Preface

I was born in August of 1921 on a wheat farm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, which is the last county at the far west end of the Panhandle, where the state runs out and New Mexico begins. I lived there until the fall of 1939, when I was eighteen and went off to the Civilian Conservation Corps. That is the part of my life these pages are about.

After that came the Army, from 1942 to 1945, and then I married Wanda and we raised four children, and from 1953 until I retired in 1983 I sold farm equipment in Guymon, tractors and combines and plows mostly, to men a lot like my father. That is all a different story and not a very interesting one, except to me.

I am writing this down because my grandchildren asked me to. When they were little they would ask about the dust, and I would tell them a little, and later I found out they had been asking their mothers whether Grandpa made it up. I did not make it up. If anything I have left some of it out.

I want to say a word about the people who left. A good many of our neighbors packed up during those years and went to California or Oregon or back east to wherever their people had come from, and there are folks who will tell you the ones who stayed were tougher. I don't believe that. We stayed because my father had a little money put back and a banker who knew him, and because he was stubborn, and because we were lucky. The ones who left were not quitters. They had run out of choices before we did. That is all the difference there was.

I have set it down as near as I can get it to how it happened. Where my memory and my sister May's disagree, I have gone with May's, because she was five years older and kept a diary, and because she will read this.

My grandson Joshua, who is studying agricultural engineering at Oklahoma State in Stillwater, typed all of this into his computer from my handwriting and put it on the Internet. He says people all over the world can read it now. I told him I would believe that when one of them writes to me. So far three have, one of them from Australia, so I suppose I owe him a dollar.

Arthur Farr
Guymon, Oklahoma
Summer 1999