For Sale —American Paradise (31 page)

“Water . . . was pouring over the levee and rushing across the field like a black wave, full of mud, grass, sticks, and hyacinths,” Moore Haven resident Lawrence Will later wrote.

At the town's little railroad station, the agent on duty for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad telegraphed the company's main office in Sebring, about sixty miles away, that the lowest part of the town nearest the lake was beginning to flood.

When the hurricane's eye reached Miami, reporter Al Reck ventured out of his apartment building to look around. “All I could see were wrecked and ruined homes,” he recalled.

Reck didn't say whether he knew that the storm's lull was only temporary, but even had he known, it probably wouldn't have mattered to him. Like a moth drawn irresistibly to a light, Reck immediately took off for downtown Miami to
chase the biggest story of his career, and as far as he was concerned, the hurricane could go to hell.

He found chaos and “a mass of debris.” And the ocean, pushed across Miami Beach by the hurricane's awful winds, was surging through downtown Miami's streets.

Even worse for Reck, all telephone and telegraph wires were down, as well as radio broadcast towers. Miami was isolated. But the city needed help, and Reck felt the primal urge of any good reporter to get his story to his editors.

An idea popped into the reporter's mind. Tropical Radio Telegraph Company in nearby Hialeah had giant broadcasting towers for receiving and relaying communications to and from ships at sea. Surely those massive towers could withstand even this powerful hurricane. If those towers were intact, he could get his story—and a call for help—to the outside world.

Hialeah was less than six miles from downtown Miami, but it may as well have been a thousand miles away.

“Automobiles that had been left on the streets were either wrecked or drowned out,” Reck wrote. “It was next to impossible to obtain any sort of transportation.”

Next to impossible, maybe, but not
completely
impossible. Reck bumped into a taxi driver who must have been a kindred spirit. With little difficulty, Reck persuaded the cabbie to take him to Hialeah.

Not far from where Reck was climbing into the taxi, Richard Gray was appalled by the parade of people who thought the storm was over and had left their homes to gawk at the wreckage. They had no idea that the lull was only temporary and that the fierce winds would resume at any moment.

Gray ran out into the street, shouting at the sightseers to get back inside. Most of the gawkers ignored him. Many of them would pay dearly only a few minutes later.

Gray's barometer had been holding steady during the calm. But at 6:45 a.m., the needle suddenly plunged again. Now it read 27.61. In 1926, no one in the United States had ever seen a barometer reading that low in a hurricane making landfall.

Then, as though someone had flipped a switch, the winds roared to life again. In only about fifteen minutes, the wind gauge at Allison Hospital was showing a steady 109 miles an hour, with gusts of 119.

And as the winds returned, so did the awful fear.

“Saturday was the worst day I ever want to go through,” Edith Royce Oakley later wrote in the letter to her brother. “The only place that we could stay where the water was not pouring in was a tiny kitchen. Briggs braced himself against the door and we sat there for hours, thinking each moment would be our last. Houses were crumbling all around us and the roofs were hurled through the air.”

In the streets of Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami Beach, some of the sightseeing newcomers ducked into shelter when the winds suddenly resumed.
But dozens of others couldn't find a place to hide, and they were dying because of it.

The air was filled with debris from buildings shattered during the first part of the storm. Much of the deadly debris—perhaps most of it—came from the shoddily built houses that had been slapped up by boomers obsessed with cashing in on the burgeoning rental market. Building inspectors had looked the other way while the houses were thrown together, and the fortune seekers pouring into Miami had been more than willing to rent them for exorbitant prices.

Now, the boomer shacks were mowing people down. Chunks of concrete, shards of metal, even coconuts became deadly missiles. Boards were ripped loose and became spears, skewering people who were unfortunate enough to be in their paths.

The awful dread reenveloped L. F. Reardon and his family as the winds returned.

“Never abating for an instant, the wind rose still higher until it sounded like hundreds of steamer whistles blowing at once,” Reardon said. “Then came once more the terrifying siren-like moan that had made hideous the previous night.”

Reardon and his wife took their children into their arms. Reardon expected to be overwhelmed by floodwaters at any moment.

“With an ear-splitting rush of raging wind the large double doors of the living room flew open and the ripping, tearing hurricane found us,” Reardon said. “The wind must have been making by this time 120 miles an hour—through the living room of our home.”

Reardon tried to close the door.

“A titanic gust of slashing wind picked me up bodily and hurled me against the dining-room buffet forty feet distant,” he said, thinking. “The house will not stand another minute!”

With chunks of his home flying away, Reardon moved his family into the laundry room.

Despite the water covering Miami Beach, S. K. Hicks and another attorney friend ventured out of the Mere Grande when the eye arrived. They were only about a block away from the hotel when the fierce winds resumed, but with the air filled with deadly missiles, they hastily ducked into the Beach View Apartments.

“The doors at both ends of the hall on the first floor of the apartment house were ripped away and the wind swept through as though forced from a great bellows,” Hicks said. “It knocked us off our feet before we could reach the stairway, and we were compelled to crawl along on our hands and knees to keep from being carried away.”

Hicks and his friend climbed to the second floor. The door to one of the apartments was open. Desperate to find some safety from the wind that was howling through the hallways, they ducked into the apartment.

They found a young woman calmly sitting on a couch. She was wearing a bathing suit, and intently watching the hurricane rage outside.

“We were shivering with cold, so she got up and brought us blankets to wrap around us and also got us cigarettes,” Hicks said.

Al Reck's wild taxi ride became even wilder when the winds resumed. But his luck—or maybe it was the cabbie's—held.

“That taxi driver was gifted with the luck of the gods,” Reck said. “As we sped out north from Miami, past scenes of ruin and desolation on every hand, it seemed as if the wind-strained trees and telephone poles threw themselves at us but missed. The driver literally hurtled the machine over fallen trees and poles. We smashed wires by the mere strength of the heavy taxi and finally reached the radio station.”

But even Tropical Radio's four sturdy towers were no match for the hurricane.

“The huge towers were flat on the ground,” Reck said.

Reck and the cabbie joined other hurricane refugees in the radio station's concrete blockhouse. They were surrounded by people with broken bones and severe cuts.

“Tiny children were crying in the arms of their parents,” Reck wrote. “None of the refugees were dressed except in nightclothes or clothing hastily donned. They were wet, injured, and miserable.”

Combat veteran Reck did what he could to offer first aid to the injured.

In Fort Lauderdale, Peggy and Frank Pope watched in astonishment from their apartment as the raging wind lifted their car off the ground and carried it nearly a block down Condit Avenue. Before they could recover from the shock of seeing their automobile carried away, the storm sent a huge timber crashing through a window. Then the roof collapsed, jamming the doors so they couldn't be opened.

Frank Pope broke down a door, and he and his wife fled to a nearby garage apartment, where they took shelter with six other terrified families.

The winds kept increasing until they were blowing even harder than before the eye arrived. By 7:30 a.m., the winds at Allison Hospital were 123 miles an hour, and at 7:40 a.m. the anemometer was reading 132.

From a window of the Tropical Radio blockhouse, Al Reck watched the storm rage.

“Peering from the rain-
clouded windows I could see houses rolling along the ground like tin cans,” he wrote.

He saw someone crawling on their hands and knees toward the station. Soon a man tapped on a window. He told Reck and the others that there were nine people in a small house about a block away, including a woman with a broken leg who needed help.

Reck and the taxi driver looked at each other.

“Let's go,” the cabbie said.

“There was nothing else to do,” Reck said. “I went with him.”

Somehow, the amazing taxi driver steered his rocking, swaying cab through the storm to the house. Reck and the driver crammed four adults and five children, plus themselves, into the vehicle. The cabbie started the return trip.

As the car pulled away, the house that had contained the refugees pulled free of its foundation and turned over.

Back at the radio station, the taxi driver and another man carried the injured woman inside. Reck picked up a toddler.

“A gust of extra heavy wind came swooping and bounding, picked my feet up, and hurled me a good twenty feet and then started me rolling,” Reck said. “I held on to the child with one hand and grasped at a palmetto bush with the other. I regained my feet and crawled on my hands and knees to the station with the child.”

When the refugees were safely inside the radio station, they told Reck and the others that there were people who'd sought shelter from the hurricane by hiding among nearby palmettos. The taxi driver and Reck looked at each other again.

“Let's go,” the cabbie repeated.

“How many trips we made back and forth to the wireless station I do not know, but we found about thirty men, women, and children, blue and cold, in the palmettos, gripping the earth to save from getting hit by flying debris,” Reck said.

As the storm worsened, Louis Slutsky was worried about Beth David Synagogue, which was less than a half-mile from the fierce winds roaring off Biscayne Bay. When Slutsky, who was the synagogue's caretaker, saw flooding and “roofs flying in the street,” he decided he had to go to the synagogue to prevent the sacred Torahs from being destroyed.

Slutsky and his son pushed their way into the storm.

“It was already dangerous to walk in the street because of flying pieces from the buildings and the flood,” he later told the
New York Times
. “I thought that a repetition of Noah's deluge was coming, when everything would be washed off the earth. Every second of our way was an experience, but we reached the synagogue safely.”

The Beth David Synagogue was damaged, and flooding had reached the Holy Ark where the Torahs were stored. Slutsky and his son removed the holy scrolls and took them up into the gallery where women sat during services. They settled down there to wait out the rest of the hurricane.

In Moore Haven, the dike was giving way against the onslaught of the wind and waves. The first break happened just west of town. At first, the water seeped slowly and quietly into the town. Then the dike started crumbling altogether, and the water “began to come in great waves, rising over streets, over floors, and then up and still higher,” Lawrence Will later wrote.

“By mid-morning the full fury of the hurricane broke upon us and the waters from the lake were rushing through the town like swift rivers, the air filled with rain, the crests of waves and flying debris,” said Fred Flanders, the state engineer. “Visibility, due to the flying scud, dropped to a few hundred yards, and all signs
of life disappeared. . . . It was impossible to differentiate between the torrential rain and the wind-
driven spume. Looking toward town, some houses had disappeared and others were slowly floating out of sight. No dry land was visible in any direction.”

A crowd of townspeople took refuge at the Mayflower Hotel, one of the town's more substantial buildings. Around 8:30 a.m., they felt the building lurch and sway. The flood had pulled it away from its foundation.

The hotel carried its terrified occupants for a brief, wild ride and then settled down in the middle of the street.

Elsewhere, dozens of Moore Haven residents were overcome by the water pouring from the giant lake. Horace Howell, one of the last men to leave the futile sandbagging effort, was swept away. He saved himself by grabbing a willow tree and holding on for dear life. Not far away, his wife fought the waters to save their four children as the water broke into their home and quickly rose above their heads.

The terrifying scene was being repeated throughout the town. Mothers and fathers grabbed children and climbed into attics, or hauled themselves onto roofs where they clung for dear life against the fierce winds. Some families managed to hold on. Others were swept away, one by one, and never seen again.