Indianapolis Times, Volume 46, Number 93, Indianapolis, Marion County, 28 August 1934 — Page 14

PAGE 14

Drought Tour Tops Margaret Bourke-White’s Career

BY MARY MARGARET M BRIDE. •NE A Srmtt Writer NEW YORK Aug. 28.—The most heartbreaking job from a human point of view that ever fell to her lot and yet one of the most thrilling ptctorially she has done at all is the way Margaret BourkeWhite. America's most famous woman photographer, characterizes her recent assignment from Fortune Magazine to photograph the havoc that the drought has brought to the middle west. Miss Bourke-White, who has just come back, chartered a plane in Omaha. Neb., and covered seven states by air. Her pilot flew low over the burned and desolate land and whenever Miss Bourke-White saw anything she wished to photograph, he would make a landing in some barren pasture. In the takeoff after one such descent, the propeller struck a partly buried plowshare in the meadow and the plane cracked up. Luckily, neither Miss Bourke-White nor the pilot was injured. "The whole trip except for the excitement of the job itself was like some kind of dreadful nightmare that you felt you ought to wake up from any minute." Miss Bourke-White told me. You could hardly believe that the season was late summer, for the country looked as it usually does in early spring. There were the furrows that had been made for seeds and you knew the seeds had been planted, but as often as not nothing at all had come up. Or if

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Rain — It’s cloud in* vp! Looks mighty like rain! . . . And a smile stretches Mr. Farmer’s leathery cheeks.

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OASIS—. 4 sun-boiled river has become little more than n trickle of water . . . but welcome water, nevertheless, to starving and thirsting cattle roaming the powdery, denuded fields of the Texas Panhandle.

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l ARM PROBLEM — Tense, earnest faces an automobile has brought a teacher to tell Dakota farm youths the "uhy" of disaster in the land.

| a tiny, stringy plant had struggled to the surface, it had withered before it was more than above ground. • Farmers used to hate the Prussian thistle, you know. Now it is all many of them have to feed their cattle and they are actually harvesting this old enemy of theirs and packing it away for the stock to j pat in winter. The corn is seared and lifeless—worthless even for I fodder.. It grew' only two or three inches from the ground—not worth cutting. "We passed over stream-bed after stream-bed that had dried up utterly in the broiling sun. Sometimes there would be a tiny trickle of water left from what was once a wide brimming river, an dthe cattle would be clustered about trying to get a little refreshment. Often, too, they stood listlessly in the beds from which all water had long ago vanished. It was as if they were too listness to move aw'ay. "Cattle that used to be the pride of the pasture —blooded herds that took years to build—are bags of bones. aaa_ * * * “AS we flew over the houses, I felt as if I were looking upon uninx\ habited country. The farms seemed deserted. The machinery ! stands idle in the barnyard—expensive machinery that represents the investment of hundreds and thousands of dollars —all that farmers earned in a lifetime. "There is no sign of life about either the houses or bams. When man or woman comes to the door for a moment, you see in the hu-

STALK COLLAPSE —Out where the tall corn didn’t grow . . . sun-shriveled stalks, torn sign posts of disaster . . . foliage too scant even for fodder, as the Nebraska farmer ivlio cut a row discovered.

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THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES

SKELETONIZED STORY —This is drought! In one severe camera study, Margaret Bourke-White has described the catastrophe that befell the cattle country.

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ESCAPE—. 4 short-lived, blissfully cool daun .. . then another oven-hot day. Omaha sleepers-out.

mans the same listless apathy that you notice in the starving animals. Yet when you talk to them, some reveal the blind faith in the future that is so characteristic of Americans generally. Others show that they have been doing some thinking. The last is especially true of the young farm men and women. "In the Dakotas I came upon a farm school on wheels, a group of young people who are going about holding meetings in the open air for farm boys and girls in an effort to educate them to meet the problems that have grown so serious.” In her eventful and successful life, Miss Bourke-White has been in many difficult and hazardous situations. She began, unexcitingly enough, to take nature pictures while she was at Cornell university—in fact earned a good part of her tuition, so popular did her campus studies become among her fellow students. But once she was out of college and had opened a small office of her own in Cleveland, adventures came thick and fast. From photographing houses and gardens she went on to factories and coal mines. Taking her first steel mill pictures, she worked under such terrific heat that varnish on her camera blistered and the miners watching her ride aloft in a huge crane, with waves of heat rising all about her, swore softly under their breath, fearing she would faint dead away.

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DEATH AFIELD—Dwsi ?aj/ (seep over the land, so no pasturage . . . r/*e s?/n licked streams dry, so no water . . . That’s the grim story this picture tells.

She didn't, not then, nor when in the lumber camps of the north she manipulated her lens in a temperature of forty below zero. * * * a a a SHE has made three trips to Russia. To get material for her book, "Eves on Russia," she traveled miles into the Caucastis, where American woman had never been before. Taking pictures of skyscrapers in the course of construction, she has balanced herself upon steel girders 1.000 feet above the earth. She has ascended steep, well-nigh impassable mountain peaks on foot, when one misstep would have been fatal. She has descended to the depths of coal and metal mines and has had her life endangered by cave-ins. She has been known g again and again to stand or sit all night on a dizzy summit in a place not big enough to turn around in. just waiting for the proper light on the subject she wanted t<s photograph. She did just that not long ago when she was taking pictures for the photo-mural in Rockefeller center that tells the mechanical background of radio. The list of her adventures since she came to New York from Cleveland four years ago to open an office would fill a volume. But never in all her adventuring, she declares, has she been so emotionally stirred as during her trip through the drought region.

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SKIES ABLAZE —For five rainless months unrelenting heavens scorched the broad prairie land tinder-dry, leaving in their fiery wake dearth, death, desolation—and a national emergency.

AUG. 28, 193*

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—Shine Sunshine and plenty of it . . . shriveling crops * starving stock. A farmer, “looks” his resentment .