My father, George Farr, came out to the Panhandle from central Kansas in 1919 with my mother, Sophia, and my sister May, who was three. Wheat had been bringing better than two dollars a bushel during the war, and there was talk all over Kansas about the cheap grassland out west of Guymon where a man could buy a half section for what he would pay for forty acres at home. My father was the third son of a farmer and was not going to get any land of his own the regular way. So he bought a half section, three hundred and twenty acres, eleven miles northeast of the little town of Tolliver, and he and my mother lived the first two years in a half-dugout, which is a room dug four feet down into the ground with sod walls built up the rest of the way and a roof of boards and tar paper. I was born in that dugout in August of 1921. My mother said it was the coolest room in the county that summer and she was grateful for it.

By the time I can remember anything, we were in the frame house. It had two rooms, a kitchen and a room where everybody else lived, and later Dad built a lean-to on the north side where we boys slept. There was a windmill and a stock tank, a chicken house, a barn with two horses and a milk cow, and the wheat, which went in every direction as far as you could see. My brothers Carl and Harold came along in 1923 and 1925, and my sister Nettie in 1928, so that by the time I was in school there were six of us and two rooms and a lean-to, and nobody thought a thing about it.

The land had been grass when Dad bought it. Buffalo grass and grama, short and curly, gray-green most of the year. I can just remember the last of it, a corner of the north quarter he hadn't got to yet, and how it felt to lie in it. It was like a mattress. It held the ground together the way the hair on a dog holds the dog together. We didn't think of it that way then. We thought of it as land that wasn't making any money yet.

Dad broke out the rest of it with horses the first few years and then, in 1926, he bought a secondhand Fordson tractor from a man over toward Boise City who was going back to Missouri. It had steel wheels with lugs on them, and you started it with a crank, and when it was cold it would kick that crank back at you hard enough to break a wrist. It also had a habit, which I learned about before I learned my multiplication tables, of rearing straight up on its back wheels if the plow caught on something. A man down the road had been hurt bad that way, and Dad would not let me drive it alone until I was twelve. But I rode on the drawbar from the time I was five, holding on to the seat springs, and I thought it was the finest thing ever built.

With the tractor, Dad pulled a one-way disc plow, which was the thing everybody was buying then. It cut and turned the ground in one pass and left it fine and loose, soft as flour. We were proud of how that ground looked after a one-way went over it. It would be some years before anybody figured out what that soft, fine ground would do when it got dry and the wind came.

Wheat was the whole year. You sowed it in the fall, in September and October, and it came up green and stayed low through the winter, and in the spring it grew and headed out, and you harvested it at the end of June or the first of July. Before the combines came in, harvest meant a header and a threshing crew, and the threshing crew meant my mother and May cooking for a dozen men three times a day in July in a kitchen with a cookstove, and I don't believe either one of them ever forgot it. Dad hired a combine for the harvest of 1929 and my mother said it was the best money he ever spent.

We went to school at Prairie Star, which was two and a half miles south of us by the section-line road. It had two rooms. Miss Genevieve Walls had the little ones, first through fourth, and Mr. Wilbert Barnes had fifth through eighth, and there were about thirty of us in all, depending on the year and who had moved in or out. May drove us in a buggy behind our old mare, Dolly, until she finished the eighth grade, and after that I drove it. We carried our dinners in lard pails, which were the best lunch buckets ever made because they had a lid and a bail and you could swing them. There was a coal stove in each room and the big boys took turns coming early to light it. We had spelling bees on Friday afternoons, and ciphering matches, where two of you went to the blackboard and Mr. Barnes called out a sum and the first one to get the answer stayed up. I was a fair speller and a good cipherer. I could add up a column of figures faster than anybody in that school, which turned out to be useful forty years later when I was figuring the price of a tractor with the trade-in at somebody's kitchen table.

Miss Walls was nineteen or twenty when she came to teach us, younger than some of the eighth-grade boys looked. She boarded with the Pools, our neighbors to the east, and she was the first person I ever knew who had been to a city, which was Oklahoma City. She read to us every day after dinner, a chapter at a time, and it is because of her that I have read the books I have read in my life, which is more than you might think for a man who sold plows.

On Sundays we went to the Methodist church in Tolliver. Tolliver had a grain elevator, a general store, a bank, a filling station, a blacksmith who was turning into a mechanic, a lumberyard, a post office in the back of the store, and about a hundred and fifty people, if you counted generously. Saturday nights in the summer the whole county came in, and the men stood around the elevator talking about the price of wheat and the women sat in the cars and talked about everything else, and we kids ran up and down Main Street until we were sent home.

The price of wheat was what everybody talked about, all the time. In 1929 the stock market went to pieces back east, and I remember Dad reading about it in the paper and saying it didn't have anything to do with us. For a while it looked like he was right. 1930 was a fair year and 1931 was the biggest wheat crop anybody in our part of the country had ever seen. It rained when it should, the heads were long and full, and the elevator in Tolliver filled up and they piled the wheat on the ground beside it in a heap as big as a house.

And the price fell through the floor. All that wheat, everywhere, and nobody with money to buy it. By that summer it wasn't worth what it cost to haul it to town. I remember Dad standing at the elevator with the slip in his hand, looking at it, not saying anything, and then folding it up and putting it in his shirt pocket and saying, "Well, we'll eat, anyhow." And we did. My mother made bread and we had the cow and the chickens and a garden, and a family with wheat in the bin and a milk cow did not go hungry, not that year.

I was ten years old that summer. I knew we were poor, but so was everybody, and it did not seem like a thing to worry about, any more than worrying about the weather.

The next year, 1932, it didn't rain much.

And the wind came up, the way it always did in the spring out there, and this time there was not much of anything to hold the ground down.