Those who survived are my ancestors, they are my relatives, and they have names, and they lived. They were my Grandparents, Uncles, Aunts, and Cousins. My Grandma Hall would sit down at the table, and clean a chicken bone, like no one I’ve ever seen. She would then break the bones, and take the marrow. If someone else left scraps on the table she would make sure they didn’t go to waste. She never talked about hunger, but you could tell that she had lived it. My Grandma Loftiss, who never threw anything away, and always had a purpose, or a project for something as useless to most people as old newspapers. Of coarse I had the traditional dust bowl stories, about putting wet cloths around the windows, and constantly cleaning up the dust after the storms, but more importantly I could see it in their faces, and the way they lived. Even my mother who passed away over two years ago from breast cancer, she didn’t grow up in the dust bowl, but she was raised and had the morals, and lessons passed on to her from the people who did. She knew what it was like to drag a 50lb. sack of cotton through a field all day to help her family put food on the table, and what it was like to save every penny so that she could go over to town and buy fabric and patterns and make her own dresses, and clothes. You know the entire time that my mother was dying she never once complained, or explained to me the constant driving pain that she was in. To me she and all of my relatives are the meaning behind Dust Bowl Tough.

Me and my wife met way back whenever we were in highschool. She was just 14, and I was sixteen at the time. We had both went seperate ways only to find each other later in life. We both grew up in Elk City, Oklahoma. My house was only about a hundred yards off of old Route 66. We farmed cotton, wheat, had dairy cows, pigs, and chickens. All of this was on the decline by the time I started getting older, and by the time I graduated from highschool, all that was left was the wheat and cotton. It was an all too common sight of people that had passed down farming from generation to generation, deciding that there was no longer a living left to be made on a small farm.

My wife was born in Perryton Texas, and spent most of her entire childhood in Elk City. Her father worked hard in the oilfield, and her mother did housekeeping for a few clients in town in order to raise 6 children. Darlene was born with a tumor on the inside of her leg, and has been through 17 surgeries related to the original tumor, and then complications later in life from the radiation and surgeries. She's also has been diagnosed with lupus. I look at her and her refusal to give up every day of my life. To me this is another example of Dust Bowl Tough.

We had both gone our seperate ways after highschool, and were reunited in October of 1998, and haven't been apart since. She is the love of my life.