To begin with, we just had the low dust blowing off of the fields and my
mother was expecting my dau-- my sister in 1933, and she said, "We've got to
get to town and stay in town, because a dust storm might come." And she
couldn't breathe good because she was expecting and she wanted to be where
there were people. So we went into Texoma for one month in July of '33. And
we had low dust storms then. What I mean is you could still see the tops of
the telephones poles. One of teach-- ladies from Gyman that had just started
teaching at that time taught out at the Bethel School and she said that one
started blowing before she could get to town and she couldn't see the road at
all, but she could see the tops of the telephone poles and she drove by the
telephone poles and right before she got into Gyman, the road turned , but the telephones
didn't and she just followed the telephone poleson into town, cause she knew that
they went to a building in town. And she followed then until she got there.
While I was in school, we
had an old building that was two-stories and the teachers would tell us when
these dust storms were rolling in to go to the hall and get under the stairs so
that if the building blew away or blew down, we would be protected by the
stairway. And this is how we went to school. So we slept pretty good
at night, but once in a while it'd go all day and all night and maybe blow for
a week before it really was no dust storm. And, of course, our parents had to
turn the plates upside-down on the tables and cover 'em with a sheet, or
whatever, and we slept with the -- the babies, especially, they slept with wet
sheets over their cribs so that they wouldn't breathe all that dirt.
One time I didn't quite get back to the cellar before the dirt hit and I can
remember that it burned my -- the wind and the gravel it felt like it burned my
legs. You know, it was hitting so hard on my legs before I got into the
cellar. But we always went to the cellar when there was a bad one coming,
'cause the first bad, bad one that I remember, we didn't know but what our
house would blow away. And my daddy took the hoe and ax and a scoop to the
cellar with us and I know that he took the ax in case it covered up the door
and he had to break the wood in the cellar door to get us out. Then he needed
the scoop to scoop the dirt out. The only reason I think that he took the hoe
was because it had the longest handle and he could poke it up through the vent
in the ceiling of the cellar to be sure that we were getting air and didn't
cover up that hole where our air vent was. And we always took something to
read.
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