Jeff Roche
speaker
654 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Jeff Roche’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
The place to start is in the 1920s, and that's because this part of Texas, and here we're talking about the entire Panhandle.
We're also talking about the Southern Plains, sort of think of where Lubbock is, and then the Permian Basin area around Midland and Odessa is experiencing massive growth.
It is the fastest growing part of the country today.
It is.
The farms and the ranches are incredibly financially successful.
This commercial family farming model is working.
This is a place that's middle class.
And its future, it seems that they have created a new way to create modern, tech-forward, progressive agricultural communities.
It looked all the world like they'd figured it out.
And the Depression, of course, hits 1929 and 1930.
But through most of those early months, it looked as if West Texas had escaped the worst of the Depression.
I think it's 1930, in the summer of 1930, Amarillo is named a safe harbor, an economic safe harbor against all of the chaos.
And then it stopped raining.
So once it stopped raining, the potential, the agricultural potential plummets.
You've got places that are going from, you know, they're producing 75 bushels of wheat per acre to zero.
You know, cotton fields, they just dry up.
So it doesn't rain in 31, 32, 33, 34 is the worst of it.
And there's out-migration, and it looks now as if the great experiment has failed.
So Roosevelt comes in in 1933, and one of his –
The large concerns as president and a bit of concern of his as governor was the failure of rural economies.
Showing 261–280 of 654 · page 14 of 33
← Previous
Next →