Excerpt from interview with David Barron of the Houston Chronicle in advance of The Dust Bowl (which airs tonight & Monday on PBS):

quote:

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Q. Texas has become such an urban state that we sometimes don’t pay any attention to anything west of Interstate 35. What did you think of the Panhandle and the Plains states that you visited?

A. It’s a really beautiful place. As someone told me, it lays a hold on your affections. … You’re driving between towns separated by distances that are two or three Manhattan Islands. But what you realize is that space does not signal absence of human activity, thought, genius, quality of character.

The real Texans live in an area where you have to go 120 miles to find a doctor or a real shopping center. I love that.

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Link

My great-aunt is one of the main characters interviewed for the new series. I have heard most of these stories growing up from her and my grandfather, before he passed.

I can't wait to watch it. I have it set to tape and my Panhandle born children and I will watch it over the holidays.

The four hours I spent watching this doc were well spent. I had read some on the Dust Bowl, but the interviews with the people really put a poignant, human face on this catastrophe. And the doc gave me a lot of new information and cleared up a lot of misconceptions that I (as well as many others) may have had about the Dust Bowl. (For one, I didn't realize that 75% of the people in "no-man's land" in Oklahoma stayed put, or that the majority of the economic refugees who migrated to California were not from the most hardest hit areas, even though they were all referred to (and reviled) as "Okies," whether they were from OK or one of the adjacent states)

I grew up in Canyon back in the 60s and 70s and saw quite a few (very mild) dust storms. (My collateral duty at our house was to sweep out the garage after the dust storms. And of course our garage faced west, generally in the direction of the prevailing winds from the SW.) Of course, these dust storms that we saw were absolutely nothing to compare with what the area experienced in the 1930s.

Here's a link to a thread on the show from the Politics Board: http://texags.com/main/forum.reply.asp?topic_id=2211179&forum_id=16

those guys better start using some modern techniques to slow the wind and stop the sand from blowing