Volume 18 , Issue 15

1938, Fugitives From Dust Bowls Find Meager Living On Coast

On 7 June 1938, Tuesday, on page 5, the Pampa Daily News, out of Pampa, Texas, was reporting: "Fugitives From Dust Bowls Find Meager Living On Coast."

Found on Newspapers.com

Portland, Ore., June 7, 1938 -- Meager subsistence in hovels on the fringe of civilization had been the lot of scores of weary men, women and children who led the nation's dust bowls in dilapidated automobiles to seek a promised land in Oregon.

For every farmer resettled with money and land from the government, a dozen others had drifted to the back roads, scratching out pitiful garden patches' in the timer, working for subsistence in the fields and living in makeshift homes.

The records of the Farm Security Administration were filled with happy interviews from families who qualified in money, implements, stock and intelligence. For the majority of others, unheard of and unknown, there is only desiccation.

Deep in Oregon's rich farm, dairy and orchard region, a middle aged man with a tubercular wife, two sons and three daughters took precarious refuge in their flight from eastern Colorado.

The environment shocked a hardened relief investigator. The mother and father slept in a trailer more like a boxcar. It teetered on its rusty jacks when the wind blew. Chickens wandered in and out of the flapping door, at home on a soiled, untidy bed or hopping from broken chair to grubby table.

Two boys of pre-school age slept on a bursting mattress in a packing box hut. The chicken had been there, too. A flea-bitten collie pup slept on the boys' bed.

The girls, one of them went to a distant high school in the county bus, had a shack a few yards up the slope. It was tidier. Three goats provided mil. the only cow was dry. A few vegetable plants pushed through soil around fir stumps.

A ragged, sturdy Kansas plains family had set up a half-tent, half-shack home on another hillside. From he canvas covered doorway they looked out upon fertile orchards and clover fields sweeping westward to the cool coastal mountains.

The father toiled on a seven acre tract felling fir and hewing and sawing it into cordwood. His labor was the price of his tenancy. The fuel would be sold in town and the slim revenue may provide a crop among the stumps next season.

It was green and cool there and there was not so much dust was what one mother said as two children, a boy and a girl, clinging to her tattered skirts.
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