Billie Jo’s World

Out of the Dust is set in the Oklahoma Panhandle between January 1934 and December 1935. It was the Great Depression. High unemployment and low incomes were commonplace in Oklahoma and across the United States. Still, life carried on, and people found ways to enjoy themselves. Here are a few of the events of the mid-1930s that shaped Billie Jo’s world.

Monopoly Fever Monopoly was sold for the first time in 1935 and became America’s bestselling game. The game came with wooden tokens — die-cast metal tokens shaped like cars, thimbles, and other common items would not appear until 1937. The prices for properties on the Monopoly board are the same today as they were in 1935.

A Child Movie Star Arrives In April 1934, the film Stand Up and Cheer! opened. Its cast included five-year-old Shirley Temple in her first big screen role. In December 1934, Shirley Temple sang “On the Good Ship Lollipop” in the movie Bright Eyes. It became one of her most famous songs.

What an Animal! In 1935, the phrase “Triple Crown” was used for the first time in horse racing. Writer Charlie Hatton coined the phrase when a three-year-old thoroughbred named Omaha won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes that year.

Reality Show On May 28, 1934, the world’s first-known healthy set of quintuplets was born to the Dionne family of Corbeil, Ontario, Canada. The identical girls and their doctor Allan Roy Dafoe become instant celebrities. The Dionne Quintuplets were soon removed from their parents’ custody and made wards of the state under the supervision of Dr. Dafoe. They were placed in a theme park named Quintland where they were seen by as many as 6,000 people a day from behind a one-way screen. The quintuplets also appeared in hundreds of endorsements. After a nine-year custody battle, the girls were returned to their parents in 1943.

Bad Call In 1936, Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for re-election against Republican challenger Alfred M. Landon, governor of Kansas. A telephone poll was conducted by Literary Digest using random names from the phone book. The poll showed that Governor Landon was decisively ahead of the popular president. Pollsters failed to realize that only the wealthy could afford to own a telephone, and wealthy people traditionally supported the Republican Party. On Election Day, Landon suffered one of the worst losses in presidential history.

Jurassic Vacation Several dinosaur quarries were opened and excavated in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, during the 1930s. Once a swamp, the region was visited by dinosaurs such as the apatosaurus, stegosaurus, and allosaurus during the Jurassic and Triassic periods. A wealth of fossilized dinosaur bones and footprints were found in the quarries.