year, Guthrie had befriended the actor and social activist Eddie Albert (who would make his feature film debut in Hollywood’s 1938 version of Brother Rat with Ronald Reagan and would star in the CBS television sitcom Green Acres from 1965 to 1971). Guthrie had been so taken with the charismatic Albert, a proponent of organic farming, that he had given Albert his guitar as a going-away gift. “Well howdy,” Guthrie now wrote to Albert from frigid Pampa. “We didn’t have no trouble finding the dustbowl, and are about as covered up as one family can get. Only trouble is the dust is so froze up it cain’t blow, so it just scrapes around. Had seven or eight fair sized blizzards down here. But was 3 or 4 days a having them. It run us out of our front room the last freeze. We had the cook stove and the heater a going full blast in the house and it was so windy inside it nearly blowed the fires out. We dig in at night and out about sunup. This one has really been a freezeout. Snowed and thawed out 3 times while we was hanging out the clothes. They froze on the line. We took em down just like boards.”
The mercury dropped to six degrees below zero in Pampa, and gas lines froze, leaving homes without heat. While Guthrie was glad to be back home in Pampa—even in wintertime—he was a worried man. What the New York Times called a “blizzard of frozen mud” the color of “cocoa” was pummeling the Great Plains. In Pampa, visibility was often less than two hundred feet. Stuck in his shack, bitterly cold and trying to keep his baby girl from catching a fever, Guthrie fantasized about handcrafting adobe bricks come the spring thaw. Such a bold venture would cost him $300 for supplies for a six-room residence. “You dig you a cellar and mix the mud and straw right in there, sorta with your feet, you know, and you get the mud just the right thickness and you put it in a mould, and you mould out around 20 bricks a day, and in a reasonable length of time you have got enough to build your house,” he wrote to Albert. “You kinda let the weather cure em for around 2 or 3 weeks and the sun bakes em, then you raise up your wall.”
Guthrie’s letter to Eddie Albert—previously unpublished, like House of Earth itself—is a recent discovery. It illuminates how mesmerized Guthrie was by the vision of his own adobe home while trying to survive the brutal winter of 1937.
We sent off to Washington DC and get us back a book about sun dried brick.
Them guys up there around that Dept of Agriculture knows a right smart. They can write about work and make you think you got a job.
They wrote that Adobe Brick book so dadgum interesting that you got to slack up every couple of pages to pull the mud and hay out from between your toes.
People around here for some reason aint got much faith in a adobe mud house. Old Timers dont seem to think it would stand up. But this here Dept of Agr. Book has got a map there in it which shows what parts of the country the dirt will work and tells in no hidden words that sun dried brick is the answer to many a dustblown familys prayer.
Since by a lot of hard work, which us dustbowlers are long on, and a very small cash cost, any family can raise a dern good house which is bug proof, fireproof, and cool in summer, and not windy inside in the winter.
I have been sort of experimenting out here in the yard with mud bricks, and after you make a bunch of em, you’d say yourself if a fellow caint raise up a house out of dust and water, by George, he caint raise it up out of nothing.
Right on hand I got a good cement man when he can get work and also a uncle of mine thats lived up here on the plains for 45 years, and he knows all of these hills and hollers and breaks in the land and canyons, and river bottoms where we can get stuff to built with, like timber and rock and sand, and he’s too old to get a job but just the right age to build.
This cement workers is just right freshly married. But could work some.
Now since this climate is fairly dry and mighty dusty, and in view of the wind that blows, and the wheat that somehow grows, why hadn’t these good cheap houses be introduced around here, which by the bricks in my back yard, I think is a big success.
If folks caint find no work at nothing else they can build em a house. There is plenty of exercise to it.
We’ve owned this little wood house for six years and it has been a blessing over and over, and the same amount of work and money spent on this house will raise one just exactly twice this good from the very well advertised dust of the earth.
It would be nearly dustproof, and a whole lot warmer, and last longer to boot. But folks around here just havent studied it out, or got no information from the government, or somehow are walking around over and overlooking their own salvation.
Local lumber yards dont advertize mud and straw because you cant find a spot on earth without it, but you see old adobe brick houses almost everywhere that are as old as Hitlers tricks, and still standing, like the Jews.
If I was aiming to preach you a sermon on the subject I would get a good lungful of air and say that man is himself a adobe house, some sort of a streamlined old temple.
But what I want to come around to before the paper runs out is this: We’re scratching our heads about where to raise this $300 and we would furnish the labor and work, and we would write up a note of some kind a telling that this house belonged to somebody else till we could pay it out. . . .
Course the payments would have to run pretty low till we could get strung out and the weather thaw out and the sun take a notion to come out, but it would be a loan and as welcome as a gift.
In this case, a few retakes on the lenders part could shore change a mighty bleak picture into a good one, and maybe an endless One.
Starting in the late 1930s, Guthrie toyed with the idea of writing a panegyric to survivors of the Dust Bowl with adobe as the leitmotif. Because John Steinbeck had stolen his thunder by writing The Grapes of Wrath, about the Okie migration westward from Oklahoma and Texas to California, Guthrie decided to focus instead on his own authentic experience as a survivor of Black Sunday and the great mud blizzard. Also, to his ears, the dialect of Steinbeck’s uprooted Joads fell short of realism. To Guthrie, true-to-life bad grammar was the essential way to capture the spirit of how people really talked on the frontier. Like Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus tales, he was an excellent listener. So House of Earth, in Guthrie’s mind, would be less an adulterated documentation of the meteorological calamities than a pioneering work in capturing Texas-Okie dialects. Steinbeck, like all reporters, focused on the dust cyclones, but Guthrie knew that the frigid winter storms in West Texas during the Dust Bowl era also crippled his fellow plainsmen. Guthrie granted Steinbeck the diploma for documenting the diaspora to California. Nevertheless, he himself claimed for literature those brave and stubborn souls who decided to stay put in the Texas Panhandle. It was one thing for Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath, to feature families who were searching for a land of milk and honey, but Guthrie’s own heart was with those stubborn dirt farmers who remained behind in the Great Plains to stand up to the bankers, lumber barons, and agribusinesses that had desecrated beautiful wild Texas with overgrazing, clear-cutting, strip-mining, and reckless farming practices. The gouged land and the working folks got diddly-squat … nothing … zero … nada … zilch. (For a while Guthrie used the nom de plume Alonzo Zilch.)
While Guthrie’s twenty-five-year-old heart stayed in Texas, his legs would soon be bound for California. Much like Tike Hamlin, the main character in House of Earth, Guthrie paced the floorboards of his hovel at 408 South Russell Street in Pampa during the great mud blizzard of 1937, wondering how to find meaning in the drought-stricken misery of the Depression. His salvation required a choice: to go to California or to build an adobe homestead in Texas. When the character Ella May Hamlin
