Dust Bowl Story - Roger Mills County, Oklahoma

Transcribed by:  Ira Isch   5 Mar 2006
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I am Ira Isch from Reydon (and now of Edmond)

About the Duster Era, I, like many of my RMC cohorts have unpleasant 
memories. During that period when the dusters hit with deadening 
regularity about once per week, we lived a couple of miles west of 
Meadowbrook School.

Atop the red clay hill, we had good visibility and could view the 
approaching duster with clarity. Early in the day, the sun rose and by 10 
a.m. it was steely hot. Not a breath of air stirring. No rain since one 
couldn't remember.

And then, with a feeling of doom, one cast an eye through the shimmering 
heat waves to the northwest. There it was-low on the horizon, just a low 
gray cloud. But we knew what it was and what would it bring in a couple 
of hours. I thought how wicked the innocent looking gray line on the 
horizon actually was!

And I waited . . . and waited for the next couple of hours. And then it 
struck. The steely heat from the merciless sun disappeared. As a matter 
of fact, everything more than eighteen inches away just disappeared in 
the voracious appetite of the horrid dust swirling around one in the high 
winds as the "thing" envelopedy all of everything.

That continued for the next couple of hours. Dust in everything. We wet 
rags to keep our nostrils open for the dust contaminated air - the only 
air available. As suddenly as it came, the wind sucked they last bit of 
joy from the misery of the humans, and, for lack of any morey foodstuffs, 
it died. But its compadre, the dust stayed on. It was so thick that one 
could swear that it settled in the sealed mason jars of cannedy beans we 
ate!

The dust stayed with us for the next twenty-four toy thirty-six hours. 
Where it finally went I don't remember but I do remembery that it was 
gone.

A few days later, the sun came up and by . . . and we lived through the 
dust again. One would ask (even if I was only ten or eleven years old) 
"Would it ever end?" But even the worst finally ends just in time for 
other horrors such as the "Big War" when the Japanese blasted Pearl 
Harbor to smithereens!

Uncle Sam crookt his demanding finger and I hoped that I would never 
remember the "Thirsty Thirties" experience in Roger Mills County!

God Bless,

Ira
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