The year was 1928 and I had just turned 13 years old. My family and I lived in Oklahoma on a big farm with our horse, George.

I had a little sister named Anna and we lived with our Mama and Papa in a small house on the edge of our farmland.

All day long, Papa would work hard in the fields. He grew wheat, corn, and other vegetables that he sold to big companies.

During World War I, when I was a young boy, Papa made a lot of money because people needed more crops than ever before. He bought a tractor and other equipment to keep up with the high demand for food, but the machines were very expensive to purchase.

Papa told me he could pay for the new machines because he was buying on credit. This meant that he could pay for his tractor a little bit each month so that he did not have to spend his money all at once. Many people were able to buy expensive things during this time because they could have the item right away, but pay for it later.

Every morning, my sister and I would go to school with the other kids in our town. After school, Anna would help Mama with the chores and I would help Papa with the crops.

Papa would work all day and night and I would often join him. Mama always made me come inside early to go to bed, but Papa would insist on working until sundown. He needed to keep making and selling food to pay for his equipment because he did not want to owe money or be in debt.

A year later, on October 29, 1929, Mama and Papa were very worried about the economy, which is the flow of money in our country. They told Anna and I about the Stock Market and how people could buy stocks for a certain price, hoping to get more money when they sold them later on. Unfortunately, on this day, the Stock Market crashed, which meant that people lost their savings and money because the value of stocks they had purchased went down very far.

Papa, in order to save money, was forced to sell his new tractor and go back to using our horse for farming. This meant he had to work much harder to keep producing crops as fast as he did before. In order to help, I stopped going to school and worked out in the fields.

After three years of hard work, when I was 17 years old, Papa and I found that we had used up all of the good soil on our land and were left with loose dirt in our fields. Without a lot of food to sell, we were not making as much money as Papa and Mama needed.

The dirt that was left in our fields would blow around when it was windy. Our crops did not grow as well anymore because the soil did not have a lot of nutrients.

For the next few years, we did not get as much rain as we used to on the farm. The soil became even drier and our vegetables could no longer grow.