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- SH: We are going to talk about the Dust Bowl. Can you remember how it affected Prescott?
- JT: It covered us up with dust. (Laughs) People watering gardens strained the city's watering system. If you can, imagine a time when you get up in the morning and there is an inch of dust on your front porch and that's the way it was. It didn't rain for two years. This affected people directly. I've been talking about the gardens and the food here in the towns. We did better that the rural folks because we had limited city water. By 1929 the streets on the east side of town had been paved, but the streets on the southwest side had not been paved. Dust was that deep (gestures with hand) on the streets. It was a miserable time. It stayed hot and the weather did not get back to normal until I finished high school in 1938. It was dry and hot. In 1936 it got up to 112 degrees, and that is still the record.
- SH: You didn't have any air conditioning either.
- JT: No, we didn't. Our house had one little small electric fan and my mother used that in the kitchen.
- SH: Do you have any stories about how it affected agriculture? Was it just the lack of water, or was it anything else?
- JT: There was no cotton production. What there was didn't bring any money. I remember one of the old hillbilly songs. It was hillbilly then not country music. The song went "Eleven cent cotton/ And forty cent meat/ How in the world/ Can a poor man eat." (Laughs) There was one good thing that came from it. The thoughtful farmers knew they had to do something. So the Department of Agriculture started the Extension Service. It got under way in the early 1930's. They did a great service in teaching contour plowing and how to get the most production. That was one of the good things that came about. There was virtually no agricultural production. In the early part of the Dust Bowl, of course, it was dry all the way to the Canadian border. The dairy herds and cattle in Kansas and Nebraska were all dying. They decided to ship what was left of the cattle down South and maybe there would be more grass or hay. By the time they got them down here there wasn't. Well, there were about six train loads of those cattle here. They were literally skeletons. They drove them out to two old gravel pits north of town and shot them. But I know that there were some people who got some cows to butcher them and ate them. (laughs) But they were supposed to be slaughtered and they were. Someday when some archeologist digs up those pits with cow bones in them, he is going to wonder what in the world happened. (Laughs) But there were hundreds of cattle slaughtered and covered up in those old gravel pits.
- SH: They didn't use the meat to give to people?
- JT: No, they were afraid they were diseased and they wouldn't okay giving them to people. I don't know what the real problems were. That was a difficult time and didn't get better until World War II started. It was getting ready to start but we didn't know it then. What rejuvenated this country economically was what they called the Louisiana Maneuvers. In late 1941, starting in August, there were about 200,000 soldiers moving through here. Well, that brings a lot of money into a place. I've been told by the bankers and people who knew, that there were six businesses that would have closed their doors by Christmas if the influx of the maneuvers hadn't taken place. Then they built the Red River Army Depot over in Texarkana. That gave work to a lot of people. It was later that they started the Naval in Camden. That helped some people here. There was a great many people who took off for California and Houston, Texas. Our next door neighbor was a building contractor and he went broke. He bought an old rickety school bus and he left town in the dead of the night so his creditors wouldn't know what he was doing. (Laughs) He took off to Houston, Texas, and got there just in time to get in the boom down there and became a millionaire contractor. He came back and paid off every nickel of his debts plus interest. There just wasn't much funny going on at that time. Those were serious times. I told you a couple of things about the boy jumping out of the school window and that is about all I can recall as being real funny.
