For Sale —American Paradise (49 page)

A piano became a stairway through the hole to the roof. Once they were on the roof, McCormick's mother was holding her baby brother, and an older brother kept calling to their mother to make sure she was safe. For a while, McCormick heard her mother answering the calls. Then the answering voice went silent. The wind and water were capsizing the house.

“The next thing I knew I was in the water,” McCormick said. “I felt myself slipping and I was under the water with things falling around me. My stepfather had told us earlier that if we was underwater it wouldn't hurt us as bad as if we was above it, so I just stayed submerged.”

McCormick stayed underwater as long as she could, then surfaced. She struggled through the water to get back to her house, which was now upside down. She found her stepfather—the only other person alive. McCormick and her stepfather clung to the house, hoping the water would recede.

Elsewhere, terrified people ran blindly screaming into the night. Some of them were near the fields of sugarcane, where the ripening stalks, towering ten
or twelve feet above them, were being whipped into a wild, flailing frenzy by the roaring winds that may have briefly reached 160 miles an hour.

The wind hurled some of the luckless refugees into the cane fields. Others were swept into the cane by the surging, relentless water. The stalks closed around them, weaving a lattice-like trap, pinning arms and legs, holding them helpless. Then more water followed, deeper and deeper until it covered them.

There was no escape.

As the storm started rising, Vernon Boots and his family decided to go to the house of a game warden. Eventually, more than sixty people, both African-American and white, had gathered there. It was one of the few places where both blacks and whites gathered to ride out the storm.

As the water started rising, they climbed into the attic.

“After a bit the black folks are praying, and singing and praying,” Boots recalled. “The white folks were, I don't know why, very quiet, never said a word.”

But the winds and surging waters pushed the house off its foundation. The house floated a short distance and then started breaking up, spilling its occupants into the water.

The wind and water scattered everyone and carried Boots and his brothers miles into the Everglades. They clung to a section of roof.

Back in Belle Glade, rain and water were pouring through the Tedder Hotel, but the building was somehow withstanding the pounding. Jabo Tryon was exhausted. He climbed the stairs to the hotel's upper floor, found a dry corner, and soon was fast asleep. He spent the rest of the night there undisturbed.

In Martin County, vicious winds were whipping off the eastern shore of the lake. In Indiantown, a blast of wind lifted a small building and dropped it on Ki Wilson, an African-American man who worked for L. L. Mayo, a logging contractor.

Both of Wilson's legs were broken. Mayo was afraid to move Wilson, but he realized the man had to have medical attention as quickly as possible. So the white contractor and four other men, all black, piled into Wilson's car and set out into the storm to fetch a doctor from Stuart.

The four men with Mayo rode along to remove downed trees and debris that might be blocking the road between Indiantown and Stuart. Mayo sped along until he came to a section of the road that had been washed out. Mayo slammed on the brakes, but his car skidded and overturned in water about fifteen feet deep.

Two men managed to escape the wreck, but Mayo and three others were trapped and drowned.

In West Palm Beach, the hurricane's winds started to diminish shortly after midnight. Frances Ball and her companions picked their way down debris-
strewn
stairs to stand at the smashed-in front door of the Harvey Building. Outside, the wind was still shrieking.

A group of American Legionnaires appeared and offered to guide the refugees in the Harvey Building to a hotel that had thrown open its doors. They left the building and followed the Legionnaires down windswept Datura Street.

“The wind was so driving and the rain so strong that in three blocks I managed to catch my breath three times,” Ball wrote to her parents.

“And such a sight as met our eyes!” she continued. “The street was piled full of cars heaped up on each other. Wires were down across the way and a building [was] sitting in the street. Of course all these things were just dim shapes and we didn't see the wires.

“A huge gust of wind whipped me down the street and a tight wire cut me a mean clip under the chin that sent me back about five feet.”

Ball regained her balance and the group continued. “We scrambled around in the mud and wire until we finally got clear and then started for an alley,” Ball wrote. “We climbed over a roof or two, some mashed-
in walls, and missed a couple of wrecked cars and fell into the cellar of this hotel, where a bunch of Negro porters got us started up the stairs.”

They joined dozens of others who had taken shelter in the Pennsylvania Hotel.

“It was going on one a.m. when we got here and the halls were lined with refugees rolled up in blankets—just like the war scenes in movies!” Ball wrote.

Ball and her group were given blankets. “There I spent the night with four men!” Ball told her parents. “I lay awake and prayed while the walls quivered and shook from the impact of the storm.”

At about the same time Frances Ball went to bed, Margaret Best finished her letter to her sister in Massachusetts.

When the eye reached West Palm Beach, Best and her family had taken refuge in a neighbor's cellar with more than two dozen other people.

“I'll write again tomorrow,” Best concluded. “We sure are weary.”

Frances Ball, still picking bits of plaster and glass from her hair, finished her letter to her parents the following day.

“The ambulances have been tearing about all day,” she wrote. “The dining room here is an impromptu operating room and the lobby is the hospital. Two babies were born here during the nite [
sic
] to add to all the rest of the confusion.”

“PS,” she concluded, “my hair isn't even gray yet! But I sure hate to hear people drop things with a thud. I wonder which wall has gone now!”

As gray daylight crept into the Everglades on Monday, September 17, low, dark clouds to the north marked San Felipe's departure. The storm quickly lost its ferocious intensity after its eye moved north of the lake, but it was still packing destructive winds and heavy rainfall.

Vernon Boots and his brothers began slogging through the Everglades, hoping to find their way back to where they had last seen their family.

“We were back in undeveloped land,” Boots recalled. “The woods [were] full of snakes and turtles and alligators and anything, birds and all type of life, where the animals had died in the bushes.”

The brothers hadn't gone far when they heard someone shouting. It was one of their friends, a young boy named Mutt Thomas, who also had survived being swept into the Glades. The youngster joined the older boys, and they continued their journey across the ruined watery landscape.

It looked as though a giant hand had upended Lake Okeechobee and spilled its water across miles of the southern shore.

“Water, knee-deep, covered all the land,” wrote author Lawrence Will, who survived the awful storm and later wrote about it in his book,
Okeechobee Hurricane: Killer Storms in the Everglades.
“Projecting dismally above the flood were fragments of roofs and floors, bed posts, and trunks, uprooted custard apple trees, wrecked automobiles. From limbs and snags high above the ground hung festoons of hyacinths, and rags that had been clothing. The eye searched in vain for familiar buildings. Instead it was confused by strange houses, leaning crazily, where none had been before.”

And there were corpses, flung into trees, floating in the water, or simply lying cold and stiff and still on the higher ground that occasionally rose above the floodwater.

In Belle Glade, “tight-packed wreckage filled the streets,” Will wrote. “Figures of men began to appear, staring about in amazement. I joined them,” he said.

The men splashed through the water, stunned at what they were seeing. They found the bodies of a young boy and his little sister. A poolroom that was still partially standing became a morgue, and they laid the children's bodies on a pool table.

Jack Zuber, still unconscious on the raft that had been a side of his house, felt something warm in his mouth and slowly roused himself to consciousness. He had been found, and someone was trying to force warm coffee into his mouth.

Eight days later, Zuber still had no word about the fate of his wife and children.

Other than the unlucky people around the lake, the public didn't have any idea what had happened on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee. But the Red Cross was getting alarming reports early Monday morning from J. Denham Bird, its local chairman in the town of Okeechobee on the lake's northern shore.

“Conditions serious here,” Bird telegraphed Red Cross headquarters in Washington, DC, “We would appreciate help. Imperative. Reported many drowned and homeless.”

Red Cross officials also were getting their first reports about conditions in West Palm Beach. In Jacksonville, Red Cross officials received a message from an amateur radio operator. Three-fourths of the homes in West Palm Beach were damaged, and nearly every business was heavily damaged, he said.

But somehow, Florida governor John Martin wasn't yet in the loop about hurricane damage. He could be forgiven for not being aware of the horror in the little towns on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee. Cut off by flooded roads and isolated by downed telegraph and electrical lines, it would be days before
the gruesome details of San Felipe's slaughter emerged. But Martin seemed to dismiss the severe damage the storm had done to West Palm Beach, one of the state's larger and better-
known cities. When the commander of Florida's National Guard asked Martin to send troops to the area where the hurricane had done its worst, the governor hesitated.

“If necessary, of course, I will act on the request,” Martin said.

Around eight a.m. on Monday, September 17, the storm's eye made its closest approach to Tampa, coming to about thirty miles east-southeast of the city.

But the hurricane had weakened considerably since wreaking havoc from West Palm Beach to Lake Okeechobee. Its strongest winds, blowing at about 100 miles an hour, were well to the east of Tampa, where peak winds reached only about 30 mph.

Still, that was all the irrepressible Tampa attorney Peter Knight needed to make up his mind about the effects of this hurricane.

Without waiting for details of the Lake Okeechobee horror to emerge, and taking it upon himself to speak for the entire state of Florida, Knight dispatched a telegram to Arthur Brisbane.

“News dispatches sent out from Florida concerning so-
called hurricane positively malicious and criminal,” Knight seethed. “The velocity of wind in Tampa has not exceeded thirty miles per hour. No damage here. Damage to entire state negligible. Please give this publicity.”

Negligible.

In Knight's estimation, the most powerful hurricane in US history at that time had been nothing more than a windy, rainy day in Florida. Knight's irresponsible and wildly inaccurate telegram to Brisbane was the first shot in another publicity duel between Florida business interests and the American Red Cross.

As the storm spun northward, an announcer on WDBO radio in Orlando was summarizing the hurricane's effects on that city. Speaking from the station's broadcast studios in the Fort Gatlin Hotel, the announcer told his listeners that “little, if any damage” had been done in Orlando.

Outside, the storm's winds whipped through the hotel's street-level arcade. Unlike Tampa, however, Orlando was on the strong side of the hurricane and the winds were considerably stronger.

A few minutes after telling listeners that Orlando had suffered little damage, the WDBO announcer was back. The radio station would be off the air for a while, he said. The hurricane had just ripped the ceramic tile roof off the chic, Spanish Mission–style hotel.

As soon as the winds had died down enough to allow people to emerge from their shelters, Florida's larger newspapers in Miami, St. Petersburg, and West Palm Beach sent out reporters to try to find their way to Lake Okeechobee. But it was slow going. Roads were flooded and piled high with debris and downed trees.