Friday Fish Wrap: April 16, 2010

I’ve been reading Timothy Egan’s ‘The Worst Hard Time’ - which is all about the Great Depression viewed from the sooty blackness of the Dust Bowl. We all have occasion to think we’ve got it rough, but the days around the Oklahoma panhandle during the mid-1930’s gave rough a whole new meaning.

Those people were the real survivors, and not the self-important, wanna-be celebrities on a ‘reality’ show.

But I got thinking about work. Today was a bit of a back breaker, and I came home really tired. But, it was satisfying tired. We did good things and we did it well - as a team all dedicated to making something work.

Work is rejuvenating, no matter what kind of work it is. Even better, it sometimes pays the bills.

I’ve had all manner of jobs down through the years, and I thought they were all valuable - whether it was  making the ads for the chain drug store in Fulton, Missouri (paid position), or being the national spokesperson for a high-profile and history-making news story (unpaid position). I did my best and it was good.

Where is this leading? That everybody should be working.

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'The Worst Hard Time' is a timely read for new hard times

A sweeping historical tale of those who didn’t go west to the California oil fields in the 1930’s, Pulitzer prize winning author Tim Egan’s 2005 story of the dustbowl- ‘The Worst Hard Time’ - reads like a grand piece of historical fiction.

My soon to be 93-year old Mother suggested the book.

She was born in a sod dugout house in Roger Mills County, Oklahoma -where Gen. George Armstrong Custers’ 7th Cavalry attacked Black Kettle’s Cheyenne village. Roger Mills County isn’t  far from the Cimmaron Strip where Egan’s heros and villans live out their stories. She said this was the truest picture of those hard times, and that it even brought back memories - some unpleasant- of people she knew.

This a story that is beautiful, depressing, uplifting, tragic and completely American in scope.

Egan follows the story of several families who stayed to eke out a life on the vast prairie, where they had been promised all the riches that the offer of free land could possibly give folks with nothing but faith in hard work.

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