Ruth McCulley Bacon and Lanefield School Class
Great Depression
Oral History #2: Ruth McCulley Bacon
Interviewed by Margaret Brooks January 18, 1989
Ruth McCulley Bacon taught at Lanesfield School in rural Johnson County, near Edgerton, from 1933 to 1935.
Ruth: No, but if you remember the time I was teaching there [at Lanesfield School] we had dust storms. And one spring it got so very bad and the reports on the radio said you weren’t suppose to be out in it. So, we did not play outside for those two or three days in the spring. We put a cloth over our face when we went to the outside toilet. We didn’t play outside. We would go outside to look around because it was a novelty to them. But the dust was so bad that spring.
Margaret: Was this blowing in from western Kansas and Oklahoma?
Ruth: And local, everything.
Margaret: The drought conditions caused a dustbowl here?
Ruth: Yes. We’re likely to have the same thing this spring.
Margaret: It’s not looking good is it?
Ruth: Of course, we’ve had more conservation practices than they did back then, there’s more ground cover. So, there’s not as much raw ground as there used to be. But, if it blows the wheat out in western Kansas it’s going to blow here.
Margaret: I didn’t realize that Johnson County had the same conditions as Oklahoma and western Kansas did.
Ruth: Not as much, but some. I have seen dust piled up along side of the fences and things.
Margaret: What other conditions happened during the Depression? You said you had some poor families that you made adjustments for.
Ruth: Well, I guess we were all poor. There were no really affluent families. Everybody had enough. As I always said we didn’t know we were poor back then. Lots of the boy’s just had one pair of overalls and the mother would wash them on Saturday and the girls would have a couple of changes of dresses. But, so what, all the rest of us was the same.
Margaret: Was there any big change that you remember from your being in school in the twenties and teaching in the thirties in the county? You were in a rural school in the twenties.
Ruth: No, it was very much the same.
Margaret: So, the Depression didn’t affect...
Ruth: I don’t think it made much difference.
Margaret: Because everyone was pretty much at the same state?
Ruth: Yes.
