldtimers here, who was 87 years old, I think, when we moved here in 1999, stood on our property with its towering trees and told me that when his family came to Oklahoma by covered wagon in the earliest 1900s, there were no trees except along the Red River. I asked him where the trees had gone, and he said everyone cut them for building material, fence posts, and firewood until none were left. He remembers traveling to the Red River in a farm wagon to spend a day cutting young trees (there weren't any old ones left) for firewood. He also talked about how the land eroded later because, of course, there were no tree roots left to hold the soil and because everything was plowed and bare. He remembered erosion beting a huge problem until at least the 1950s.

Jay,

My dad never lost his great affection for wild foods you could forage, and always loved finding 'poke sallet', dandelion greens, purslane, and stuff like that in the spring. His favorite was lambs quarters. He said without them, they would have starved. When I was a teenager and he would tell me that, I'd think to myself that I'd rather starve than eat purslane and lambs quarters! Now, when our lambsquarters pop up in the spring, I always think how thrilled my dad would be to see them.

They also made lots of prickly pear jelly if they could barter to get the sugar (usually they used sorghum syrup or molasses) to sweet the jelly. Apparently the prickley pear did just fine in those years.

Your story about the bathtubs reminded me of my dad telling me those stories too. Apparently in his family, rank had its privilege and age gave you rank. He was the third youngest and the second youngest to survive to adult hood, and he was at the end of the line when it came to baths. He said he was in the Navy and in his late teens before he knew what it was like to bathe with 'new' water that hadn't already been used by everyone else.

We always got an orange in our Christmas stockings because that orange reminded my dad of his childhood Christmases when the orange in their stocking was their one and only present and they loved those oranges and ate them slowly because they were a once-a-year treat. The town where my dad grew up is pretty much a ghost town now, but we go back to the cemetary once every few years. If the ghosts could talk, what stories they could tell us now.

Dawn

Dawn,
Yes I couldn't think of lamb's quarters when I was posting earlier. But there were other weeds that they ate at certain stages. Even Kochia weed when very young. My grandmother knew when to pick it and when prepared with other greens it stretched a meal out.I will think of some of the others later. I often wondered how they knew when to pick and eat something and when not too. Did someone have to get sick to know? When I asked many times I was told it was knowledge that had been passed down. I know one time a chemist from TX I believe came to NM looking for horses and contacted my Dad as he had the reputation for having and also knowing where the best was. At the place where he bought a horse it was the spring of the year and served with the dinner(noon) meal was some greens partly from the garden and part picked wild(weeds). He found them to be good. And took some home along with some more mature plants the lady told him not to eat as they would make him sick. He wrote back later and said he had ran tests on them. And the mature plants had something that would make you very sick but the tops out of the small plants didn't show any. That was in the early 60's. He also wondered how they knew what stage to eat them at. They were survivors. But if you walk through the small cemeteries here. You will see high numbers of infants from the 30's buried. Like mentioned above many times it was dust pneumonia.
My friend always said it went father, mother and then down the line till the end. And that a girl got preference over a boy if age was close. At least in his house. Jay

Jay,

I was born in Perryton, lived in Farnsworth until I was 3 or 4, and then raised in Gruver.

I know when I was born in the early 50s, my mother had to put wet sheets over my crib whenever I was asleep and sometimes during the storms. I still carry a scar on my chin from falling out of the crib after getting tangled in the wet sheet trying to climb out. That's the story, anyway.

And the 'wild greens'? I remember one time as a new bride, my grandparents were coming over for a meal. At that time, I had just discovered wilted salad and loved it. I thought I was quite the gourmet cook. I served it with the meal. My tender-hearted grandmother gently said, "Honey, I just can't eat that wilted salad, although I'm sure it's delicious. I had too many of them when I was young and I just can't make myself eat them now." It brought home to me how hard the depression and Dust Bowl was as the weed salads and brown beans were just about all my family had had to eat.

After DH read "The Worst Hard Time", he said he finally understood why Texans (read "me") were so hard-headed. "You had to be just to have survived", he said.

Thanks everyone for sharing.

Marcy

Marcy,
A small world. I started to school in Perryton in 1959 if memory serves me correctly. I attended the first three grades there. I know several people from around Gruver. My best friends are from Morse south of Gruver. All nice communities.
I know several that couldn't eat certain things because they ate so much of it during the depression. Beans is another I know some wouldn't eat. And most gardeners I've known raised during those years was very good. They learned what it took to raise a garden to feed a family. It took a certain determination to survive. A grit that I feel many don't have today. Jay

My mother is 98 years old (99 in July) but my Dad was a lot older than my Mom. He remembered all of those rough times but didn't talk about them much. When he did talk, it usually had to do with food. He would not touch rabbit at all although he ate all other wild game. I understand the rabbits had serious problems, but people had to eat them anyway. Once he had a choice again, he never took another bite of rabbit, domestic or wild.