November 11, 1933: As if the Great Depression wasn't already bad, and hitting farm country harder than the cities, on came the Dust Bowl. For those of you who are sports fans: No, this was not a college football game.
On this day, a very strong dust storm stripped topsoil from desiccated South Dakota farmlands in one of a series of severe dust storms that year.
Such storms had been periodic since 1931, but this was when the Dust Bowl kicked into high gear. Beginning on May 9, 1934, a strong, two-day dust storm removed massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil. The dust clouds blew all the way to Chicago. Two days later, the same storm reached cities to the east, such as Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York and Washington, Over the Winter of 1934-35, red snow fell on New England.
On April 14, 1935, known as "Black Sunday," 20 of the worst "black blizzards" occurred across the entire sweep of the Great Plains, from Canada south to Texas. The dust storms caused extensive damage and appeared to turn the day to night. Witnesses reported that they could not see 5 feet in front of them at certain points.
Denver-based Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger was in Boise City, Oklahoma that day. His story about Black Sunday marked the first appearance of the term "Dust Bowl," coined by Edward Stanley, Kansas City news editor of the AP.
Dust Bowl conditions fomented an exodus of the displaced from the Texas Panhandle, the adjoining Oklahoma Panhandle, and the surrounding Great Plains to adjacent regions. More than 500,000 Americans were left homeless. More than 350 houses had to be torn down after one storm alone. The severe drought and dust storms had left many homeless; others had their mortgages foreclosed by banks, or felt they had no choice but to abandon their farms in search of work.
Many Americans migrated west looking for work. Parents packed up "jalopies" with their families and a few personal belongings, and headed west in search of work. In particular, residents of Oklahoma and Arkansas -- "Okies" and "Arkies" -- headed west on U.S. Route 66, which became known as "The Mother Road," for California, "the land of milk and honey," hearing of jobs available picking fruits and vegetables. These jobs proved to be worse than farming, as they were no longer their own bosses, and the bosses were brutal until the labor unions came in.
The Plains States lost about 3.5 million people in the 1930s. More migrants arrived in California in 1936 than in any other year, including the Gold Rush year of 1849. Many of them brought their Southern mindsets with them, and were every bit as biased against the black and Hispanic people of California as they were against the black people of their home States. Ray Manzarek, keyboard player for rock band The Doors, said that, in the 1960s, a big chunk of the Los Angeles Police Department was the sons of Southerners who had come from the Dust Bowl, and they enjoyed practicing police brutality on minorities and hippies.
What did the federal government do about the Dust Bowl? President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly set the New Deal to work on the problem. The Soil Conservation Service, forerunner of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, was founded. He also created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which created the Great Plains Shelterbelt: A line of 200 million trees from Canada to Abilene, Texas, to block the wind and cut the giant dust storms off.
In 1939, John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, about a family that escaped the Dust Bowl, only to find life in California just as hard as life in Oklahoma. The following year, it was made into a film. That same year, Woody Guthrie recorded one of the earliest "concept albums," Dust Bowl Ballads, making himself a legend of folksinging.
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November 11, 1933 was a Saturday. Actor James Boyd, who played J. Arthur Crank and Paul the Gorilla on the 1970s PBS kids show The Electric Company, was born on this day.
Among the college football games played that day were these:
* Alabama beat Virginia Tech, 27-0 at Denny Stadium (now Bryant-Denny Stadium) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This was the 1st season of the Southeastern Conference, and Alabama won the title.
* Duke beat Maryland, 38-7 at Byrd Stadium in the Washington suburb of College Park, Maryland. Duke won the Championship of the Southern Conference, which, 20 years later, would sort-of evolve into the Atlanta Coast Conference.
* Michigan beat Iowa, 10-6 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. Michigan won the Big Ten Conference.
* Nebraska beat Kansas, 12-0 at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nebraska won the Big Six Conference, the league that would become the Big Eight, and, later, the Big Twelve.
* Rice beat Arkansas, 7-6 at Rice Field in Houston. Nevertheless, Arkansas went on to win the title in the Southwest Conference.
* Purdue beat Notre Dame, 19-0 at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Indiana.
* Among the service academies, Army beat Harvard, 27-0 at Harvard Stadium in Boston; and Navy lost to Columbia, 14-7 at Baker Field in Manhattan.
* In the other major game played in New York City that day, Fordham beat New York University (NYU), 20-12 at Yankee Stadium.
* And among New Jersey's teams, Princeton beat Dartmouth, 7-0 at Palmer Stadium in Princeton; and Rutgers beat Lafayette, 20-13 at Fisher Field in Easton, Pennsylvania.
* Stanford beat the University of Southern California (USC), 13-7 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Stanford won the Pacific Coast Conference, the league that would become the AAWU, the Pac-8, the Pac-10 and the Pac-12.
Baseball was out of season. The NBA hadn't yet been founded. There were 3 games played in the NHL:
* The Montreal Maroons beat the Boston Bruins, 3-2 at the Montreal Forum.
* The Ottawa Senators beat the Montreal Canadiens, 2-0 at the Ottawa Auditorium.
* The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the New York Rangers, 4-3 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.
* And the New York Americans, the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Black Hawks were not scheduled.
And in English soccer, defending Champions Arsenal, of North London, beat Wolverhampton Wanderers, a.k.a. Wolves, 1-0 at Molineux Stadium in Wolverhampton, outside Birmingham.
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