‘Dust Bowl’ writer to attend film preview
BY RITA SHERROW World Television Editor
Sunday, November 11, 2012
See lessons learned from “The Dust Bowl.”
“As far as you could see,
there was a dust storm
comin’ right towards ya. …
This giant wall just coming
towards ya. … And you still
had the feeling, whether you
would admit it, that something
was gonna run over ya
and just crush ya.” — Floyd
Coen in Ken Burns’ “The
Dust Bowl.”
For Floyd Coen and the
inhabitants of “No Man’s
Land” — the Oklahoma
Panhandle, the western
third of Kansas, southeastern
Colorado, the northern
two-thirds of the Texas
Panhandle and northeastern
New Mexico — a storm coming
was a way of life in the
Dust Bowl.
The era is described in
graphic human terms in the
new Ken Burns documentary,
“The Dust Bowl,” airing
at 7 p.m. Nov. 18 and 19 on
KOED, channel 11.
The region covered “onethird
of the Great Plains,
close to 100 million acres,
500 miles by 300 miles,” according
to the Soil Conservation
Service.
It was a case of human
nature colliding with
Mother Nature and she won,
said Dayton Duncan, writer
and co-executive producer
of the film, who will be in
Tulsa on Monday to preview
the film for a capacity crowd
at OSU-Tulsa.
It was a man-made disaster
of biblical proportions, of the things you learn by
looking at the 1930s Dust
Bowl on the Great Plains is
that you can count that every
once in a while there will be
a drought. That is the history
of the Great Plains for as long
as we have been recording it
and even before as recorded
in tree rings of specimens. So
what made this different was
the farming practices and the
extent to which that preceded
a very severe drought.
“That was the catastrophe
of what we now call the Dust
Bowl.”
Duncan, an Iowa native
and a longtime collaborator
of Burns, said he started out
with the same shorthand
knowledge about the Dust
Bowl as most people.
Most of what he knew
came from the classic 1940
film “The Grapes of Wrath”
about a Midwest family
forced off its Oklahoma land
by drought and dust storms.
“That is not the story of
the Dust Bowl,” Duncan
said. The film tells the story
through the journals, newspaper
reports and the actual
voices of survivors.
It’s a real story of human
folly, human perseverance
and heroism in the face of
massive dust storms that
often loomed hundreds of
feet in the air, 200 miles in
width and went on for up to
28 straight days.
Storms that buried houses
in sand and dirt, filled up
fence rows so cattle — those
that didn’t suffocate from
breathing the dirt — wandered
off in search of food.
Dust that filled every crack
and crevice, sanded paint
off houses, derailed trains,
destroyed livelihoods, and
forced homeowners and
businesses to live and work
in midday darkness. Add to
that the dust pneumonia that
killed livestock, pets, the
children and the elderly.
“All of these elements
make it almost a fable,” but
it’s true, Duncan said.
It started with plowing up
the native grasslands of the
Great Plains to plant wheat,
which at first made huge
profits. Then, with the Great
Depression in the rest of the
country, the price per bushel
began to fall so farmers had
to plow even more ground to
sell more wheat to make the
same profit. Combined with
years of drought, the farming
techniques made the soil vulnerable
to the famed winds
that come sweeping down
the plains. And the drought
went on for nearly 10 years.
Other Americans were
busy trying to deal with the
Depression and weren’t
aware of the situation out
West until it was felt on the
East Coast.
“It wasn’t until you could wipe the soil of Oklahoma off
the desk of the president of
United States that attention
started being paid to it,” he
said. “That’s just the way the
world works.”
Part of that attention from
the government included
“demonstration projects”
that put farmers to work,
new farming practices and
re-purchasing 4 million acres
of land so it could be reseeded
and permanently returned
to grassland.
But the regular folks from
back east had their own ideas
about how to solve the problem,
according to the film.
Ideas that included paving
over the Great Plains or putting
down wire mesh to prevent
the sand and dirt from
blowing away. They had no
idea that the worst hit area of
the Dust Bowl was the size of
the state of Ohio.
Duncan has consulted with
Burns on “The Civil War,”
“Baseball” and “Jazz” and
wrote and produced “Lewis
and Clark: The Journey of
the Corps of Discovery.”
He said a catastrophe like
the Dust Bowl is something
that could happen today,
even with modern farming
practices. Plains states are
using the Ogallala aquifer —
which could be depleted in a
few decades — to water their
crops, and a shortage of rainfall
is already affecting states
like Oklahoma.
“What we don’t know and
are incapable of knowing is,
is this the equivalent of 1932
and will be followed by eight
years of drought, or will next
year have moisture or not?”
Duncan said.
“We don’t know what
it will be so we should be
careful about how we treat
the land because if we get
arrogant about the notion
of our relationship with the
land — that it will do whatever
we expect of it and nature
will conform to our wishes —
then we are setting ourselves
up for some really bad things
to happen.”
Fully reserved
All seating for Monday’s
free 45-minute public
preview of acclaimed filmmaker
Ken Burns’ latest
documentary, “The Dust
Bowl,” at OSU-Tulsa has
been reserved, and there is
a waiting list.
Rita Sherrow 918-581-8360
rita.sherrow@tulsaworld.com
Associated Images:
As a black blizzard rolls into Ulysses, Kan., two women and a girl pose for a photograph before taking shelter, part of Ken Burns’ documentary “The Dust Bowl,” which will be previewed Monday at OSU-Tulsa and will air Nov. 18 and 19 on PBS, channel 11. Courtesy
Dayton Duncan: The writer and co-executive producer will attend “The Dust Bowl” preview.
The huge Black Sunday storm — the worst storm of the decade-long Dust Bowl in the Southern Plains — is seen just before it engulfed the Church of God in Ulysses, Kan., in the mid- afternoon of April 14, 1935, and turned daylight into total blackness. Courtesy
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