Book Review: The Worst Hard Time

I grew up with stories of the Great Depression, and have tried to compare our present hard times to those times.  Both sets of my grand parents married in the very late 1920's.  My parents were born in 1930 and grew up without much.  My mother's side of the family lived in our present home town and "owned" a ranch, but my grandmother was the youngest of five children.  When she married, she moved with her husband as he tried to earn a living in various ways.  I never knew this grandfather as he died before I was born. He was a gas station owner, turkey farmer and long haul truck driver before settling down to drive truck for a local gas distributor.

My paternal grandfather left his wife and son, my father, in the Midwest and came to California to find work.  He was more fortunate than most and found work and stayed here in the Central Valley.  After a year he drove back and moved Grandma and Dad here to California.

I have heard the stories of working for a dollar an hour.  I have listened in history classes of the reasons and the results of the stock market crash.  I have read The Grapes of Wrath and learned. But I have never heard of the hubris and the indomitable spirit of Americans as told by Timothy Egan in The Worst Hard Time.

I've heard of the Dust Bowl, but never realized the extent and what the term really meant.  Egan does a great job of showing and describing what the Dust Bowl was and what it did.  For me it was an eye opening read. I started the book after Maureen had started reading it.  She described it as being about people living through the hard times of the Depression.  The author had interviewed people about their lives in the Dust Bowl.  I thought it might be a good insight into what people did to survive in hard times, and might offer some ideas in helping us through these hard times.

I then found out the book was written in 2006, before our hard times began. But more staggering was the overwhelmingly difficult obstacles these "Dusters" lived through. Egan's book gave me the origins of the tumble weed we know of today.  Dust pneumonia that killed many. And the only surviving grassroots program of the New Deal, the Soil Conservation districts Hugh Bennett started. It was a great history lesson on a subject I thought I knew.  But it was also more insight into the human spirit. We all can still learn about that.