April 23, 2008 08:14 pm
—
By Roger McKinney
rmckinney@joplinglobe.com
COLUMBUS, Kan. — Priscilla Henning began her talk by telling of a quandary faced by Thelma Warner in 1935 in Syracuse, Kan.
Warner’s baby was crying and covered with dust from a dust storm. A bucket of water in the house was so dirty from the storm that Warner used a dry cloth to wipe her baby.
“I just wiped off what I could and let him go back to sleep,” Warner told Henning.
Henning, of Weir, is pursuing her master’s degree in American history at Pittsburg State University. Her thesis topic is the experiences of women in southwest Kansas during the Dust Bowl years. She gave her talk Wednesday at the Kansas State University Extension office in Columbus during the Family and Community Education Council spring tea.
Henning has interviewed 30 women from Kansas who lived through the Dust Bowl. Her talk was accompanied by a photo presentation.
“I wanted to know how women coped during those times,” Henning said.
She told of Ione Lewis, who went into labor as a dust storm approached in 1935. The doctor made it into town, but the storm prevented him from getting to her house. Her son, Keith, was born in her house during the storm. Lewis told Henning that her son always had “Dusty” as a nickname.
Henning said the Dust Bowl primarily was in western Kansas, eastern Colorado, eastern New Mexico, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. It lasted from 1932 to 1937. She said the storms weren’t constant, but they usually struck during January, February, March and April.
The Dust Bowl was caused by overcultivation of what previously had been grassland, she said.
She said Amy Finkenbinder told her of her neighbors being found dead after a dust storm.
Another woman told her that people couldn’t grow gardens, and whatever water they had to spare went to livestock.
“Many women served only one meal a day,” Henning said.
Clothes that were dried on clotheslines had a gray tinge from the dust.
She said the women sometimes could clean the dust from their homes using a wet mop and bucket, but often only a shovel was used first.
“Fighting the dust became an unending struggle and a source of frustration,” Henning said.
The homes often were little more than shacks, with no utilities and little furniture. Most of the women she interviewed were the wives of tenant farmers.
She said Black Sunday, on April 14, 1935, was a dust storm so widespread that it caught the entire nation’s attention.
Henning said her 95-year-old grandmother, Cora Ashmore, was another interview subject. Ashmore lit kerosene lamps during the middle of the day during the dust storms. Static electricity built up to such a degree that she saw sparks coming from a windmill.
Henning said her grandmother caught and skinned skunks, the hides of which she sold to Sears, Roebuck and Co. She used the money from the skunk pelts to buy her first set of dining-room chairs.
Meeting attendee Wilma Jennings, 87, said a dust storm struck Cherokee County in 1932. She said she was in sixth grade at Center Star School, north of Columbus. She said she had to walk a little more than a mile to get home from school. She said that when the dust storm struck, she took her younger cousin by the hand, and they followed fence posts to find their home.
More recent
Priscilla Henning said dust storms in Kansas didn’t end with the Dust Bowl years. She said she recalls enduring dust storms in southwest Kansas as a schoolchild in the 1970s.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.