Ken Burns wants to hear about your Dust Bowl trek to California
| Monday, Sep 14 2009 10:29 AM
Last Updated Monday, Sep 14 2009 10:31 AM
Ken Burns, meet Earl Shelton. Earl Shelton, meet America's most celebrated documentary filmmaker. What took you guys so long to get together?
Well, fact is, the two haven't exchanged formal introductions quite yet. But it's probably just a matter of time, now that Burns has committed to making the Dust Bowl -- perhaps the greatest migration of people and culture in U.S. history -- the subject of his next film. He'll want to talk to Shelton, who's undoubtedly the most lucid and loquacious member of the Dust Bowl generation associated with the most famous federal migrant camp of them all, Weedpatch.
Burns, whose acclaimed documentaries include "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" (which debuts Sept. 27 on PBS), "The War" (2007), "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson" (2005), "Jazz" (2001), "The West" (1996), "The Civil War" (1990), "Baseball" (1994) and his Academy Award-nominated "Brooklyn Bridge" (1981), is looking for Dust Bowl migrants interested in telling their stories.
He will want to spend a day with Shelton, who was just a school-aged kid when his mother died of tuberculosis and the family farm blew away. Then, in 1941, when Shelton was 7, he, his father and three brothers came cross-country from Scipio, Okla., in a Ford Model A. The trip, which concluded at the Arvin Federal Government Camp (known colloquially as the Weedpatch camp), took nine weeks.
Shelton -- he of the deep Okie drawl and ever-present silver belt buckle that forms the word "Earl" -- can tell Burns about losing a wheel in the middle of the night just east of Needles, about burning a Sears catalog for light, about filling 23-kilogram sacks of potatoes until his hands ached, about Slab 529, the rectangle of concrete at the Weedpatch camp that the Sheltons called home, intermittently, for 13 years.
"There are fewer and fewer of those people every year, but Earl is in good shape, and nobody tells a story like Earl," says Doris Weddell, the retired librarian who co-founded and still coordinates the Dust Bowl Days festival at the Weedpatch camp. This year's celebration, the 20th annual, is Oct. 17.
The story of the Dust Bowl is a rich and layered tale that describes profound changes in California -- political, cultural, religious. The migration itself came about because of an environmental and economic disaster spanning a decade that prompted 2.5 million people to move from the lower Plains (especially Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Kansas) to points west, primarily California, between 1935 and 1940. Almost half were farm laborers, the vast majority of whom settled in the Central Valley (Kern County in particular), necessitating the establishment of a chain of government camps.
The migration has always fascinated academics and journalists (starting, most famously, with John Steinbeck), and it continues to fascinate today. Weddell reports that Newsweek magazine and The Guardian of London have been in Arvin in the past few weeks.
Burns' interest elevates the legacy of the Dust Bowl to a whole new level, however. "This call really taught me that you never know who is going to be on the other end of the line," Weddell says.
Burns has selected a worthy topic for more than one reason, Weddell says. "History has proven that the initial distrust of and opposition to new cultural groups is misplaced. Will we ever learn?"
One peripheral benefit of a Ken Burns film about the Dust Bowl, she notes, is national exposure for the long-running Weedpatch camp restoration project -- and the ongoing need for contributions.
Got a Dust Bowl story to tell? Bryan Shadden, a producer with Sacramento's PBS affiliate, is collecting stories on Burns' behalf.
Contact him via e-mail (bshadden@kvie.org), snail mail (KVIE Channel 6, Dust Bowl Stories, P.O. Box 6, Sacramento, CA 95812) or phone (800-270-6601).
Somebody be sure and tell Earl.
E-mail Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com.
