One evening around 6 pm on the 29 of August
1936 my DNA was completely formed in a wind
swept shack on the Llano Estacado located
in the Redwine Community in the southeast
part of Lynn County, Texas. I know for sure
it was a shack and that the wind was blowing
because wind always blows in West Texas and
we always lived in a shack. I was brought
into this world by a neighbor named Cunningham.
At roughly the same time in Coco Solo Naval
Air Station Hospital in the Panama Canal
Zone a lad by the name of John Sidney McCain,
III was also being born. He had much more
potential to succeed than a lad on a dirt
farm in West Texas, but really why would
you really want to be president. Much of my birth
makes you wonder was this trip really necessary.
Mulling all of the problems of the 1930’s
around in your mind, a question jumps out
at you; need another mouth to feed?
There are times that you really wonder if
sex was worth the consequences. Granted,
without television, radio, money, and good
music what was left but sex. As my father
was 58 years old and my mother was 37 years
old, one wonders if this was part of Planned
Parenthood or just one of those oops that
plague people when they can least handle
it. The Depression was still impacting
most people, making life rather harsh. Around
this time my brother George was sent to live
with my father’s sisters in Cleburne and
Ft. Worth Texas. I was never told why he was
sent away. George did say that he had
a run in with Dad over school and work. My
guess is that it had something to do with
reducing the overhead associated with raising
a family. Whatever the reason, this left
my sister to take care of the crying addition
to the Patterson Clan. She did not think
highly of this great honor bestowed upon
her, but it did keep her out of the field.
She had her mind set on getting a new sister
but got a brother. Had the choice between
me and a hot stick in the eye, in all likelihood
she would now be wearing a patch over her
burnt out eye. As this was not an option,
she became a live in nanny at
10 years of age. During the 1930’s poor farming
methods and the droughts that usually hit
the plains area every 25 years combined to
create the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains
of the United States; This piled on the
collapse of the financial structure of this
country and the entire world made the life
of a farmer on the Llano Estacado rather
bleak. This picture shows the ravages of
the sand storms that swept the Great Plains
of the United States. This was a dark
time in the history of the United States.
People that wanted to work could not make
enough money to feed their families. We became
a nation of unemployed immigrants wandering
around trying to find food for their families.
The drought hit first in the eastern part
of the country in 1930 and by 1931
had moved
west. By 1934 it had turned the Great
Plains
into a desert. “If you would like to
have
your heart broken, just come out here,”
wrote
Ernie Pyle, a roving reporter in Kansas,
in June of 1936. “This is the dust-storm
country. It is the saddest land I have
ever
seen.” These conditions forced the farmer
to make some heart rendering decisions
concerning
how he was going to support his family.
Many
just started walking with everything
that
they could pile on their backs. The
more
fortunate piled all their worldly possessions
into their automobiles along with the
family
and started driving.
"On the fourteenth day of April
of nineteen
thirty five,
There struck the worst of dust storms
that
ever filled the sky:
You could see that dust storm coming,
the
cloud looked deathlike black,
And through our mighty nation, it left
a
dreadful track...
This storm took place at sundown and
lasted
through the night,
When we looked out this morning we
saw a
terrible sight:
We saw outside our windows where wheat
fields
they had grown
Was now a rippling ocean of dust the
wind
had blown.
It covered up our fences, it covered
up our
barns,
It covered up our tractors in this
wild and
windy storm.
We loaded our jalopies and piled our
families
in,
We rattled down the highway to never
come
back again.
— Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)
From “Dust Storm Disaster”
 Many people living on the Great Plains pulled
up stakes and headed to California,
“Land
of Milk and Honey”. A lot of these
people
suffered the deprivation associated
with
being poor in a strange land. A massive
migration
of this size was destine to upset the
economics
of California which would cause the
natives
to become very restless. No market
could
absorb this many people and still maintain
its standard of living. As is always
the
case the migrants were treated as lepers.
I think everyone that didn’t have a
ring
side seat to the Depression should
see the
movie “Grapes of Wrath” with Henry
Fonda.
While no movie can get it exactly right,
this one came real close. The life
of the
migrant workers of the 1930’ was bad,
but
it was not a picnic for those that
stayed
behind. The Dust Bowl didn’t hit the
Lynn
County area as hard as it did in Oklahoma
and Kansas. A lot of the land was still
arable.
I chose to include some pictures of the Depression
because I believe that it was one of the
largest things that influenced my life. Had
the depression not occurred would my father
have taken a
different path and maybe became a more successful
farmer. I know that this is the theory
of alternative realities, but one does think
of such things. I suppose that you
can take this to all kinds of levels and
have suppositions as to World War II and
on and on until hell freezes. I do
know that because of the depression I grew
up accepting my lot in life much better than
people do today, which could be good or bad.
My attitude to accept things as they happen
probably is a result of this background as
does my belief that if you do the best you
can then things will happen. In my
case things happened and in general they
were great. There was a saying back
then that “things could get worse and probably
will”. While this seems a bit on the
negative side, there really weren’t any options;
hope was gone from the English language.
This picture below always seemed to sum up
what the depression did to people.
In the face of this woman is nothing but
despair; no sign of hope. The depression
and World War II had a deep impact on anyone
that lived during this stormy time in our
history. Some had it extremely bad
but everyone including the wealthy were required
to change their way of life. As my mother-in-law
said, it wasn’t fair that she had to drop
out of Tulane and go to Ole Miss because
of the depression. She also thought
that World War II was started to make her
life difficult.
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