KACV launches "Days of Dust" website.

In anticipation of  the airing (in November) of Ken Burn's Dust Bowl, KACV TV has launched a new website "Days of Dust" featuring film clips, photographs, interviews and education resource materials.

KACV conducted interviews with local Dust Bowl survivors and Florentine Films Academy Award winning producer and documentarian Ken Burns - clips of which will air during the run of The Dust Bowl when it airs on November 18th.

In conjunction with the series, educational resources for area schools in the Region 16 area can also be downloaded by educators for use in their lesson plans for the Elementary, Secondary and College level courses.

"Days of Dust" is a Texas Panhandle-wide Community Engagement effort surrounding Ken Burns' film The Dust Bowl, premiering on KACV and all PBS stations November 18 and 19, 2012. "Days of Dust" is taking place summer - fall, 2012.

Exclusive production projects and a variety of special events, exhibits and activities are being undertaken by the "Days of Dust" key partners - Amarillo College, Amarillo Independent School District, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo Public Library, KACV - Public Television for the Texas Panhandle, Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum and Region 16 Education Service Center.

Any Texas Panhandle organization is invited to take part in "Days of Dust." Please contact KACV to add your Dust Bowl activities to our community calendar.

We welcome all Texas Panhandle residents to take part in the various "Days of Dust" activities offered from August through November, 2012.

Swimming in debt - during the Dust Bowl

Click to enlarge
Photo by Steve Douglas 

By 1932 nearly a third of all farmers faced foreclosure for back taxes or debt: nationwide one in twenty were loosing their land. and since more Americans still worked on a farm than any other place, it meant every state was swimming in the same drowning pool.

During the boom years, Folkers had been wise enough to put some money away. But now his savings were gone, wiped out by the bank collapse. He withdrew into a paralysis, blank faced, skulking around the homestead and talking to his fruit orchard, the one thing that still gave him hope. At night he sat in a chair, his fingers tapping away, going over the figures in head. Faye never saw her father so broken. 

His homestead was a quicksand quicksand of debt. The new house he gad built by hand, the Model T, the new kerosene cook stove, the piano that he and Katherine had purchased for their daughter Faye - he might lose it all.

Outside the wind blew with a callous edge. 

Excerpts from The Worst Hard Time - Timothy Egan (C) Timothy Egan 

Reproduced with permission: Houghton Mifflin,Company