Any of you here recall parents/grandparents mentioning the Dust Bowl days?

I'm reading this very stunning book, "The Worst Hard Time", by Timothy Egan and for anyone to have survived that is beyond me. The dirt rolled in so much full of static it knocked out cars, electricity, and sometimes you couldn't see your hand in front of you. Children, old people, and aniamls chack full of dust it's a wonder anyone lived who stayed behind. For a time before that people were rolling in the money from the wheat but around 1928/29 mounds of wheat just rotted by the railroad tracks and graniers while many people in other states were starving.

setting was the Dust Bowl Day's.

grandmother used to tell us of the depression often. Times were tough, she carried that frugality, borne of necessity, all through her life.

(Neodesha) said that they would spray water from the garden hose up in the air and it would come down mud.

They didn't like to talk about what happened,it was so bad.
If they hadn't had family to come back to, they would have really been up a creek.

on their farm, no grass just dirt. He told me that no matter what they did when they woke up in the mornings there was dust all over them. The photos look like something out of Grapes of Wrath only they were Kansans not Okies.

They had to move around a lot but stayed in Eastern Kansas where it was not as bad as farther West.

I have heard that book is really good, I want to read it.

We're getting some rain now, but it is too little, too late to help the crops this year. We've been in a drought for over two years in Missour, Kansas, and Oklahomah. I'm starting an orchard, and have been hauling 1000-3000 gallons of water a week to keep my trees and berry bushes alive. Ponds, up to five acres are now less than an acre. It's starting to get really bad out here, and if it continues, well, we'll be seeing the Dustbowl days again.

What we really need is a wet fall, winter, spring and summer. A really cold snowy winter would help things immensely.

In the early 30s things were so bad that sometimes the evening meal would consist of one boiled potato. Grandma would cut it into thirds for the 3 kids (ages 6-10), and she and grandpa would eat the peelings. That was it until breakfast.

He grew up on a family farm in Missouri, and went to visit his cousin one time when he was a kid, and stayed for dinner. They sat down and his aunt asked "kraut or blackberries?" He assumed it was a side dish. It was dinner. And there wasn't enough to have both, so she'd given him a choice. We used to laugh about it, but as I've gotten older, that story just breaks my heart.

She was one of 13 children growing up poor in the southern Indiana town of Bristow in the 1910s. Great-grandma made something called "pot pie." Later, grandma got through the depression with it because it was cheap to make and went a long way. It consisted of flour, sugar, salt, pepper, and hog lard. Not very nutritional but sure "filled the bellies."

flour, water, a little lard and a little sugar.

Like a pancake, but HEAVY. Keeps your belly filled all day, but no nutrition.

it is quite often mentioned.

Dust Bowl days. Actually, when I was in grade school (50s) we still had dust storms. It would become completely black with dust in the middle of the day. If at school - we were kept there until it went past. If at home for lunch - we didn't go back to school.

I bought and read this book when it first came out. It is now making the rounds of the next generation of my family so they will better understand why their parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents have always cared about the "land". Water conservation and farming methods have been dinner table conversation my entire life.

Soil conservation, crop rotation, etc. was religion with my grandparents, who were farmers in Missouri. There were a lot of hard lessons learned, but the programs FDR put into place for agricultural extensions and other state programs for farming and conservation were a huge help. Those folks learned very hard lessons during the depression and were determined to never let it happen again.

He was the man.

THE ONE AND ONLY WOODY FROM OKALAHOMA!!?

greatest artists of all time. I wonder how many younger folks from other parts of the country learned about the Dust Bowl from Woody's songs or Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. It's such an important part of our history, I'm certainly glad these artists felt the need to document it for future generations.

in school. Our teacher always talked about soil erosion and crop rotation. We lived on a huge working farm and always rotated the crops. There's another novel just published, "Whose Names Are Unknown", by Sanora Babb who lived during that time and she submitted her manuscript to a publisher but since "Grapes of Wrath" had just been published they figured one book on the subject was enough. However "Grapes..." was not really about the Dust Bowl, but about a family down on their luck who'd lost the farm.

My grandparents lived here in California during the Depression, part of that time in a tent-house on my great-grandparent's property. I remember my grandmother talking about the horrors of the Plains states. Many of the refugees from the Dust Bowl came west to look for work and settled in the central valleys. The best book on the exodus is Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/

And, another. How would you like to look up to see that wall of dust coming your way. My parents said the wind blew so hard, you had to seal the windows and doors to keep the dirt out.

http://www.ptci.net/museum/dustbowl.html

There are many good links that can be found with a Google search for dust bowl.

It was such a horrible time for them. Several family members went to California to live afterwards.

I did find an interesting link on pbs if anyone is interested in reading more about it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/

and my Grampa was from Kansas. I heard stories growing up about what it was to live during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. My Grampa's family were farmers trying to scrape by, there was never enough food or clothing. All the kids slept in the same bed and clothes were handed down until they fell apart. His aunt lived in a one room shack dug out of the ground -- it had dirt floors and a sod room. Nana never made it past 5th grade in school and he made it to 6th. You better not get sick because there was no money for a doctor.

None of us know what it is to have it really hard -- I would say that life back then for those folks was positively third world living.

Great-grandpa was an itinerant preacher, and the family moved to California and lived in farm camps. My grandmother NEVER talked about it -- life got better for her in WWII, when she was a Wave, so that's what she talked about. I had to find her name on censuses to find out where she was all those years: migrant camps.

worked in OK as a cook when she was 12 in a tent camp for oil workers -- her Mom had died in the influenza epidemic and all the kids had to find jobs. I remember she talked about how they laid down wood planks in the mud for sidewalks. WWII changed her life for the better, too -- she worked as an Army nursing assistant. My Grampa had joined the Army to make a living and was on his way back from the Philipines to be released from service when WWII broke out. Like so many from the midwest, they ended up here in San Francisco and built a great life for themselves.

I think back on the stories I heard growing up -- so much pain, uncertainty, desperation, hardship -- I guess when you are forced to, you do what you have to do. I can't imagine living through what they did.

Or a million. I forget which.

I think "rolling in money" might be a bit of an overstatement given the context. The people hit hardest in the Dust Bowl were never rolling in money because most of these farmers were barely above subsistence farming at their best. Others were sharecroppers who didn't actually own anything. Quite a bit of money was in play, but the railroads, other shipping and distribution industries, large land owners, and the industries that servered them were the ones making the actual money. The farmers by and large had always been poor. The Dust Bowl years simply took people barely surviving and destroyed them. Then came the market crash, and the industrialists, big money people, and then average Joe and Jane in the cities were hit, thus making it news.

There's a line in a country song by Alambama that's fairly on target about this. "Somebody told us Wall Street fell / But we were so poor that we couldn't tell."

"Somebody told us Wall Street fell / But we were so poor that we couldn't tell."

And the common men and women were all in the same boat, so they helped each other as much as they could. My father farmed on shares and he owned a flatbed truck, which he used to deliver his and heighbors' animals and produce to market, sold them for the best price he could get, took the cash and purchased the groceries/equipment they had asked for and hauled everything back to his neighbors. For this service, he received a small percentage to help pay for gas and wear and tear on the truck. Profit wasn't an issue they worried about...survival was. Everyone had some talent they could share...my grandfather repaired our shoes, women canned as much as they could, but shared their extra fruits and veggies. That generation was probably the most innovative of any we've had since, only because they had to discover ways to do with what they had. You couldn't just run to the store, lumberyard or hardware store.

I admired my parents for what they went through and how they accepted their lot in life at that time. Many in society, today, would probably not make it.

My grandmother and her sisters confused me when I was a kid. Grandma saved every button that ever fell off of anything. She canned every fruit or vegetable that could be canned. She made dishes with meat so sparse you could barely tell it was there ... yet it was very nutritious and flavorful and filling all at the same time. They plucked chickens, shucked their own corn, husked their own peas. They made their own clothes and made *me* clothes and sewed together quilts from patches of cloth. They also insisted I be taught how to hunt and grow things and cook things and make my own stuff from nothing ... but, I thought, you could just go to the store and get all this, sometimes cheaper, or at least with a lot less effort. Yet they insisted I learn these habits and skills. When my great-aunt died, three years ago at the tender age of 99, she had a "root cellar" so full of stuff she'd tucked away I'm still eating some of it ... like the peaches and strawberries, which are OH SO MUCH better than what you can get in a store.

As I got older I realized why. They knew how bad it could get. They didn't want to scare me by letting me know exactly why they wanted me to know this stuff, but they wanted to make sure I knew it anyway.

I still don't know if I could make it, as addicted to A/C and electronic gadgets and the local grocery store as I am. But, I'd certainly do better than 99% of the people I know, people who don't think it is possible to have a shirt or a pair of pants that weren't purchased at some store or who wouldn't know how to determine an edible plant if their life literally depended on it.

were the ones "rolling in the money" snce they could plant on large acres and the bank was giving out loans, and the USA was shipping wheat to Europe because of Russia not shipping out their wheat. But yes, most people were just scrub bare farmers.

I met a few of the people who were children at the camp in the 30's and 40's.

book and it's one that I hope many more people read. I grew up in northern New York State, so the Dust Bowl was not part of my family's experience, and my grandparents did not suffer too much during the Depression. They were Irish immigrants. One grandfather was a janitor, the other a cook, and they both worked, did not lose jobs. I live in Kansas now, although in Johnson County, which is extremely suburban, and I do not know anyone here who farmed during the 20's or 30's. The Egan book is absolutely eye-opening to someone like me. Things were so much worse than I could have imagined, and it was all the fault of the government for encouraging people to go and farm where they had no business farming.

this was in southeastern part of Colorado around Sugar City, Rockyford area. She told me they used to hang wet sheets at the windows and doors to catch all the dirt and dust. Even though they were closed, dust managed to get in via cracks.

She told me that sometimes you could see a storm rolling in, and there would be lightening in it. Very scarey. She was just a child then, born in 1925/

My grandmother was a girl at the time, but her family had to move from Kansas to California to escape it. She described once the final straw that made them move.

Her farm was one of the lucky ones. They had an uphill spring nearby that never went dry, so they and a few neighbors were able to divert the creek below it and put together a crude irrigation system. Still, one by one, her neighbors moved away. At first it was only one here, and another there, but as the crops failed everyone just started abandoning their farms. Eventually the only ones left were her family and the neighbors sharing the irrigation system.

Even with the irrigation, life was tough. After every dust storm they'd have to go out into the field with sticks and brooms to knock the dust off the corn, or it would smother and kill the plants. I've tried to imagine what that must have been like...a 9 year old girl, her parents, and her four siblings knocking dust off 100+ acres of corn. Sometimes the dust would come several days in a row, and they'd be out there every day knocking it back off.

But they never went out INTO the duststorms. They were highly charged, something as simple as touching a fence could shock you hard enough to knock the wind out of you. The dust itself would embed itself into your body...in your eyes, in your ears, down into the deepest recesses of your clothing. And there was no indoor plumbing on her farm, so a quick shower after a walk in the dust wasn't an option. Baths were work, and required hand pumping dozens of gallons of water, and careful heating of some of the water over the wood stove. In a two room house with little privacy, this wasn't something to look forward to and most just stayed dirty.

The end came for them following one particularly long storm. The wind blew for days and days (she claimed two weeks, but I couldn't ever find any record of a storm that long and assume she was exaggerating for my benefit) without interruption, and the dust in the air was so thick that visibility was down to only a few feet at times. When it subsided and they wandered outside, all they saw was devastation. Their fields were gone. The wind had blown over their corn and deposited a full foot of dirt on top of it. Their barn, not built well enough to handle that kind of load, had collapsed under the weight. Their horse and cows, without a barn to protect them, quickly suffocated in the dust. There was only barren land, and in the middle a half buried home.

One final time, their location and irrigation saved them. Unlike those who lost everything, the irrigation system still gave their land value and a chance to be reclaimed. My great grandfather had given up, but his neighbor came and made him an offer. He wanted to buy the land but didn't have the money to afford the whole thing. The neighbor offered to pay him about a quarter of the lands value and "sharecrop to own" the rest of the value. When they had all switched away from wheat as the irrigation came in, the neighbor had planted melons instead of corn. The low profile and heavy melons were worth a lot and did well in the wind so the neighbor was looking forward to expanding his crop. My great grandfather accepted the deal, packed his family up, and moved to California.

The initial money from the sale and the continued income from the sharecrop were enough to spare my grandmothers family from the worst of that period, but she saw enough of that too. The abuse the Dustbowl escapees endured when they came to California is worthy of a book unto itself (in fact, Steinbeck wrote one). My grandmothers family initially moved to the Salinas area to look for ag work, but balked at the low pay, outright hostility, and working conditions. They ended up moving to Monterrey where they purchased a very small home (6 people in a 600 square foot 1 bedroom house) and my great grandfather found a job fixing engines on the fishing boats.

And before you feel sorry for them for the size of that home, I should tell you that they considered it a palace. It had electricity, an oil heater, and a primitive hot water heater. It also had an icebox and an ice service that ran year round...unimaginable luxuries for people who had previously lived in a half sod home on the dusty Kansas plains. I actually visited the house once when I was a little kid, and even though the whole thing would fit into the living room of the house I have now, there was a sense of family around that place that I've never experienced since. Sadly, it was bulldozed in the late 80's and there's now some subdivision there full of million dollar homes :(

Glad they got out.

but they were townies.

Grandma's father was a sheriff, and Grandpa's father was a moonshine runner. They managed to survive, but it was tough. To this day Gram's kitchen has an ample supply of empty butter containers, twist ties, string. Boxes and jars are stored in the basement. Buttons have their own special (large) tin.