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The Joads and 2.5 million other Oklahomans and Midwesterners left the dust bowl for California. Grapes of Wrath chapter 19 “And then the dispossessed were drawn west—from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out.”

Whenever we get a blast of that arctic air making things cold where we live, it occasionally brings snow and ice with it. But when it comes to clearing your driveway, most of us either shovel it, or get some assistance from salt or a chemical blend that'll melt that ice away. The only problem is that there's more than one type of chemical, and salt can be bad for your concrete as well as your plants. This week, we'll talk about how the various ice melt products are made, and which might be the best choice for you!

This week Luke tells us how he makes very lean and tasty breakfast sausage from game meat and cheaper cuts of domestic pork. This can be a great way to use all of the meat you've harvested from a hunt!

Hi, this is Janice Northerns, coming to you from Wichita, Kansas, for Poets on the Plains. Today, I’d like to share a poem by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, who served as the Kansas Poet Laureate from 2009-13. Caryn is the author of 24 books, as well asa writing workshop facilitator and writing coach. The poem I’m reading today is Magnolia Tree in Kansas which is from her 2020 book, How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems.

Perhaps no single plant was more useful to the early day inhabitants on the High Plains than the spiky yucca, or soap weed, as it was commonly called. Pioneers learned from the Native American tribes that the roots could be used as soap, especially good for hair shampoo. The process of making the soap was a long one, involving digging the sticky green roots, then pounding them on a wooden board until they were softened. The resulting pulpy mass was put into water to soak. The juice and water mixture that was drained off became soap in a community where store bought goods were rare and costly.

This was my first time reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and I can instantly see why it’s a classic: the themes of migration and class struggle are just as relevant today, and it reveals a cyclical history. The Joads come from Sallisaw, OK, what would have been Indian Territory just 30 years prior, where the Cherokee Nation (along with four others) were forcefully displaced from the Southeastern US to make way for rapid settler and agricultural expansion, including for cotton.

Greetings from the Oklahoma Panhandle! I’m Marjory Hall with a BookByte for HPPR’s Spring 2026 Read, a celebration of the centennial of Route 66. At first, the idea of commemorating the establishment of a road might seem odd. After all, there are roads nearly everywhere a person looks that have no significance beyond their obvious usefulness.

In this graphic memoir, artist and writer Shing Yin Khor sets out on a deeply personal journey along Route 66, interrogating what the “American Dream” means for those who have historically been excluded from it. Blending travelogue, history, and memoir, Khor explores roadside attractions, ghost towns, and personal memories while reckoning with identity, racism, and representation.

When “in touch with the world” was announced as the theme for the 2023 Spring Read for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club, I was excited about the possibility of reading fiction that described life in Ukraine.

This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR. The book is “Words for War,” an anthology of Ukrainian poets edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky.