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A highly admired friend of
mine, Le Triplett, wrote to me not long ago and mentioned the drouth of
the 1930s. Le and I attended Moss School together and he was a member of
my graduating class of 1943. Le has a PhD, and I was pleased to know that
a man of his stature would still use the word drouth, when all the news
media use the word drought. The word drouth, may or may not have been
coined by the inhabitants of the vast dust bowl, but that is the term we
always used, therefore that is our word, and who knows more about it than
we do?
My parents moved to a rental farm 2 miles west and 1/4 mile north
of Hornetown in 1926. The rent was third and fourth crop rent. I was born
there the same year and grew there until I left home at age 17. The people
of the area were doing very well at that time, life was good. The house we
lived in had carbide gas lights, and with a windmill and water storage
tower giving us running water to the kitchen sink, and to the concrete
watering tank in the barnyard lot/pasture. My father was able to pay in
cash to purchase a new 1929 Chevrolet. Things were looking so good that he
made the decision to borrow the money and buy more dairy cattle to add to
his herd. This was a mistake that nearly ruined him.
The stock market crashed that same year, 1929. My dad was a very
honest man, but could not pay the debt he owed the bank for his cattle.
Neither was he allowed to sell mortgaged cattle without paying his debt in
full, which would have been only a pittance anyway. The bank was demanding
remuneration and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He was
completely helpless, and that is a terrible feeling when the dark cloud of
such an awesome obligation is hanging heavily over one’s head. It was
several years before he was able to pay it off. Then the carbide that
produced the gas for our house lights was used up and no more could be
afforded, so we changed to coal oil [kerosene] lamps. At one time, as I
remember, we only had one of those. Then some mechanism on the windmill
broke and without funds for repairs, we were reduced to pumping water by
muscle power into a bucket and carrying it into the house.
In 1932, the seemingly infinite drouth of the thirties depression
began. Crops shriveled and died in the parched fields. The corn and cotton
fields appeared as wastelands. Oat harvests were very little better. Yet
we always toiled through the same routines day after day in the blistering
heat, with hopes of maybe getting back more in harvest than the cost of
our seed. To make matters much worse, in 1934 the barn burned to the
ground, destroying all our grain in the storage bins, our harnesses and
most of our farm machinery. Mom said Dad actually cried. I had never seen
him show any such emotion. The only emotions that I had ever witnessed
from this man were laughter and anger.
We wore shoes with holes in the soles and formed cardboard into
insoles to cover the holes. When the stitching of a shoe sole would wear
out, leaving the sole flopping and the insole filling with a mound of
dust, used rubber fruit jar rings were placed around our shoes to hold the
soles to in place. We ate a lot of cowpeas. We cured hog meat that lasted
through the winter months, then ham, bacon or sausage had to be purchased,
though some was canned in a pressure cooker. This often resulted in our
having one of these meats with gravy and biscuits for breakfast one
morning and the next morning, only biscuits and gravy, made from the
drippings of the morning before. We did have chickens, but never used
their eggs for breakfast. These were used in making pies and cakes and
sold to grocery stores. A milk separator was hand cranked to remove the
butterfat from the milk. The cream was sold to grocery stores and Harrod’s
Dairy. The skim milk from this operation, we fed to the hogs and cats
{good mousers}, sometimes mixing in shorts {a more nutritious part of
wheat than bran}. My father usually bought Purina Cow
Chow to feed the milk cows, but at times had to grind corn, mixed with
ground oats, and feed that instead. When we didn’t have much corn he would
have it ground, cob, shuck and all and mix a handful of shorts with it.
School vacations [vacations?] were split, half in the spring and
half in autumn, so the students could labor in the fields. Then we
attended school in the hot summertime. No air conditioning, no electric
fans, with the only cooling coming from perspiration and evaporation.
Normally we say “boys sweat, girls perspire”. We all sweated in those
days. We usually arose from bed at about 4:30 in the morning and worked
until after dark. That’s a little longer than from kin till cain’t.
Homemade dresses were the fashion for my two sisters as they were
for most of the other girls. Very few could afford a store-bought dress
once in awhile. My sisters were embarrassed to wear these dresses made
from printed Gold Medal flour sacks, but actually they looked better than
most dresses that were bought off the rack. My mother was an expert at
dressmaking and could make her own patterns to custom fit their bodies.
Patches were common for the boys’ overalls. During the passing of one
winter only a button up sweater could be afforded for me to wear to
school. Before that I had outgrown my nice sheepskin wool lined canvas
coat and warm aviator cap. But Mother Nature was kind to me that year, the
winter was mild.
The whole family toiled hard many hours each day, and if we were
ever lucky enough to get a little shower the kids really enjoyed the day
off. We kept our immune systems exercised a lot of the time by bathing
only once a week, though we washed our hands, faces, and feet every day.
My feet were sometimes not accommodated in this fashion because once in
awhile I was able to slip into bed early and pretend to be asleep before
my mother ordered me to wash them. Bless her sweet soul, she didn’t have
the heart to awaken me and send me back to correct that mistake.
My father, as most farmers in those days were, was an excellent
weather forecaster. On one occasion, after breakfast, he instructed me to
harrow the cornfield, because he was expecting a dust storm at 1:30 in the
afternoon. It was really late to harrow the corn since some of the stalks
would be broken because of their height, but this was done anyway. His
prediction was accurate, I believe, within 10 minutes. A ditch that been
dug ran along the south side of our field to carry flood waters out and
prevent erosion. This ditch was about 4 feet wide and 4 feet deep. After
the dust storm had spent it’s energy, this ditch was filled and the first
12 rows of corn were completely covered by our neighbor’s topsoil. He
should have harrowed his.
We and our neighbors were survivors. Carefree children will always
find time to play and have fun, therefore enjoying many hours of
happiness. It was extremely stressful on the parents though, who had the
awesome responsibility to eke out some sort of a meager existence and
raise a family during those dreadful days. We, as a nation of people from
this generation are strong survivors and most of us can still enjoy the
small pleasures of life. Much, much more could, and has been written about
those days, but today, we and the newer generations must know and remember
what made us that way, and know that we all still have that quality of
survivorship in our beings. I firmly believe we have. Our younger
generations have enjoyed a much better life of ease, but I believe, God
forbid, if an occasion such as this should ever arise again, our newer
generations could and would rise to the occasion. We have this kind of
history. Our founding fathers gave us this heritage. These men and their
followers were some of the greatest people this world has ever known. They
came here to build a free republic, under God, where the people rule. The
immigrants that followed were the strong, the independent, and the
determined of high moral character.
This is in our genes, transported down through the centuries by our
strong and faithful ancestors. In the drouth years and depression days,
most of us needed to have something strong and mighty to lean on and we
found it in the author of our universe, our Heavenly Father.
Harry Shumard |