My grandparents lived on the border of TX and OK, and I grew up hearing stories about the Dust Bowl. My grandmother told me a story about my dad, who wrote a paper about it while at Annapolis. The instructor failed him, because he thought my dad exaggerated his claims in the paper. The instructor was from the east coast, and had never been west, so had no idea what it was like.
Ah, they lived in the area that suffered the most.
But it's really odd, because easterners were well aware of the Dust Bowl, even though hundreds of miles away.
There was one massive dust storm that came down from North Dakota--yes, really, there were meteorologists in those days, and they kept records; every single dust storm has been documented--into Nebraska, and then suddenly veered straight east.
Over Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, it was too high up in the sky, but as it approached New York City, it began dropping. It dropped a good shower of dust on New York City, but then a thousand miles further east, out in the mid-Atlantic, it dropped more than a foot of soil on a French luxury-liner, the
Mauretania, I think.
Nebraska soil went all over the place during the 1930s, to the consternation and exasperation of faraway housewives in eastern states who found that dusting the window-ledges was suddenly becoming a daily, and full-time, chore.