For Sale —American Paradise (29 page)

The
Forbes
story quoted Peter Knight, who again had statistics at hand to prove that Florida was just fine. The state had had 28 banks fail in the past six years, compared to 173 banks in Montana that had failed, 160 in Oklahoma, and 153 in Iowa.

World's Work
, another highly respected publication, agreed with the
Forbes
analysis of Florida, saying “it is difficult to visualize anything but further progress” in the state.

The National Park Bank of New York concurred. “What has happened in Florida has been precisely the sort of readjustment which was inevitable under the circumstances,” the bank said in its regular bulletin in September.

Florida governor John Martin no doubt was aware of his state's banking situation, but on September 14, he was dealing with quite a different issue. Putnam County Sheriff R. J. Hancock and F. S. Waymer, mayor of the county seat of Palatka, had brought a chilling problem to the governor.

Palatka and Putnam County—which had so charmed journalist Edward King in 1873—was being terrorized by a mob of vigilantes determined to enforce a strict moral code in the county. The mob was dispensing its harsh justice on Saturday nights, flogging offenders for crimes such as bootlegging and prostitution. Two people had been killed, and sixty-three had been whipped in the past year, Hancock and Waymer told the governor.

The mob members were not identified as belonging to the Ku Klux Klan, but they did wear masks when they meted out their punishment.

Martin told reporters in Tallahassee that he'd received many letters from Putnam County residents, asking him to end the terrorism.

It was a serious and embarrassing problem for the chief executive of a state that was as image-conscious as Florida. The governor didn't know it, but while he was hearing pleas for help from Putnam County, a more
serious problem was heading his way. Another tropical storm had formed. It would become one of the most powerful storms on record. And it would not, as the others had done, weaken and veer away from Florida at the last minute.

CHAPTER SEVEN

F
OR A WHILE, A BRISK BREEZE COMING OFF
B
ISCAYNE
B
AY MADE THE EVENING
of Friday, September 17, 1926, more pleasant for couples dancing in the rooftop gardens of the American Legion hall that overlooked the bay. The Miami Legionnaires were in the middle of a three-
day Mardi Gras–themed festival to raise money to send the post's drum and bugle team to the upcoming national convention in Philadelphia.

By eleven p.m., however, the rising wind was no longer adding to the tropical ambience. It was becoming quite a nuisance.

Someone called the local US Weather Bureau office. There was a storm off-shore. The wind and rain would be increasing. The disappointed partyers decided to call it a night.

The blow wouldn't be much, they told each other. Nothing more than a windy rainstorm, like that hurricane back in July. They'd be back at the Legion hall the following day to continue their merriment.

But they were about as wrong as they could possibly be. The rising wind that chased the Legionnaires indoors was the outer edge of a fierce hurricane that had been pounding its way across the Atlantic Ocean for several days.

The Weather Bureau had been following the storm and issuing advisories since September 14. On the morning of Wednesday, September 15, as the hurricane passed just north of the Virgin Islands, the Weather Bureau advisory tersely noted, “This storm has already attained considerable intensity.”

That was a calculated understatement. The hurricane unleashed that “considerable intensity” Thursday afternoon as it plowed west-
northwestward across
the Turks and Caicos Islands.

“At 1:55 the storm had reached such intensity as to indicate that everything would be demolished,” meteorologist George Goodwin later wrote. Roofs were ripped off and hurled far from the buildings they'd once covered, and Goodwin estimated the wind speed at 150 miles per hour. And the hurricane's storm surge made it seem as though the islands were sinking into the ocean.

“The sea swell at times was well above the windowsills, and before it could recede was caught by the next swell, the sea reaching inland for about three-quarters of a mile,” he wrote.

The hurricane lost little of its intensity as it moved on and gave the Bahamas a severe beating Thursday night and early Friday morning, September 17.

In Miami, Weather Bureau meteorologist Richard Gray knew a bad hurricane was closing in on Florida, but Gray and the Weather Bureau meteorologists in Washington, DC, who issued the advisories didn't know exactly where the storm was, or where it was headed. In those days before weather satellites and hurricane-
hunter aircraft, pinpointing the exact position of a hurricane was largely guesswork, unless a ship at sea crossed paths with the storm's eye and radioed its position before the winds carried away its antenna.

With one tragic exception, ships were managing to avoid this storm and weren't providing Gray with much help in locating it. The unlucky ship was the British freighter,
Loyal Citizen
. Early Tuesday afternoon, the Independent Wireless Telegraph Company—a Long Island company that relayed radio traffic to and from ships at sea—picked up an SOS from the
Loyal Citizen
. The ship gave its position as “400 miles off the coast of Florida.”

A few hours later, a second SOS said the ship was sinking and the crew was about to launch lifeboats. Nothing more was heard from the stricken freighter.

But the following day, a Danish tanker searching for the
Loyal Citizen
found only an overturned lifeboat floating on an empty, storm-
tossed sea. The hurricane—wherever it was—had claimed the freighter and all thirty of its crew.

Although Richard Gray didn't know exactly where the storm's center was, by Friday morning he was certain that South Florida was in for a bad blow. At 10:20 a.m., he relayed the official storm advisory from Washington, saying that “destructive winds” would be raking the Florida east coast from Jupiter Inlet south to Miami—a stretch of about eighty-five miles—by Saturday morning.

And just so there could be no doubt about the danger posed by this hurricane, the official advisory included this warning: “This is a very severe storm.”

The storm warning was published in the Friday-afternoon newspapers, and broadcast by radio as well. The storm warning also was telegraphed to state offices, and throughout the afternoon, Weather Bureau staff answered telephone calls from people wanting information on the storm.

Still, lots of South Florida residents didn't see any reason to worry. They recalled the July hurricane that had done little more than rustle tree limbs, and they thought that storm was the worst that nature could throw at them.

What they didn't know, however, was that they'd been very, very lucky in July. Besides rain and winds, the storm had delivered a false message—especially to newcomers—about what a hurricane could do.

One of the Weather Bureau's warning telegrams went to Fred Flanders in Moore Haven, a little town on the southwest shore of Lake Okeechobee, about
ninety miles inland from Miami. Flanders, a state engineer, didn't know what to make of the warning.

“I showed it to a number of people whose reaction, like my own, was more or less negative,” Flanders said. “None of us knew what to expect.”

But the storm warning still made Flanders and his neighbors uneasy. They knew that a tropical storm could cause havoc in their little lakeside town.

The effect of powerful winds on Lake Okeechobee has been described as similar to a person filling a shallow saucer with water and then blowing across the water. And September 1926 was not a good time for a storm to be blowing across the giant, shallow saucer that is Lake Okeechobee. Rainfall had been unusually heavy, and the lake was brimming with water. A simple mud dike stretching for several miles along the southern rim of the lake was Moore Haven's only protection from storm-driven flooding.

As the phone continually rang at the Weather Bureau office in Miami, Gray studied the sparse information being reported by Weather Bureau offices in other Florida cities. He was especially interested in barometric pressure readings.

At sea level, a barometer's needle doesn't drop below 29.92 inches unless a bad storm such as a hurricane is nearby. As the storm approaches, the needle will begin a slow, steady descent and continue to fall as the hurricane's eye nears. The needle will not start rising until the storm center has passed and is moving away. Very intense hurricanes will cause the needle to fall very low. For example, Hurricane Camille had a barometric pressure reading of 26.84 inches when it struck Mississippi in 1969. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew had a reading of 27.23 inches when it came ashore at Homestead, Florida.

The information Gray was receiving wasn't very helpful when it came to figuring out where the center of the storm was.

Around four p.m. on Friday, Leo F. Reardon, a construction contractor in Coral Gables, left his office to play golf with a friend who was visiting from Boston. On the way to the course, the men picked up a copy of the afternoon
Miami Tribune
. A headline across the top of the front page read “Miami Warned of Tropical Storm.”

Reardon and his golf partner shrugged off the
Tribune
story and headed for the first tee. Reardon lost the match to his guest, and then the men went to Reardon's home in Coral Gables, where his wife was cooking dinner for them and two other guests.

There were, however, clear indications that something awful was headed toward South Florida. At the observance of the Jewish holy holiday of Yom Kippur at Temple Israel, a white dove flew through the window, perched on the altar, and stayed there. It would not move from its perch after the services ended.

As the sun neared the horizon, a young Jane Wood Reno, who was living with her parents in a rented house in Miami Beach, walked with her mother to the beach to watch a spectacular sunset. It was “the most beautiful sunset we had ever seen,” she recalled years later. “High-
flying cirrus clouds and widespread
cumulous floated across the sky from east to west. Everything was gold and pink and blue and calm.”

It was a classic pre-hurricane sunset, as described in 1890 by Father Benito Viñes, a Jesuit priest in Cuba who was a pioneer in hurricane forecasting.

The spectacular colors linger long after sunset, Viñes wrote, “as if this dim and prophetic light tried to prolong the evil omen in the longer duration of the twilight.”

At eight p.m. Friday night, Richard Gray and the Weather Bureau office in Washington, DC, got the latest weather data from other Florida cities. It still wasn't much help in locating the center of the hurricane. Key West, about 130 miles south of Miami, reported winds of twelve miles an hour and a barometric pressure reading of 29.68 inches, virtually unchanged from its reading two hours earlier.

Miami's winds were eighteen miles an hour, and its barometer was identical to Key West's reading. So the telltale dramatic drop in barometric pressure that would reveal the hurricane was moving toward one city and away from another hadn't yet become apparent.

In Moore Haven, Fred Flanders was one of many residents who went to a party Friday night to honor the town's teachers at the start of the school year. He brought the telegram from the Weather Bureau with him and showed it to other guests.

“Nobody seemed to be alarmed,” he said.

Miami resident Mildred Cronin, a Dade County school board employee and a volunteer for the local Red Cross chapter, wasn't even aware of the storm until an alert Girl Scout reacted to the warning.

“A young girl who lives in the same apartment [building] as I do came running home from a Girl Scouts' meeting to put her pet dog inside,” Cronin said. “This was the first time I had heard about the approaching storm.”

But she wasn't concerned.

“During the evening, I went about my usual work, the reports of the storm having little effect on me,” she said.

For others—especially the boomers who had come to Florida to get rich quickly and have fun—it was another Friday night in paradise, and they were determined to enjoy it. Hundreds of people crossed the causeways to Miami Beach to get a bite to eat and then dance or walk on the beach.

Most of them had no idea what a hurricane was.

But the Miami Beach cops ended the merrymaking when they went through all the restaurants and bars, telling patrons to go home because there was a storm coming. The police also chased sightseers off the beach.

Seen from high above, a hurricane resembles a spinning pinwheel as it churns across the ocean. Slender strands of clouds known as rain bands extend from the hurricane's center. As the hurricane nears land, these bands of clouds can become a sort of overture for the approaching storm. As the bands race past
overhead, they can bring brief but heavy rainfall and high winds. But once they're
past, the winds and rain diminish.