Last Train to Paradise (21 page)

To this day, Bernard Russell recalls wandering through the hellish aftermath, wondering if he was, in fact, one of the lucky ones. “Everything was flattened,” he says, “everything was gone. It was a different world. I went back to where our house had been and there was nothing. Just an empty space.

“A numbness comes over you,” he continues, repeating the familiar refrain of the hurricane survivor, “seeing one terrible thing after another. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it.”

One memory remains clear in Russell’s mind, though. As he and his father stood together surveying the devastation, Bernard glanced up at his father in despair. “Dad, what are we going to do?” he asked.

“All we have left is this property,” John Russell replied, waving his hand about the ruined landscape surrounding them. “What do
you
want to do?”

Bernard Russell looked about, trying to comprehend what had happened, trying to reason what possibilities might remain. When he finally answered, it was in a way that Henry Flagler would surely have approved. “I guess we’ll have to start over,” he said. “We’re going to dig in and start over.”

Dig in, the Russells did. The Red Cross built for them—as they did for twenty-seven other survivors—a fortress of a home with eighteen-inch poured-concrete walls on a five-foot-high raised foundation, not far inland from the Atlantic.

Bernard’s father, who had become Islamorada’s first postmaster after the train arrived, stayed on, and after a tour with the Coast Guard and the Army, Bernard would return as well. He and his wife, Laurette, herself a survivor of the storm, still live in the house the Red Cross built, married sixty-six years at the time of this writing. For years Russell worked as a carpenter, and in his off-time he served as a civil defense official and founded the island’s first fire department.

He acknowledges that the storm changed him: “I suppose it made me more aware of the terrible things that can happen. When I came back after the service, I figured I ought to try and help people realize.

“My dad used to say that the railroad changed Islamorada from an island to a part of the world,” Russell says, but he harbors no resentment that the rescue train couldn’t reach his family on the day that it mattered most. “That was no one’s fault,” he insists. “That’s the thing about hurricanes. No one could have imagined what was going to happen.”

Bernard Russell’s capacity for forgiveness seems remarkable, though the passage of time may well have helped in that regard. Certainly others felt less charitable, especially in the storm’s immediate aftermath.

Because several of the smaller bridges above and below Islamorada had been washed out by the hurricane, there was no access to the disaster area but by boat. Phone and telegraph lines had been washed away as well. For at least two days, most of the world was unaware of the magnitude of the disaster.

But when tales of as many as one thousand deaths began to circulate, and photographs of the obliterated Keys found their way into newspapers across the country, outrage grew.

“Who sent nearly a thousand war veterans, many of them husky, hard-working and simply out of luck, but many of them close to the border of pathological cases, to live in frame shacks on the Florida Keys in hurricane months?” Ernest Hemingway demanded angrily, in his
New Masses
dispatch. “Who advised against sending the train from Miami to evacuate the veterans until four-thirty o’clock on Monday so that it was blown off the tracks before it ever reached the lower camps?”

From St. Augustine, Scott Lofton, who had been appointed as receiver for the financially troubled FEC, issued an emphatic defense of the railroad: the veterans stranded on the Keys could not have been evacuated successfully unless the rescue train had left Miami by 10:00
A.M.
on September 2, he insisted. It was 2:00
P.M.
that day before F. B. Ghent, director of the Veterans’ Work Program, had placed a call to the FEC, and the fact that a train and crew had been assembled and dispatched from Miami within two and one-half hours was remarkable, in Lofton’s eyes.

“The officials of the railway have co-operated with the FERA officials in every way possible since the veterans have been in camps on the keys, and in this instance exerted themselves to the utmost to get this special train out from Miami at the earliest possible time notwithstanding the many handicaps that existed,” Lofton said.

Despite such statements, congressmen and senators had soon joined the chorus demanding answers to these questions. A congressional investigation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Weather Bureau was conducted, due in large part to Hemingway’s widely publicized outrage, an undertaking that would require more than two years to conclude.

When it was over, the investigators had come to the same conclusion as Bernard Russell, however: “The evidence clearly shows that the tidal wave was entirely unexpected and that it was impossible to even anticipate the hurricane within sufficient time to ensure safety for those concerned.”

It was not much by way of recompense for all those lives lost, the lives of men who worked for one dollar a day plus room and board to build a highway down the Keys. Little more was to come.

A memorial was built by the Works Progress Administration in memory of the victims, atop a crypt containing the remains and ashes of about three hundred. The structure, in Islamorada at MM 81.5, was unveiled before a crowd of five thousand on November 14, 1937, by nine-year-old hurricane survivor Fay Marie Parker. “Dedicated to the memory of the civilians and war veterans whose lives were lost in the hurricane of September second, 1935,” reads the inscription. One could easily walk from Bernard Russell’s house to read it.

Some hoped for yet another rebirth of the Key West Extension, pointing to the fact that despite the devastation of much of the low-lying roadbed, Flagler’s mighty bridges had weathered the storm virtually unscathed. But already bankrupt and in the hands of a receiver, the FEC was in no position to rebuild anything, much less a project that
Scientific American
had once described as “one of the most difficult works of railroad construction ever attempted.”

Desperate for any ready source of cash, the right-of-way was sold to the state shortly after the disaster for $640,000, a sorry return indeed on a project that had required nearly $30 million, seven years, and the labor—and in quite a few cases, the lives—of a forty-thousand-man workforce, as well as the determination of a visionary, to build.

24

A Fine, Improper Place

As early as 1928, Congress had passed legislation making provision for an Overseas Highway across the Keys, and by 1935 one could actually drive much of the distance between Miami and Key West, though an intrepid motorist would have to make use of several ferry services on his way to the Southernmost City. The vets who had died in the Labor Day storm actually had been involved in the construction of a section of highway linking Grassy Key and Lower Matecumbe so that one of those ferry links could be eliminated.

With the railroad blown away by the hurricane, and the FEC through with the Keys forever, the state of Florida stepped into the breach, determining to use the abandoned right-of-way and the still-standing bridge spans as the route for a highway through the Keys. The road was finally completed in 1938, though it took the Second World War and the reactivation of the Navy base to resurrect the moribund economy of Key West.

If Flagler and Jefferson Browne had been wrong in predicting that “the products of the West Indies and Caribbean sea will be ferried across from Cuba and taken by the railroad for distribution to all parts of the U.S.,” and that “with the completion of the Nicaraguan Canal, Key West would be a port of call for no small part of the shipping of the world,” they had been prescient in one way at least: “Sooner or later the thousands of tourists who are restlessly seeking a milder and more equable winter climate than the mainland affords will find in Key West their ideal.”

Following the war, the Southernmost City once again became a thriving tourist destination, and though now the pirates and the wreckers are gone, as are the turtle-raising corrals and the sponge divers and the cigar factories and the Cuban rollers and their lectors, who read newspapers and novels aloud while they worked, and the blustery big-game-hunting author who loved it all—though all this has vanished, and though the shrimpers and the fishermen and the Navy boys are nearly gone as well, obdurate Key West remains.

Irreverent and, to some, irrelevant, the oddball city at the end of the line is still the “Last Resort.” The sun still shines, the Gulf Stream still flows, and palms still wave in the island’s balmy breezes. Tourists and sports fishermen still descend, the colonies of writers and artists endure, and Hemingway’s house on Whitehead has become a museum where the curious and the devoted come by the hundreds and the thousands each day. T-shirt shops and rowdy bars thrive, cheek by jowl with the swankiest of resort hotels.

And in its quirkiness and beauty may be found the proper legacy of Henry Morrison Flagler. Though it is hard to imagine Flagler and his crowd brawling down a crowded Key West street during one of the seemingly endless festivals concocted by the city’s tourism mavens, he was not averse to a good time, and most men of his ilk and day would never have done
most
of the things he did.

Had he been content to reinvest his Standard Oil dividends instead of spending them to invent Florida, Henry Morrison Flagler might be as synonymous with wealth and power as his former partner and sales associate John D. Rockefeller. But Rockefeller did the safe and sane thing, and Flagler built his Speedway to Sunshine.

As one writer of his time once put it, Henry Flagler went down to Florida “with its palms and red poinsettias, its white beaches and blue water, and so to speak, began life all over again.” A joke of the day had it that the abbreviation of Fla. on any sender’s letter was shorthand for Flagler.

He created a string of world-famous resorts all the way from St. Augustine to Key West, with a railroad to bring others to them, and when he had to do the impossible to reach that final destination, he rolled up his sleeves and he made it happen. Significantly enough, he did not ask Joseph Parrott if the Extension to Key West could turn a profit, but if it could be
built.

Admittedly, he lived in a day before personal income taxes, and—despite his carping about Teddy Roosevelt—before anything vaguely resembling the scrutiny, environmental and otherwise, that today’s movers and shakers must undergo. But as biographer Edward N. Akin asserts, Flagler, for all his stoicism, was not so much a businessman as a visionary in businessman’s clothing. Or at least that is what he became during the second phase of his life.

Flagler, who had never traveled to Europe, who had never been so far as California, found himself at age fifty-five, somehow arrived in Florida, in St. Augustine, and the result was transforming.

“It was the oldest city in the United States,” wrote Edwin Lefevre in
Everybody’s.
“He saw the old slave market, he saw the old
Spanish
fort; he saw the old city gates! He saw what you and I saw when we went to Pompeii or first gazed on the Pyramids! He saw palms—
palms!
—this man who had grown up in Ohio amid the wheat.”

For Flagler, Lefevre said, “St. Augustine was a magic pool,” and there the great man “steeped his soul in the glamour and romance of antiquity.”

Whether Flagler came to Florida with a vision, or acquired it in the way that Lefevre suggests, he distinguished himself from his ilk, for the trouble with most visionaries is their lack of ability to make a vision whole.

By the time he arrived at the end of the continent, however, Flagler had plenty of experience with the practical. Not only could he dream a railroad across the ocean, he had the wherewithal and the know-how to turn such a dream into concrete-and-steel-reinforced fact.

There are no more men like Henry Flagler, and there are no more dreams like his. Today we have software titans, and their minions who seek to bridge gaps measured in millimicrons and nanoseconds. Such accomplishment may be dizzying in its own right . . . but that kind of bridge-building pales in comparison to those that Flagler built across the Florida Keys.

Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” tells the fanciful tale of a wide-ranging traveler who encounters the shattered statue of a long-dead emperor tumbled to a barren desert landscape. The inscription on the blasted statue’s base commands the traveler, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” though all there is to gaze upon are “lone and level sands.” The enjoyment of the poem depends upon Shelley’s implication that such grand dreams of the high and mighty are doomed to eventual ruin.

And so might a modern traveler find himself, halfway across the new Bahia Honda highway bridge, glancing off to eastward at the Stonehenge-like remains of that ancient railroad span still defying the Atlantic, perhaps thinking of Henry Flagler and, perhaps, tempted to buy into Shelley’s argument.

But there is no stopping, not halfway across a busy highway bridge. And by the time the traveler reaches Key West, order is restored.

Selected Bibliography

I
N ADDITION TO THE
exhaustive holdings of the Flagler Library and to those works already cited, the following are sources that have provided information for the writing of
Last Train to Paradise.
Where information unique to any single publication is referred to, a citation has been made in the text.

Books and Monographs

Barnes, Jay.
Florida’s Hurricane History.
Chapel Hill, N.C., and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Bethel, Rod.
First Overseas Highway to Key West, Florida.
1989.

Brian, Denis.
True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Hemingway.
New York: Grove Press, 1988.

Browne, Jefferson B.
Key West: The Old and the New.
St. Augustine: The Record Co., 1912.

Chapin, George M.
Official Souvenir: Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Overseas Railroad Extension.
St. Augustine: The Record Co., 1912.

Cox, Christopher.
A Key West Companion.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.

Ellis, William E.
Robert Worth Bingham and the Southern Mystique.
Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997.

Gallagher, Dan.
Pigeon Key and the Seven Mile Bridge, 1908–1912.
Marathon, Fla.: Pigeon Key Foundation, 1995.

Hersey, John.
Key West Stories.
New York: Knopf, 1994.

McCullough, David.
The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977.

Mclver, Stuart.
Hemingway’s Key West.
Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 1993.

McLendon, James.
Papa: Hemingway in Key West.
Key West: Langley Press, 1990.

Murphy, George, ed.
The Key West Reader.
Key West: Tortugas Ltd., 1989.

Parks, Arva Moore.
Miami: The Magic City.
Miami: Centennial Press, 1991.

Pyfrom, Priscilla Coe.
The Bridges Stand Tall.
Marathon, Fla.: Pigeon Key Foundation, 1998.

Schulberg, Budd.
Sparring with Hemingway.
Chicago: Dee, 1995.

Tinkham, Todd. “The Construction of the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway, 1905–1915.” Unpublished mss., Kalamazoo College Library, 1968.

Westfall, L. Glenn.
Key West: Cigar City USA.
Key West: Historic Key West Preservation Board, 1984.

Windhorn, Stan, and Wright Langley.
Yesterday’s Florida Keys.
Key West: Langley Press, 1975.

Significant Contemporary Articles

Browne, Jefferson B. “Across the Gulf by Rail.”
National Geographic
(June 1896).

Corliss, Carlton J. “Building the Overseas Railway to Key West.” Talk before the Historical Association of Southern Florida, April 7, 1953. In
Tequesta
13 (1953): 3–21.

Lefevre, Edwin. “Flagler and Florida.”
Everybody’s
(February 1910): 168–186.

Paine, Ralph D. “Over the Florida Keys by Rail.”
Everybody’s
(February 1908): 147–156.

Rockwell, John Maurer. “Opening the Oversea Railway to Key West.”
Colliers
48 (20 January 1912).

Venable, William Mayo. “The Long Key Viaduct.”
Engineering Record
56, no. 21 (23 November 1907): 558–560.

Significant News Articles

Klingener, Nancy. “The Dangerous Summer.”
Tropic Magazine of the Miami Herald,
3 September 1995, 7–12.

Klinkenberg, Jeff. “Killer in the Keys.”
St. Petersburg Times,
14 August 1991.

Sanders, William. “Survivor Recalls the Storm of 1906.”
Miami Herald,
24 April 1960, 5F.