Camille Gavin: Here's your chance to star in Dust Bowl documentary
| Wednesday, Oct 14 2009 03:58 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Oct 14 2009 03:58 PM
Bring your photos, letters and memories
Susan Shumaker, a representative of filmmaker Ken Burns' production company, will be stationed at a table at the Dust Bowl Festival on Saturday.
"I'll be in shade, I made sure of that," she said. "And I'll be wearing a Florentine Films T-shirt."
Shumaker said she'll be happy to meet with anyone and to see any snapshots, diaries, letters or other memorabilia from the period. But her main objective is to get brief information from a particular target group.
"The criterion for this film is extremely narrow," she said. "We want Dust Bowl survivors who left the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, southwestern Kansas, southeastern Colorado, and northeastern New Mexico for California. And we want only those who came between 1930 and 1939."
Also, she wants migrants who took to the road "not because their uncle or somebody had a job for them but because it was a land of opportunity."
"I encourage people to bring their story in writing, just a brief paragraph and their names and addresses so we can contact them later," She said. "And they shouldn't be shy; if there's a line, people in our target area should bypass the line and come right up to the table."
However, there is an alternative method for contacting the Ken Burns team.
If you feel you can help in the research project, or know someone who can, send a short written note to Bryan Shadden, a producer at Sacramento's PBS station.
His e-mail address is bshadden@kvie.org, phone, 800-270-6601. Or you can mail a brief written note to KVIE Channel 6, Dust Bowl Stories, P.O. Box 6, Sacramento, 95812.
Occasionally, I come across people much younger than I am who wonder if the trials and tribulations of the current recession are similar to the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression.
In my view, there is no comparison. And for one simple reason, the weather. The one thing we humans have no control over.
As if the stock market crash of 1929 weren't enough, the weather, all by itself, brought catastrophic changes in the lives of countless people in the Midwest, and by extension, in Kern County.
For days on end in the 1930s, relentless 50-mph windstorms pummeled the Plains states, destroying cropland and blanketing the atmosphere with choking dust clouds that rose thousands of feet into the sky.
The proof lies in the first-person stories of those who survived it, says Susan Shumaker, an associate producer for Ken Burns' Florentine Films.
"People's stories, that's how history is told," Shumaker said during a phone interview from West Virginia where she is based.
"That's a lot better than someone sitting in a library writing down what they think happened."
For the past several months she has been doing "pre-interviews" for a new Burns' film, which is why she'll be in Lamont on Saturday for the Dust Bowl Festival.
"The Dust Bowl (film) is our next project," Shumaker said. "I'm pleased that the exact same team that worked on the (recent PBS series) 'National Parks' will be doing this one."
The projected film will be similar in nature to other films Burns has done on important periods or events in our nation's history, such as his look at World War II in "The War," "Jazz," "Baseball" and "The Civil War."
No filming will be done at the festival, however. That will come later, after the script is written by writer-producer Dayton Damon. Shumaker is doing only preliminary interviews with possible subjects for the film.
Burns is focusing on people who migrated to California from the area hardest hit by the windstorms -- a roughly rectangular area that includes the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, and specific parts of three other states.
Shumaker began doing "pre-interviews" last spring and has been touched by what she's heard. What's impressed her most is their positive attitude, one that says: You can't keep us down, even in the worst of times ...
"This is really about humanity, about our ability to adapt," she said. "These are people who had the courage to strike out on their own into the unknown. They had to learn how to do everything -- even how to make yeast so they could bake bread -- on their way to what they saw as the golden land of opportunity in California."
A 101-year old Kansas woman from the target area, who stayed put and did not migrate, told Shumaker she doubted the current generation -- accustomed to having their daily needs met with little effort on their part -- could withstand what she and her family did.
"We were able to survive these conditions because we were homesteaders, we were ready for it," Shumaker said, quoting the woman. "If such a calamity happened today I don't know how they would survive."
AT THE FESTIVAL
The annual Dust Bowl Festival is held at the Sunset School, site of the federally funded Weedpatch Camp made famous in John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath."
A number of professionals who have done research or written about this period in Kern County's history will be there, including Rick Wartzman, author of "Obscene in the Extreme," a book that provides important background information on the 1939 county Board of Supervisors' decision to ban Steinbeck's book. Also expected to attend is Mark Arax, whose most recent book is "West of the West."
Doris Weddell, a member of the planning committee, said Daniel Nealand, director of archival operations at the National Archives in San Bruno, is scheduled to speak during the morning.
"I'm really tickled about that; that's kind of the big time, you know," Weddell said, explaining that the San Bruno facility is one of the few regional sites on the West Coast that has an extensive collection of material related to the Dust Bowl era.
She hopes Nealand will bring a bibliography or some kind of listing of such items.
"It's a complicated process to get information from the archives," Weddell said. "You have to notify them ahead what your area of interest is; then when you get there, a staff member brings the stuff out on a book truck and you have only 30 minutes to read and copy."
Visitors to the festival can also see displays of historic photographs, many of them taken by Dorothea Lange and Horace Bristol, and a video presentation by Michael Martin of Visalia that tells the story of one family and their reasons for migrating to California.
A number of items will be offered for sale, including two professionally produced DVDs. One is "Dust Bowl Memories," produced by KVPT, the public television station in Fresno, and another done in 1994 by Huell Howser. Each sells for $20.
A commemorative calendar, $12, is also available.
