it looked like smoke out of a train or something. we ran into the storm house because we thought it might be storming. we had to tie wet rags over our mouths just to keep from smothering. the old-timers said they had never seen nothing like that. our house was sealed, but that dust came through somehow. even the stucco houses. you had to mount really good when it was over -- mop really good when it was over. lynn: today we will be looking at our dust bowl migration archives, which we have had since 1994 -- materials gathered beginning in 1974, primarily by journal -- gerald haslam. he received dozens of letters offering to provide him with material. he also gathered material directly from people who worked in the camps. charles todd and robert sunken are probably the most infamous of the people that worked in the camps on a daily basis between 1940 and 1941. there goal was to gather stories and songs, either remembered by migrants from their previous times, or their relatives, or stories about their migration and experiences in the camps. so, a lot of those recordings are housed in the library's congress in a dust bowl oral history project. i think music has always served a purpose in people's lives, especially in troubled times. i think one of the values for the migrants in their songs with them was it was probably, besides their belongings, the one thing that could bring with them -- stories and songs. i think as they were exposed to the difficulties of life in new environment in california, and exposed to the difficulties of earning money, and the difficulties of working for landlords who are not always kind and did not always give them living wages, they develop songs that reflected their new lives in the camp, and they included songs about wages and the difficulties of being a wage-earner and not making enough to live on. and the possibility of striking -- there were a lot of labor and strike songs that were gathered. i think all of those songs together represent people holding on to what will keep him home and keep them able to survive this difficult experience. i am going to share with you some announced the notes that were written by charles todd and robert sonkin when they arrive in each of the camps. they began recording their experiences in type-written form. this is an example from 1940. "we arrived at the farmworkers community at 3:00 p.m. the clerk on duty in the office directed us to the camp store to find mr. do we rogers, assistant camp manager. the store is a new, very neat building. according to the wife of the store manager, the blueprints from the office were upside down. they indicated a sloped to the roof, which was obviously slanting in the wrong direction. -- direction.: they go on to the people they meet -- "dewey rogers, heavy set rapid speech, eager to help. he took us to the library where we set up our machine. cotton davis, extroverted, full of gags and witty sayings." khan davis ended up giving sonkin and todd a lot of material for songs. anyone that comes now to research the time, and they do a wonderful job of introducing who these individual people were, so it is not just a mass of 350,000 okies. it is individual stories that have been a superb job of recording. that is why the library of congress has collected these materials. we have a number of photographs in our dust bowl migration archives. most of the photographs were taken by a photographer in ventura. almost all of the photographs are officially farm security administration photographs of life in the migrant camps of california. a few examples that are quite telling include this sign from the u.s. department of agriculture farm security administration identifying the farmworkers community that po its that these children are