Dust Bowl Babies

I was born in the dust bowl, Amarillo Texas. The weather even put on a black duster for me: the nurses in the hospital packed wet sheets around the windows and doors to keep the dust from getting to the patients, especially us newborns. Granted, I was born well after the Great Dust Bowl of the thirties had come to a close, but the soil didn't settle down right away, and the area is still subject to wind and drouth. (In the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, along with the adjoining areas, the word is prounounced "drouth," not "drought.") My birth came during one of the short, two-year aftershocks of the main event.

My parents were real dust bowl babies, and my dad's whole family lived in or near the Oklahoma No Man's Land considered "ground zero" in the thirties. He was born in Clayton, New Mexico right about the time the bottom fell out of local agriculture. My mother's folks came from Manhattan, Kansas, which is home to the US Department of Agriculture's Wind Erosion Research Unit; she was born in Denver but moved to Amarillo around 1934 when she was still a toddler.

As a consequence, we have mixed feelings about books Elizabeth gave us for Christmas: Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time. It is an entertaining read, although the author's habit of following one story and then looping back to another, unrelated story, can be confusing. Essentially, it follows a handful of individuals, mostly in Dalhart, Texas, Boise City (which is pronounced Boyce City, not Boy City, by the way) and Baca County, Colorado, with a somewhat baffling digression into Nebraska. All the individuals and families presented failed, and failed hard - and yet only twenty percent of the population of the area fled.

Granted, atypical stories are often the most interesting, but we wish the author had found a few atypical stories from people who toughed it out and succeeded. We take the total lack of mention of R.W. Isaacs Hardware in Clayton as a personal insult. I also feel that the inclusion of the hardware store would add balance to the story, as well as providing information on some things the author glossed over. Clayton is mentioned, but apparently Egan found no personal stories of interest there. He can't have looked very hard.

Egan gives one the impression that the windmills and advanced plows that made farming the area (which, granted, was a bad idea) came from the Sears catalog, or maybe from traveling salesmen. According to Genevieve Chapin's WPA interview with R.W. Isaacs in 1936, part of the Federal Writers' Project,

When the Isaacs Hardware and Implement Store began its career in Clayton [in 1898], the only farm tools used here were the "breaker" and the seven-inch plow, and a great excitement pervaded the little community when he introduced into it the first modern plow.

During the Depression, my great granddad gave long credit and accepted farm goods in payment for needed hardware, tools and windmill parts (Isaacs Hardware still sells windmills and parts for them). As a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1932, RW cast his vote for FDR on the first ballot. Roosevelt sent him a large, signed photograph that was still hanging in the store's office when I worked there briefly back in the 70's. The KKK came after great-granddad because he was a Jew. When he died of a stroke in 1936, the store was heavily in debt, but my granddad managed to hang on and then turn things around as the economy improved. My dad, who was still a child at the time, remembers the party his parents threw around 1940 when the store at last got out of debt. This is one area where our family story differs from those Egan used: our family made it through the tough times without losing everything.

My dad's mother's family lived in Kenton, Oklahoma. I not only have family stories about the family and the area, I also have a two volume set of newspaper extracts, Old Trails of Kenton 1898-1949 by Alma Jean Bulls Cryer. Kenton was originally the county seat of Cimarron County, an honor that was later taken by the more centrally-located Boise City. Bud Freeman, my dad's grandfather, was one of the earliest settlers in the area. In 1900, he proved up a homestead and opened a barber shop in Kenton. His first wife, Addie Giles, died suddenly in 1902, leaving behind four small children. The oldest, Aunt Merle, was not quite six years old.

The following year, William Henry Guy, a Methodist Episcopal minister from Ohio, moved his family to Kenton, and Bud Freeman married the Rev. Guy's younger daughter Iva in 1904. Bud had sold his barbershop on Main Street in 1903, but he couldn't make enough ranching on a single quarter section. In 1904 he advertised his preparedness "to do all kinds of repair work, either harness, saddle, boot or shoe work." He also continued as a barber. Between 1905 and 1927 Bud and Iva produced nine more children, not including a stillborn boy born in 1909.

At some point in the 20's, the Freemans tried Boise City but returned to Kenton in 1926. Bud reopened his barbershop, and along with the usual barbering and the leather repair, he soon added cleaning, pressing and tailoring, plus a refrigerator for a cold drink counter.

In 1931, Bud had to have his leg amputated just above the knee as the consequence of a badly broken ankle the year before. A year or so later, Bud's son Guy (his eldest with Iva) "struck [him] on the head with a shoe last... As the elder Freeman fell, his head struck on a projection on a foot rest of the barber chair causing a serious skull fracture." I'd like to know what provoked the attack, but the newspaper account doesn't give that detail. Bud fortunately recovered, going on to live until 1956.

Sunday afternoon, Apirl 14, at 4 o'clock, Kenton along with the rest of the Great Plains area suffered the worst dust storm in its history. Inky darkness enveloped everything for a period of 15 minutes followed by 30 minutes of semi-darkness, and finally clearing to dim twilight. Motor traffic was tied up instantly and chickens out feeding in yards and around corrals were bewildered and scattered for considerable distances during the darkness.

Obituary...William Henry Guy...He was a good minister, a true neighbor, and a real community asset...Funeral services were conducted Sunday afternoon, April 14th at 2:30 o'clock in the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Kenton, Okla., ... Interment was made in the Kenton Cemetery...

Black Sunday. My dad was three years old, and he remembers that day. Al Guy (who was only a year older) also told me about it when we visited the Kenton Cemetery during the 2003 family reunion. The funeral party was at the cemetery when the duster appeared on the horizon, and people rushed to their cars. According to Al, his mother Augusta (the redoubtable Aunt Augusta of family legend) took a photo of the oncoming storm that later became famous as "The Phantom Face." Al insisted that the face was his grandfather W.H. Guy's.

My dad was in a car that tried to outrace the duster, but they ended up stopping in Moses, New Mexico, where a man suggested they shelter in the Catholic Church. Daddy's memories of the event are confused, as one would expect, but he left the worrying to the adults. When it got so black "you couldn't see your hand in front of your face," he curled up in Aunt Merle's lap and went to sleep. For him, black dusters were part of everyday life.

I bought a camcorder a couple of weeks ago, and when the stereo microphone I ordered from Amazon gets here, I plan to start getting some interviews. My parents will be the first, but I also hope to get some other family members to record their recollections. Maybe I can fill in some of the blanks here as well as learn more about family history in general.