| Recommended
Books on the Texas Panhandle |
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A
Scary Thing:
Dust Storm in the Texas Panhandle
April 1935
Ola Covey
As told to Louise George |
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Author:
Personal interviews with Texas Panhandle men and women born in the early years
of the twentieth century rewarded me with hundreds of stories illustrating their
everyday life. I like to share those stories just as they were told to me.
Ola
Covey has vivid memories of the Dirty Thirties in the Texas Panhandle. She
was working in the Gray County Clerk’s office in Pampa.
She and a friend went for Sunday afternoon visit in April 1935. It was a little
more exciting than they planned. Ola tells about that day. |
| The
dust storm of April 1935
Photo courtesy Louise George |
| I
was in the dirt storm to end all dirt storms, I guess. It was one April. It was
a nice day and a friend, Lucille Douglas, she and I roomed together, we had gone
over to Panhandle. Her
brother, Curtis Douglas, a lawyer was over there; he and his wife were living
over there with his wife’s mother and father, the Cleeks. They had a real nice
farm house. We went over there to visit the Cleeks and as we came out of the house
to leave, I never noticed anything wrong, but when we got down to the highway,
well Curtis, who was ahead of us, stopped and came back there to us and he said,
“It looks like a dust storm coming. You just come on down to the Panhandle Inn
until we see what’s going to happen.” |
By
the time we got there, people were coming in off the highway and gathering there
at the Panhandle Inn. That thing rolled in and it wasn’t like a dust cloud coming
from out of the sky. It was like something creeping along on the ground, just
turning over and over and over. We watched it until it hit the school building
there and it just simply rolled over it and just covered it. One minute you could
see the school building and the next minute you couldn’t even tell the school
building was there. It just simply covered the thing over. It was just an amazing
thing to watch.
People kept coming in off the highway and they would
have their handkerchiefs over their faces. A lot of people were scared. Curtis
said they thought there might be a tornado behind it. There wasn’t though. It
was just a black duster. When it rolled in, it got so dark they turned the lights
on in there. Lucille and I drove on home after it had blown over, but it was still
dusty. There were a whole lot of stories told about that storm, about how people
got scared and got religeous and everything else. People really got scared. It
was a scary thing. That was a bad one.
There were a lot of sandstorms
in those days. You would just wake up and it would be hazy and it would stay that
way all day. When it was a red one, they said it came from Colorado. I don’t know
that, but that’s what they said. The land was just blowing away. I’ll tell you
right now, when Roosevelt came in here and started that soil conservation, it
was a God’s blessing to this country. It really was. We’ve never had those bad
dust storms since then – not like that. |
©
Louise George
History by George
- September 14, 2005
Author: Ola Covey is featured in Louise George’s
book, Some of My Heroes Are Ladies, Women, Ages 85 to 101, Tell About Life in
the Texas Panhandle. Louise can be reached at (806)935-5286 by mail at Box 252,
Dumas, TX 79029 or by e-mail at lgeorge@nts-online.net |
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