For Sale —American Paradise (32 page)

Around eleven a.m., the Atlantic Coast Line agent telegraphed the Sebring office to say that water was now flooding the train station. It was the last word that the outside world would have from Moore Haven for days. Shortly after this frantic message, all the town's telephone and telegraph wires were down.

In Sebring, Atlantic Coast Line officials decided to send a rescue train to Moore Haven, but they'd have to wait for the storm to subside some.

It was late morning in Miami, but daylight still hadn't come to the city. The hurricane had been pounding Miami and much of South Florida for almost ten hellacious hours.

Kirby Jones, who was in Miami on business for the American Bakery Company, was among about 150 refugees who were riding out the storm in a large downtown building. “The city was covered with a pall of darkness which obscured everything,” Jones later told the
New York Times
.

Around nine a.m., the building where Jones and the others had taken shelter could no longer stand against the furious winds. The roof caved in. The occupants fled into the storm and made for a school building about a block away.

“It was a pitiful sight to see that crowd running through the driving rain, barely able to make headway against the terrific force of the wind,” Jones said. “Women were crying hysterically and old men were whimpering that they did not want to die, their voices almost inaudible in the roar of the wind. And all the while flying timbers and glass were falling all about us.”

Somehow the refugees reached the school safely.

In Coral Gables, Leo Reardon and his family were clinging to shreds of the life they'd known before the hurricane. The storm had nearly carried Reardon
away a couple of times. It had rampaged through his comfortable, stylish house like an enraged but invisible beast and turned his beautiful home into soaking wreckage.

“Will this cursed storm never abate, or is it determined to decimate us and our beautiful city?” Reardon wondered as he huddled with his wife and children in the last available shelter from the winds—the laundry room.

“Hours went by—years of terror,” Reardon said.

Then, around noon, although it was still dark and windy and pouring rain, the constant roar of the storm eased up. Barometers started rising. Finally, the worst part of the awful hurricane had passed over Miami and was moving away from the city.

Reardon and his family crept out of the laundry room and looked around at what had been their home.

“Nothing was left,” Reardon said. “Those three words tell the story.”

Numbly, Reardon loaded his family into his car and drove to the Everglades Hotel.

“Scenes of the storm's ravages were everywhere,” Reardon said. “Trees, poles, and wires lay across the streets. Cuban tile dotted the scene with dull red splotches. Roofs, whole and intact, were lying blocks from their proper locations.”

Entire walls of some buildings had been torn away, “disclosing semi-naked men and women moving dazedly about the ruins of their homes,” Reardon said.

The wreckage of buildings—“houses, stores, and shops”—was piled and scattered everywhere. And surely, there were many corpses beneath the debris, Reardon thought.

The streets were nearly deserted.

“Are they all dead?” Reardon wondered. “Those we did see were either laughing hysterically or weeping.”

Reardon heard that wailing noise again, only this time, he knew what it was.

“Ambulances rushed in every direction, their wailing sirens reminiscent of the storm,” he said. He saw “a boy covered with blood running blindly across the street” and thought, “Where are his parents?”

Reardon picked his way through the wreckage of downtown Miami. Water rushed through the streets. “Third Street is strewn with twisted automobiles,” Reardon said. “Along Biscayne Boulevard large yachts and barges weighing hundreds of tons have been deposited in front of the McAllister and Columbus Hotels.”

The Everglades Hotel was damaged but habitable, its lobby crowded with storm refugees. Reardon and his family were shown to a damp apartment.

“We must sleep,” he thought. “Or have I been dreaming a terrible dream?”

Up the coast in Stuart, the winds had raged and the rains had poured, but the blow had not been anything like what Miami had received. In the
South Florida
Developer
, Edwin Menninger later reported that, compared to Miami, Stuart had “escaped almost unscathed.”

Menninger wrote: “The wind, which is said to have struck Miami with a velocity of 150 miles an hour, probably did not exceed ninety miles an hour here. The rain came down in torrents all day Saturday and far into the night, but did no greater damage than wash out a number of bridges and their approaches throughout the county, and tear up the hard-surfaced roads here and there.

“It is true, wires were down and power and light shut off at times, but little damage resulted. The city was cut off from communications with the outside world, and no trains entered Stuart for something more than thirty hours, but this was merely an inconvenience.”

On Sunday afternoon, about twenty-
four hours after the winds had finally died down in Miami, a northbound Florida East Coast Railway passenger train made its first stop in Stuart since before the hurricane.

The train was packed with still-terrified refugees from the awful storm. They'd had enough of Paradise, and they wanted out.

Menninger was at the Stuart station when the train chuffed to a snorting, hissing stop.

Residents in the towns north of Miami knew the hurricane down there had been bad, but the obviously shaken occupants of the train brought astonishing news from the south.

“The startled train crew and passengers announced that ‘three thousand persons were dead in Miami,'” Menninger later wrote in the
Developer
. “The news spread over the city like wildfire.”

“Six long passenger trains followed in quick succession, and the terror-stricken passengers corroborated the first report,” Menninger wrote, although he added a newsman's natural skepticism about these tales of such a staggering catastrophe: “No real news was available, all wires being down.”

That would change, however.

Soon, readers from Maine to California would be fixated on front-
page stories about the Miami hurricane. The stories were emblazoned with screaming headlines such as one in an “extra” edition of the
Galveston Daily News
that was on the streets of the Texas seaport almost before the winds had stopped blowing in Miami: “Many Die: Cities Razed.”