Tillie Zimmerman and her parents left their native Germany for The United States just as the stock market crash of 1929 threw thousands of people out of work. Free farmland in Oklahoma was available to hardy souls who would homestead the land. They scraped the grass off of the prairie and built a sod house and labored to till the soil without much more than a plow, a mule and seed financed by the local bank. By 1935 they and thousands of "Okies" abandoned their farms as howling winds blew away in the great dust storms of the "Dirty Thirties." The Okies headed for California and were turned...