Jerry Stanley - Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp

Copyright 1992 by Jerry Stanley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Published by Crown Publishers, Inc., a Random House company, 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022
CROWN is a trademark of Crown Publishers, Inc.
Maps by Susan Johnston Carlson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stanley, Jerry, 1941
Children of the Dust Bowl: the true story of the school at Weedpatch Camp / Jerry Stanley.
1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: Describes the plight of the migrant workers who traveled from the Dust Bowl to California during the Depression and were forced to live in a federal labor camp and discusses the school that was built for their children.
1. Children of migrant workersEducationCaliforniaArvin History20th centuryJuvenile literature. 2. DroughtsSouthwestern StatesHistory20th centuryJuvenile literature. 3. Depressions 1929Great PlainsJuvenile literature. 4. Depressions1929 Southwestern StatesJuvenile literature. [1. Migrant laborCalifornia.
2. Depressions1929.] I. Title.
LC5152.C2S73 1992
371.96750979488dc20 92-393
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-79247-1
ISBN 978-0-517-58781-2 (trade)
978-0-517-58782-9 (lib. bdg.)
978-0-517-88094-4 (pbk.)

v3.1

To Leo Hart, the teachers, and the children

John Steinbeck.

ONE

Mean Clouds

L ife had always been hard on the farmers who lived in Oklahoma, and in the 1930s it was especially hard on those who lived in the Panhandle, a barren stretch of rock and red soil sandwiched between Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico. These people owned small family farms of forty to eighty acres and were dry farmers. They had no irrigation system, no reservoirs to store water, no canals to bring water to their farms. When there was enough rain, the Okies in the Panhandle grew wheat and corn and raised cattle. When there wasnt enough rain, they were forced to sell their livestock and farm machinery and borrow money from the bank. Every year they gambled with their lives, hoping for enough rain to get by.

In 1931 it stopped raining in the Panhandle. The sky became bright and hot, and it stayed that way every day. Cornstalks in the fields shriveled from the sizzling heat. Shoots of wheat dried up and fell to the ground. The farmers were caught in an impossible situation. They were already suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, which had started in 1929 when the stock market collapsed. The Depression caused the price of wheat and corn to fall so low that it made growing these crops unprofitable. Most farmers had borrowed money to buy their land and had borrowed again against their land in lean years. When the prices for their crops fell, many couldnt make payments to the banks that held title to their land. By 1932 one thousand families a week in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas were losing their farms to the banks. And now it had stopped raining in the Panhandle, and the crops themselves were failing.