Volume 6 , Issue 11

Dust Bowl Memories...

The "Dust Bowl" website link that we put in last week's newsletter had some interesting information. Do you have any similar legacies to share of your ancestor's "Dust Bowl Memories?" Did they ever mention "Black Sunday, April 14, 1935?" Here is some of what the 1930's Dust Bowl Stories - Excerpts from "The Dust Bowl, Men,  Dirt and Depression" by Paul Bonnifield had to say about that...

     "On Sunday, April 14, 1935, the sun came up in a clear sky. The day was warm and pleasant, a gentle breeze whimpered out of the southwest. Suddenly a cloud appeared on the horizon. Birds flew swiftly ahead of it, but not swift enough for the cloud traveling at sixty miles per hour. This day, which many people of the area readily remember, was named Black Sunday.
     By May, it seemed like the wind and dirt had been blowing for an eternity. Rain was an event occurring only in dreams. It was a year of intensive dirt storms, gales, rollers and floods mixed with economic depression, sickness and disaster. It was a year of extreme hardship, but surprisingly the vast majority of the people stayed. By 1935, the unusual had become the usual, the extreme became the normal, the exception became the routine.
     During 1936, the number of dirt storms increased and the temperature broke the 1934 record high by soaring above 120 degrees. On one pleasant June day in 1936, the ground began to tremble. A sharp earthquake shook the land from Kenton to Perryton and from Liberal to Stratford. By the fall of 1936, the rains began to return and the heat wave was broken. The following year, 1937 was another year of unprecedented dirt storms. Day after day, Dust Bowl farmers unwillingly traded farms as the land moved back and forth between Texas and Kansas. And of course there were the usual floods. 1938 was the year of the Snuster. The snuster was a mixture of dirt and snow reaching blizzard proportions. The storm cause a tremendous amount of damage and suffering.".

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