Chapter 8: The Sky of New York City was Blotted Out
[Pare Lorentz:] I had, as I told you, been in the prairies and industrial mid-west in the 30s where the drought was already under way, merciless heat. And I had been working at Newsweek, when the sky of New York City was blotted out in a strange, gray, mustard-colored cloud. So, I found out it was dust from the Great Plains and the prairies that had blown in. And therefore, I was assigned writing for the National Press section, a regular news magazine type of round up.
But I wrote more than one piece about the drought and it seemed to me that that was appropriate because of the size of it and because again the eastern seaboard, much thought the city, had no concept of the size out there anyway. Because I had been startled, driving a second-hand Chevrolet through Iowa and Wisconsin and felt like I was in a row boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean after having been in the city so long. So it seemed to me an appropriate image subject and an appropriate disaster subject, and one that lent itself to the problem of informing city people why do we give money to those people out there.
