Chapter Five: Mr. Hart Summary and Analysis

Leo Hart, forty years old, got in the habit of stopping by Weedpatch Camp to play ball with the Okie kids and talk to them. He learned how the other children treated them at school, how little they had to survive on, and how they had suffered in the "terror wind" back home in Oklahoma. Hart served in the Army during World War I where he contracted tuberculosis. He was sent to a sanitarium in Arizona to recover, which he barely did after losing a lung and a kidney. After his hospitalization, he enrolled in the University of Arizona, where he earned a master's degree in education. He was a school counselor in Kern County, where he heard daily about the abuse and unfair treatment the Okie kids were made to endure. Hart decided to...