For Sale —American Paradise (30 page)

Around ten p.m., one of those bands passed over downtown Miami as United Press correspondent Al Reck stopped by the Dade County Sheriff's Office.

Reck, at the youthful age of twenty-
eight, had already packed more death-defying adventure into his life than many older men. He'd been wounded and left for dead on a battlefield in France during World War I. He'd survived, been captured by the Germans, escaped, and been recaptured and finally released on Christmas morning of 1918, about five weeks after the fighting had stopped. He'd been discharged from the army as a lieutenant in 1919.

Reck would go on to become a legendary city editor for the
Oakland Tribune
in California. As a young reporter in 1926, he was restless, eager, and fearless—perfect attributes for a journalist about to be caught in the middle of a savage hurricane.

“I dropped over in the sheriff's office and found the county police force wondering just how bad the hurricane was going to be, or if it really was going to hit Miami,” Reck later wrote.

While Reck was chatting with the deputies, an anemometer at Allison Hospital in Miami Beach—about six miles from downtown Miami—was registering winds of about thirty-five miles an hour. An hour later it was showing forty.

Shortly after eleven p.m., Weather Bureau meteorologists in Washington had enough information to justify issuing a hurricane warning. In Miami, Richard Gray's barometer was steadily and rapidly falling. The center of the storm was headed his way.

By 11:30 p.m. hurricane warning flags were flying.

The problem was that almost no one saw them, including attorney S. K. Hicks.

A few minutes before midnight, Hicks left downtown Miami to return to the Mere Grande Hotel in Miami Beach, where he lived. The rain had stopped, but as he drove across the causeway linking Miami and Miami Beach, he noticed that the wind was picking up.

At midnight, Gray's barometer read 29.54, down 0.16 inch from its eight p.m. reading. Worse, the pressure was steadily falling, a clear indication that the hurricane was getting closer to Miami. Then the rain began, and the brisk breeze that had annoyed the Legionnaires became a constantly rising wind that began to tear at Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami Beach.

The party in Moore Haven began breaking up at about the same time that Hicks was arriving at his Miami Beach residence. As Fred Flanders and the other guests left, they noticed that the weather was getting worse. “The wind had increased, there were scudding clouds, and a general feeling of [an] impending storm,” Flanders said.

Worried about how the dike was holding up, Flanders went to the town's lakeside waterfront. What he saw alarmed him. The winds were pushing the water higher and higher against the flimsy dike. Soon the water would top it.

Others had realized the same thing. Several men—including the mayor and the town manager—were racing through Moore Haven, knocking on doors. All able-bodied men were needed at the dike to start filling sandbags.

But it would take precious time to recruit manpower going door to door. Someone uncrated a new siren that had been purchased for the town's fire department. Wiring was hastily rigged to a generator, and the siren started blasting an ear-splitting wail. “The noise would have waked the dead,” said Moore Haven resident Ed Lundy.

Soon a crowd of men was shoveling sand into bags and stacking them against the failing dike. They intended to work through the night.

In Coral Gables, Leo Reardon and his guests had gotten caught up in a conversation about whether the new motion
picture industry would set up production studios in Miami. Around eleven p.m., the conversation broke up and Reardon's guests went home.

The storm was obviously getting worse, but Reardon wasn't worried. He put his two young children to bed in a closed-in sunporch and went to bed.

He drifted into sleep, but was awakened by a loud crash. He discovered that the wind had ripped an awning off his house and shoved part of the awning frame through a window.

Reardon moved his kids to an interior room and returned to the broken window. Wind-
driven rain was pouring through.

“Against the lights on Ferdinand Drive, I could see the tall pines bending before the storm, and across the golf course I dimly made out the outline of the Miami-
Biltmore [Hotel],” Reardon said. “Then the lights went out on the street and in all houses. We were in the blackest dark I have ever seen.”

That sudden, heart-pounding awakening to terrifying crashes was being repeated across South Florida. In Miami Beach, Gertrude Rubelli—who worked for the Dade County school board and the local Red Cross chapter—and her husband were jolted awake around two a.m. when the winds blew open a hinged window on their porch.

They nailed it shut, but going back to bed was out of the question. No one could sleep in such a howling racket.

“The house rocked with every blast of wind, and at three a.m. the kitchen window was smashed by a broken awning frame, lights went out, and water was shut off,” Rubelli said.

As the wind continued to rise, newcomers to Miami heard, for the first time, the ceaseless rasping moan of a powerful hurricane. The winds from the July hurricane hadn't sounded anything like this terrifying and unforgettable noise. And there were occasional eerie variations in the wind's noise that sent chills down thousands of spines.

“[I'd] never heard anything like it,” Miami Beach resident Edith Royce Oakley later wrote in a letter to her brother, Herbert Royce, in Middletown, New York. “It made us all deaf, and you could not hear a single thing but the noise of
the wind. One awning after another blew off the apartment, and then the French windows started blowing in and breaking off, and the glass was blown out.”

Leo Reardon was wondering how much more his house could stand. The walls were trembling before the wind, and windows were crashing. Reardon was trying to decide whether to stay in his house or move his family. He went to his front door and opened it to take a look at the storm. The wind snatched him up and nearly carried him away.

“It hurled me several yards and I managed to regain the door by grabbing the awning bars that still were fastened to the side of the house,” he said.

Reardon realized that he and his wife could never carry their children through such winds. He decided to move his family into the garage and put them in his car. To get to the garage, however, they had to go from the kitchen through a laundry room. “No sooner had I released the latch on the kitchen door than it shot back and was shattered against the electric range,” Reardon said.

They crawled on their hands and knees into the garage and climbed into the automobile.

At 3:30 a.m., Richard Gray's barometer at the Weather Bureau office had dropped to 29.06. Thirty minutes later, his office went dark when the electric lines went down. At 4:30 a.m., Gray turned a flashlight beam on his barometer. It read 28.65. At the same time, the anemometer at Allison Hospital was showing winds exceeding one hundred miles an hour.

Out on Miami Beach, the sea was swallowing the island.

The front door of the Mere Grande Hotel was about three hundred feet—the length of a football field—from the usual high-
tide mark. But as the hurricane approached, the huge breakers made a steady, thundering march up the beach until they were booming just outside the hotel's door.

“Then one giant wave battered down the door and rushed through the lobby, leaving it three feet deep in water,” said S. K. Hicks, the Miami attorney who lived at the hotel.

Each successive wave made the water in the hotel lobby a little deeper. Outside, Hicks could see “many small shacks and automobiles” being carried away by the onrushing ocean.”

“All night long the breakers roared,” Hicks said. “Hysterical women in the hotel huddled together in little groups on the upper floors, expecting at any moment to be carried out to sea in the hotel. In order to quiet them we got a man to play the piano, and a lot of us began to sing.”

Then, above the wind's roar, Hicks and the others in the Mere Grande heard awful ripping noises and a bizarre whistling sound. The storm was tearing away big chunks of the hotel's roof, and the weird whistling noise was the sound the chunks made as the wind whirled them away.

As dawn approached, the hurricane's winds had reached at least 115 miles an hour in Miami Beach. That was more than Gertrude Rubelli's house could withstand. It started coming apart.

“At five a.m. the glassed front of the house blew in, and at the same time the roof sailed off, landing several blocks away, where it was found the next day,” Rubelli said.

Rubelli and her husband crawled through the wreckage of their home and fought through the winds to their car. Rubelli's husband turned the car's front into the wind, and then they got into the backseat and covered themselves with a tarp for protection in case the winds smashed the windows.

As he huddled with his family in an automobile in the garage of his disinte-grating home in Coral Gables, L. F. Reardon heard for the first time the blood-curdling shriek of the wind known only by those caught in the most powerful hurricanes. Lots of people who hear that awful noise don't live to tell about it. It was a moment that Reardon never forgot.

“Above the roar of the storm there started a high wail like the sound of an ambulance siren,” Reardon said. “It could not be that, for we were on the outskirts of Coral Gables, six miles from Miami. The sound rose slowly. I jumped out of the car and went to the door of the garage.”

He looked out and could see nothing but sheets of rain. But he still heard that awful shriek. Somehow, his terror-stricken mind associated the noise with approaching water.
This is the end
, he thought.

He returned to the car and told his wife to prepare for the worst. But the noise died down, “leaving the dull, monotonous, deadly roar of the gale,” Reardon said. “Then it came again—about ten minutes later. Never have I heard a sound that froze one's . . . blood like that.”

At the Weather Bureau office, Gray's barometer was plummeting. At six a.m., it read 28.00, and the Allison Hospital anemometer showed steady winds of 104 miles an hour, with gusts up to 117. Then, at 6:10 a.m., as a dim, gray dawn crept over the battered city, the winds suddenly diminished. The hurricane's eye had arrived.

Gertrude Rubelli and her husband ventured out of their car. Their Miami Beach neighborhood was in ruins.

“We saw many of our neighbors' homes gone, or partially destroyed,” Rubelli said.

They flagged down a passing car, and the driver dropped them off at a nearby church, which already had been converted to an emergency hospital. A dozen injured people were there, and more were being brought in.

“One man had a big gash across his head,” Rubelli said. “Another old man had both legs badly fractured. A woman was dying from internal injuries.

“One whole family was brought in, one child dead, one possible fractured skull, the mother, father, and baby with severe lacerations of the body.”

The savage winds had smashed one unlucky man in the face with a large wooden splinter, which was protruding from his cheek and nose. Rubelli was impressed with the injured man's patience as medics carefully removed pieces of wood from the ugly wound.

The bodies of three children were brought in, and then the body of a young woman. Dazed, frightened residents whose homes had collapsed around them had picked their way through the ruined neighborhood to the church, and were pleading for help.

“Families were separated and crying for their children,” Rubelli said. “Some had on just nightclothes, others were wrapped in wet sheets or blankets, whatever they were able to find as their homes were blowing away. Every car that could run was out scouring the town and vicinity, bringing in injured and dead.”

Once the winds had died down in Coral Gables, Reardon hustled his family back into their house, hastily cleared a path in the driveway, and set off down Ponce de Leon Boulevard in search of groceries.

“The scene of wreckage brought tears to my eyes,” Reardon said. “Coral Gables' buildings, with a few exceptions, had weathered the terrific blast, but the beautiful foliage was laid low. Lights and telephone wires were strewn about in reckless abandon. The ground was covered with green grapefruit. A few weather-beaten policemen were standing about the ruins of destroyed buildings.”

Remarkably, Reardon found a grocery store that was open. He hastily bought some food and threw the bags into his car. The winds were returning. He jumped into his car and raced the rising wind twenty blocks back to his home.

At the Mere Grande in Miami Beach, the frightened occupants were literally at sea.

“Dawn came, and save for the nearness of other houses, the scene was like from a ship at sea,” said S. K. Hicks. “Huge rollers, as high as the hotel, came rolling in. They would crash upon the beach with a force that shook the whole structure, and, seething with foam, break about the building and go hurrying westward toward Biscayne Bay.”

As the rainy, windy dawn crept over Moore Haven, the exhausted army of sandbaggers realized that they'd lost their battle with Lake Okeechobee. They couldn't hold back the lake's churning waters. The flimsy mud dike started giving way in several places.