Bizarre Postcards

Natural Disasters

Approaching Dust Storm in Middle West

This postcard, posted in Hays, Kansas on August 5th, 1938, has the printed text...

#24
Conard

The Dust Bowl or the Dirty Thirties was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops or other techniques to prevent erosion. Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had killed the natural grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. During the drought of the 1930s, with no natural anchors to keep the soil in place, it dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastward and southward in large dark clouds. At times the clouds blackened the sky reaching all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington, D.C.

Much of the soil ended up deposited in the Atlantic Ocean, carried by prevailing winds which were in part created by the dry and bare soil conditions itself. These immense dust storms—given names such as "Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers"—often reduced visibility to a few feet (around a meter). The Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres, centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota and Kansas. The Dust Bowl was an ecological and human disaster caused by misuse of land and years of sustained drought. Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families (often known as "Okies", since so many came from Oklahoma) traveled to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little better than those they had left. Owning no land, many traveled from farm to farm picking fruit and other crops at starvation wages. Author John Steinbeck later wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Of Mice and Men about the period. Source: Wikipedia

Open Coffins

Uncle Luke

Not a postcard but an actual photograph. The hand-written text on the back says...

Uncle Luke
May The Lord Bless his Soul
Luke Wells passed April 27, 1987 at the age of 82

Unknown Baby

This unused, poignant postcard that was taken from an album which ruined the back of the postcard has no other printed text but does have enough of the AZO stamp box discernable to identify it as being published between 1924 and 1949.

This page created 8th April 2010, last modified 24th April 2010