Homeless on the Range: Life on the Road in a Model A Ford

This is a story of a family's odyssey during the darkest days of the Depression, a time when one fourth of the nation's work force was unemployed, when farmers not only lost their farms, but their topsoil as the most severe drought in decades spread across the Great Plains and turned much our productive land into a giant Dust Bowl. From 1929 to 1933 unemployment soared from 3.2% to 24.9% Banks failed, and people's savings of a lifetime were wiped out. Bleak statistics, but to a young couple, Hugh Halstead Barden and Ruth Andres Barden and their four year old daughter, Barbara they were the realities of a day to day struggle to live.

The author, a native of St. Louis, Missouri and a graduate of Iowa State University, has lived and raised her three children in California. Her professional life has ranged from nutritionist, to high school teacher, to public relations, to political reform leader, to child advocate. "Although I have always written as part of my work, this is my first attempt to tell a story...the saga of a small portion of my parents life during the Great Depression. But, in a real sense, it isn't my writing that tells the story....it is my mother's story as told through her wonderful letters to her sister Thelma." Barbara lives in Santa Barbara, California with her husband Don. They play tennis, spend their summers in Colorado and are addicted to the New York Times and good wine.