Someplace to Call Home Read online

  Carpet sweeper: An appliance with a broom handle and a case containing rotating bristles. When run over a rug, it picks up such things as crumbs and dog hair.

  Cartwheel: A silver dollar. Until about 1950, silver dollars were often used instead of paper dollars.

  Continent: One of seven principle land masses on the earth. They are North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

  Cook stove: A cast-iron stove in which a wood fire is used to cook or heat food.

  Dinner bell: A large, loud bell mounted outside a house, rung when meals are ready or in case of an emergency.

  Dust Bowl: In the 1930s, a drought caused land in America’s midsection to dry up and blow away. Winds carried the dust as far east as the Atlantic Ocean.

  Dusted out: A phrase describing farmers who went broke and had to move away from their land during the Dust Bowl.

  Dust pneumonia: Winds during the Dust Bowl stirred up fine dust that got into people’s lungs, causing illness.

  Essex Terraplane Deluxe Eight: A powerful automobile made by the Hudson Motor Car Company in the 1930s.

  Feed sack: Animal feed was sold in cheap fabric sacks that were often printed with flowers, animals, geometrics, and other designs. Women made the sacks into clothing, curtains, and tablecloths.

  Flivver: An old car in poor condition.

  Great Depression: A severe worldwide economic downturn in the 1930s. Banks failed, factories closed, and millions of people lost their jobs.

  Hobo: A tramp or vagrant. In the 1930s, many men who had lost their jobs wandered the country as hobos looking for work.

  Icebox: A wooden cabinet with a compartment for ice. The box was used to keep food cold. Ice men in wagons or trucks sold ice to replace what had melted.

  Lincoln Logs: Notched miniature logs used to construct doll-size cabins, forts, and other buildings.

  Mercantile: A general store.

  Migrant: A person who moves from one location to another, often in search of a better life.

  Model T: A popular automobile made by the Ford Motor Company from 1908 to 1927.

  Old Dutch cleanser: A pumice-based scouring powder.

  Persian pickle: Paisley. Feed sacks were often printed with paisley designs.

  Pie safe: A cabinet, usually with punched tin or screen inserts, used for storage. Hot pies are placed in the safe, where the inserts keep out flies but allow air to circulate and cool the pastry.

  Ragbag: A sack that contains old clothes or bits of material salved for mending, quilting, or other uses.

  Rumble seat: An uncovered passenger seat that opens out from the back of a car.

  Soddy: A house made from strips of prairie grass stacked one on top of another.

  Squatter: A person who settles illegally on someone else’s land.

  Tin Lizzie: A Model T Ford, also known as Leaping Lena.

  Acknowledgments

  My parents, Harriett and Forrest Dallas, were married in Illinois in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. Shortly afterward, Dad lost his job as a floor walker at a Kresge’s dime store in Moline. He took Mom back to Harveyville, Kansas, to live with his parents and help Grandma and Grandpa Dallas on the farm. That summer, a neighbor agreed to pay him a dollar for a day’s work in the fields. Dad worked so hard that he finished up by noon and earned just fifty cents. That was the only money he made all summer.

  I was raised with my parents’ stories of the “dirty thirties”—of the dust storms blowing away the top soil and of desperate families driving along the dirt roads in beat-up cars, looking for work. There were also tales of farm women gathered in the shade of trumpet vines for quiltings, of picnics with relatives, of neighbors helping neighbors. Mom never forgot the hardship of that summer, but she also told me 1933 was one of the happiest years of her life. Times were tough, but Mom and Dad had family. And a home.

  Thanks, Mom and Dad, for all those stories, and thank you, Barb McNally, senior children’s editor at Sleeping Bear Press, for helping me tell them. Thanks to my agent, Danielle Egan-Miller, and to my family—Bob, Dana, Kendal, Lloyd, and Forrest. This Kansas story is your heritage, too.

  Sandra Dallas

  Sandra Dallas is the New York Times–bestselling author of the middle-grade novels Hardscrabble, The Quilt Walk, and Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky. She has written ten nonfiction books and fifteen adult novels, including The Last Midwife, Prayers for Sale, The Diary of Mattie Spenser, and The Persian Pickle Club. A former Denver bureau chief for Business Week magazine, she is the recipient of three National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum Wrangler awards, three Western Writers of America Spur Awards, and four Women Writing the West WILLA Awards. She lives in Denver. Visit her at www.sandradallas.com.