Dust Bowl Doldrums

The Dust Bowl never ended.

In one of its many preview pieces on the upcoming Orange Bowl pitting the University of Southern California Trojans against the University of Oklahoma Sooners, the Dec. 31 Los Angeles Times recaps how them Okies is sho' crazy 'bout that thar football.

"The devotion reaches 75 years back to the Dust Bowl, dark winds that ravaged much of the state, desperate images etched into the popular conscience by John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath.' Not long after that historic drought ended, the rains coming in 1939, Bud Wilkinson arrived as coach of the Sooners. Over the next two decades, his teams won three national championships and, during one stretch, went undefeated for nearly four seasons."

That's right. According to the L.A. Times, even Oklahoma's gung-ho love for college football has its roots in the destitute hellhole of the Dust Bowl and its era of toothless, gangly, bug-eyed, backwoods, mattress-strapped to-the-top-of-the-jalopy Okies.

How often do you think a newspaper or magazine story about Dallas, Texas, dredges up the Kennedy assassination? How often do articles about modern-day California delve into the 1906 San Francisco earthquake? When will mainstream media be able to mention Oklahoma without a reflex nod to the Dust Bowl?