Sudden Sea (30 page)
˜ Stanley Teller, chief of the two-man Westhampton Police Force, and his officer, Timothy Robinson, were trying to evacuate seventeen people from a beachfront house. Teller was carrying six-year-old twin boys out to his car when a huge wave swept up behind him and picked him up. He landed thirty feet in the air in the crossbar of a telephone pole. The twins vanished. While the chief was hanging on to the pole, Tim Robinson’s rubber boots floated by — empty. They were distinctive boots: black rubber with white soles. The next thing Chief Teller remembered was floating in the bay on the roof of the house he had been evacuating. All seventeen people — including the twins and Officer Robinson — were riding on the roof with him.
˜ On his 1939 IRS return, J. P. Morgan claimed $40,000 in repairs to the gardens of his Glen Cove, Long Island, estate.
˜ Erselia Leah Griffin, a cook in Westhampton, had just been paid when the storm struck. In her rush to escape, she fell and dropped her purse. Although she reached safe ground, she was so upset about losing her full week’s pay that she hunted through the wreckage for a solid week: “Finally, on a nice calm day about a week later, I found my purse back of the Quogue House Hotel, near where the help lived. There it was, my nice gray purse in the grass. The silver buckle glittered in the sun and caught my eye. The purse itself was barely damp and the money was completely dry.”
˜ When a Westhampton couple’s house broke up, husband and wife went out on the roof. Then the roof split. They both went their separate ways, but ended up in a field side by side.
˜ The windows of a Southold, Long Island, house were riddled with holes. What looked like sprays of machine-gun bullets were actually caused by horse chestnuts that gale winds had fired against the panes.
˜ In a departure from the norm every bit as shocking as the arrival of a hurricane, the venerable Hope Club, an exclusively male bastion in Providence, opened its doors to both sexes for the first time. Hurricane or no hurricane, some old-time members reacted with shock and consternation, warning, “No good will come of it.”
The knowledge, memories, and generosity of many went into
Sudden Sea.
Special thanks to my agent, F. Joseph Spieler, for never wavering; to my editor, Deborah Baker, for her perseverance and patience; to Alice B. Dwyer for her tenacious research; to Jane Burke O’ Connell, Gloria Russell, and Scott Bill Hirst for their knowledge of the Westerly–Watch Hill area and its residents; to N. D. Scotti, Rhode Island historian, for his books and his learning; to Maria S. Chapin for charting the course; to Thomas F. Shevlin for his knowledge of ocean liners; to Joseph M. Scotti for his knowledge of Jamestown and all things nautical; to Carol A. Steel for her incisive reading; to Allison Markin Powell for her continued help and enthusiasm; to Stephen H. Lamont for his fine copyediting; and to Evans and Francesca Chigounis for their editorial acumen and forbearance.
I am also very grateful for the research help given by John T. Myers, city archivist, Providence, Rhode Island; Mary R. Miner, archivist, Jamestown Historical Society; Lynn Conway and Heather Bourk, archivists, Georgetown University; Tenley M. Chevalier, Alumni and Development Office, Tabor Academy; Andrew Morang, geologist, Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, Vicksburg, Mississippi; Elizabeth Middletown and John Palmieri, Herreshoff Museum, Bristol, Rhode Island; and Jack Williams and Bob Sheets, authors of
Hurricane Watch.
Finally, thank you to William Rooney, George H. Utter, Douglas Steel, Dorothy and Thomas Stevens, Todd M. Chronister, Laura Katz Smith, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, and William D. Caughlin, corporate archivist, SBC Communications Inc., for helping me with photographs.
Instead of trying to relate every hurricane story, I have focused on a few experiences that seem representative of many more. My intention has not been to judge anyone caught in the storm, but rather to let the stories speak for themselves.
For the science of hurricanes and weather in general, I relied on a number of sources, particularly Gordon Dunn and Banner J. Miller’s
Atlantic Hurricanes
, William K. Stevens’s
The Change in the Weather
, Ivan Ray Tannehill’s
Hurricanes: Their Nature and History
, and Ernest Zebrowski Jr.’s
Perils of a Restless Planet.
For the story of this particular storm, I interviewed hurricane survivors, their families, and friends. Dozens of people, many of them strangers when I began to research the hurricane, gave generously of their time, knowledge, and memories. My thanks to: Dwight C. Brown Jr., Thomas Burke, Jane Moore Buffman, Mona Schmid Cavanaugh, Richard and William Chellis, Jayne Clarke, Fred Clarke, Lee Davis, John Whitman Davis, Helen and Irving Doyle, Catherine Moore Driscoll, Robert Driscoll, Bernard L. Gordon, Dolores Matoes Hellewell, Ann Holst, Bernard Kenyon, Virginia Kershaw, Jack Kinney Jr., Judy Spicer Knutsen, William D. Metz, Geoffrey L. Moore Jr., Hatsy Moore, Marjorie Matoes Moran, James M. Nestor, Mary Vieira Ragland, Gretchen Greene Royce, Rita Dwyer Scotti, Patricia Driver Shuttleworth, Joanne Storrs, John D. Tobin, M.D., Patricia Miller Vandel, and Linda P. Woods.
Besides personal interviews with hurricane survivors, much of the information in this book was gleaned from the research facilities of the New-York Historical Society, the New York Society Library, the New York Public Library, the Jamestown Public Library, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Newport Historical Society, the Westerly Public Library, the Langworthy Library in Hope Valley, the Southampton Public Library, and the National Archives, and from contemporary accounts in the
New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Eagle, East Hampton News, Hartford Courant, West-erly Sun, Newport Daily News, Providence Journal-Bulletin
, and the
Boston Globe.
I also drew from early books on the storm, most notably
A Wind to Shake the World
by Everett S. Allen,
Hurricane!
by Joe McCarthy, and
The 1938 Hurricane
by William Elliott Minsiner, M.D. Purely for narrative flow, I have occasionally condensed some quotes from previously published material.
The Hurricane in Rhode Island
In the Wake of ’ 38
, interviews conducted in 1977 by students at the South Kingstown, Rhode Island, high school, was a great help in telling the Rhode Island stories. Descriptions of life on the island of Jamestown come from documents and publications of the Jamestown Historical Society. Information on the Matoes, Chellis, and Gianitis families comes from personal interviews with relatives, longtime island residents, and classmates. Norman Caswell’s account of the school bus tragedy was published in the
Providence Evening Bulletin.
Joseph Matoes’s account was published in
A Wind to Shake the World;
Clayton Chellis’s story was related to me by his brothers William and Richard. In recounting the Napatree stories, I have relied on the accounts that survivors wrote for a special hurricane edition of the now defunct Watch Hill newspaper,
Seaside Topic
, as well as on the memories of friends and family members, particularly Geoffrey Moore, and Cathy Moore Driscoll, the only surviving family members who were alive in 1938, and Jim Nestor, now retired after a long career at Bostich and living in Ohio.
The Hurricane on Long Island
Mona Schmid Cavanaugh and Gretchen Greene Royce were wonderful sources. Patricia Driver Shuttleworth, who was a guest at the Greenes’ unforgettable end-of-summer party and is now director of the Quogue, Long Island, Historical Society, kindly allowed me to quote from two books of memories she has compiled,
The 1938 Hurricane As We Remember It
, vols. 1 and 2. Among the contributors were Tot and Norvin Greene, who lived into their nineties, Arthur Raynor, and Lee Davis, now an author and teacher on Long Island. I am also indebted to Ernest S. Clowes and Roger K. Brickner for their detailed books on the impact of the 1938 Hurricane on Long Island and for the Long Island Express website of Scott A. Mandia, associate professor of physical science at the State University of New York, Suffolk.
Hepburn & Hughes
The account of Howard Hughes’s flight is based on reports in the
New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Time
, and
Life
, all from July 1938. The romance of Hepburn and Hughes and the account of Hepburn at her Fenwick family home are drawn from
Me
, Katharine Hepburn’s autobiography, and from a number of biographies of both Hepburn and Hughes. (Please see Selected Bibliography for specific titles.) All quotes attributed to Katharine Hepburn come from
Me.
The Bostonian
Recollections by passengers and crew of the
Bostonian
train are drawn from several sources. Engineer Harry W. Easton described the trip in
Railroad
magazine, July 1942. Easton and the conductor, Joseph Richards, and several passengers gave interviews to Joe McCarthy for
Hurricane!
Lawrence Burwell wrote his account of the trip in a special freshman issue of the
Brown University Herald
in September 1938.
U.S. Weather Bureau
Information on the Weather Bureau in 1938, including all correspondence and memos cited here, come from the records of the U.S. Weather Bureau, now housed in the National Archives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
_____ SPECIFIC NOTES
Prologue: Gone with the Wind
When Hughes completed his record-setting round-the-world flight, New York threw a huge ticker-tape parade. More than 1.5 million New Yorkers lined the steel-and-concrete canyon. A blizzard of paper — 1,800 tons of shredded phone books, newspapers, and ticker tape — poured from office windows. The
New York Times
reported that “only the hot July sun kept the scene from resembling a snowstorm.”
“The most totally magnetic woman …” quote from
Howard Hughes: The Untold Story
by Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske; David O. Selznick quote from
Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn
by Charles Higham.
Chapter 1: A Perfect Day
Jamestown is also known by its Indian name, Conanicut Island, after the revered Narragansett chief. I have used the name Beaver-tail to refer to the entire southwestern section, not just the southern tip of the island, because that is how the area is known today. The large island across Narragansett Bay, which includes Newport, Portsmouth, Middletown, and Bristol, is Aquidneck Island, or Isle of Peace.
Oddly enough, the Moores and the Matoeses both lived on roads that ended at nearly identical forts built by George Washington Goethals before he went off to work on the Panama Canal — Fort Mansfield on Napatree, Fort Getty on Jamestown. The fortifications were built to guard Little Narragansett Bay and Narragansett Bay proper from an illusory invasion. At the time of the Spanish-American War, fear of an attack was whipped up in the notorious yellow journals of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. During World War II, Fort Getty was used as a camp for German prisoners of war.
“Sunshine, surf, and salt air …” quote from
The Search
by Paul Moore, whose sister Havila and stepmother, Jessie, died in the storm.
Information on Westerly’s history comes from
Westerly and Its Witnesses
by the Reverend Frederic A. Denison.
Information on the deadly force of extreme hurricanes comes from Nigel Calder’s
The Weather Machine
, A. B. C. Whipple’s
Storm
, and Gordon Dunn’s
Atlantic Hurricanes.
In Providence, Rhode Island, the official water level on the Old Market House is 13.85 feet; however, according to contemporary reports, water reached 17 feet in some streets.
Chapter 2: The Way It Was
William Manchester’s
The Glory and the Dream
, articles and advertisements in contemporary newspapers and magazines, and the recollections of many who lived through the 1930s helped me imagine the period.
Chapter 3: A Shift in the Wind
Information on the power of hurricanes comes from Gordon Dunn’s
Atlantic Huricanes
,Ivan Ray Tannehill’s
Hurricanes: Their Nature and History
, and A. B. C. Whipple’s
Storm.
Chapter 4: Hurricane Watch
Grady Norton continued to man the Jacksonville Hurricane Center through the 1940s and oversaw the establishment of the Hurricane Hunters aerial reconnaissance. He died on the job, while tracking Hurricane Hazel in 1954. The following year the National Hurricane Center was established, and Gordon Dunn was named its director. Dunn wrote
Atlantic Hurricanes
, which became a classic in the field, and traveled around the world helping other nations establish modern weather services. Profiles of Norton and Dunn were written by Robert Burpee in
Weather and Forecasting.
Norton was also profiled in
Life
magazine in 1948. The “By the time you wrestle with one of these big blows …” quote comes from that interview.
Chapter 5: At Sea
Information on Ernesto Gherzi, S.J., the Jesuit forecasters, and the SS
Conte di Savoia
comes from an interview Father Gherzi gave to the
Washington Herald
the week after the hurricane; the on-line
Catholic Encyclopedia
, the Georgetown University archives, David Longshore’s
Encyclopedia of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones
, the passenger log of the
Conte di Savoia
, and the Lido Line website.
Regarding Captain Greig and the RMS
Carinthia
, I drew from the Cunard Line archives, University of Liverpool Library, and
Pictorial Encyclopedia of Ocean Liners 1860 – 1994
, by William H. Miller (New York: Dover Publications, 1995).
“Whenever I have a difficult challenge …” quote from Robert Burpee’s interview.