Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (15 page)

Hecht, eager to prove himself, listened intently to his editor's instructions. “The cashier's office is closed,” said Eddie Mahoney, the assistant city editor. “You will have to get fifty dollars somewhere for expenses.” He also told him to catch the train to Indianapolis, and from there he would hopefully find transportation to Dayton.

Hecht lived in a brothel. He spent the next thirty minutes begging his roommates for money, and soon he had forty dollars in cash and was racing for the train station. So were newspaper correspondents from around the country. This had all the makings of a big story.

Hamilton, Ohio, probably around 9
A
.
M
.

Thirty-six miles away from Dayton, Councilman J. Henry Welsh was inspecting the railroad yards when, as the
Hamilton Evening Journal
would put it, he had a premonition that the city was about to flood.
It could hardly be called ESP; after all, it had been raining constantly the previous day, all through Monday and into Tuesday, and there had been that incredible series of tornadoes. A five-year-old who had been following the news and weather might have predicted that Hamilton would soon flood. But in the manner Welsh would later describe it, he just suddenly knew that a flood was absolutely in the making. There was no doubt. He knew.

So he ran from the railroad yards to the police station and asked that they start to ring the fire bells as a warning. Welsh was rebuffed; apparently a hunch wasn't enough for the authorities to go on. Welsh then became an instant modern-day prophet, warning people in the streets that a flood was coming and that everyone should start moving their goods to higher ground now.

9:30
A
.
M
., Dayton, Ohio

George Cleary, an employee at the Apple Electric Company, was walking down Miggs Street when he and a friend spotted a levee on the verge of breaking. They raced to several houses, pounding on doors and telling people that they had to flee now. Either not believing them, or probably thinking it was safer to stay indoors, they wouldn't leave. Cleary and his friend were on the street when a tidal wave came racing toward them.

They sprinted ahead of it for seven blocks until they couldn't run any farther, so they ran into a house that had fifteen other people and began helping everyone move furniture upstairs. But it wasn't long before everyone simply retreated upstairs as the river started coming underneath the doors and swamping the living room.

Meanwhile, the basement of the Bell Telephone Company, where the batteries to the telephone exchange were located, was flooding and the telephone chief decided that the current needed to be shut off before there were electrical shocks and somebody was hurt or killed. The young female telephone operators had been answering the phones, pretty much nonstop, as all of Dayton tried to reach loved ones, but the main fuse was now removed and the phone lines across the city went dead. Dayton residents and workers were officially cut off from civilization, including the twenty women and fourteen men at the telephone company.

9:30
A
.
M
., Columbus, Ohio

The levees hadn't broken, but it was just a matter of time. The Busy Bee restaurant, an early chain restaurant—there were three in existence—sent its workers home, and Frank Williams, a cook, hurried to his house to warn his family of the impending flood. Much of his family was there, although explaining his family—a hundred years later—is a bit challenging.

Williams was described in the papers as living with his stepparents, William and Viola Guy, who were married for thirty-four years. It seems likely that one of them was his real parent rather than both of them being step-parents, or perhaps they had both taken him in as a youngster, but no matter: by 1913, Frank Williams was living with the Guy family.

The Guys had five other children, the oldest being Iva, thirty-three, and the youngest Bert, who was twenty-one. Several of the adult children still lived with the Guys. William Guy—at least judging from the 1910 census records—was a factory laborer, and Viola kept the house. Most of the adult children worked in various jobs at a restaurant, possibly the Busy Bee.

Frank told his family that a flood was certain and urged everyone to take their belongings upstairs. Everyone did, but like it would be for so many people, it was a futile exercise. In the midst of all this action, the river came underneath the door, and then underneath the house. It started floating.

There must have been a lot of screaming and shouting and panicking. There were several family members in the house—Frank, William, Viola, their 28-year-old unmarried daughter Nora, and her nephew and William and Viola's grandson, Luther Wolfe. But by the time they reached the roof, Frank's group numbered well over a dozen, a hodge-podge of neighbors, all aware that their houses were floating.

Under a pounding rain, the group frantically scrambled from one house to another, each wobbling and close to being carried away by the rising flood. Everyone finally reached a house that seemed safe, and so everyone settled in, making themselves as comfortable as anyone could be when you think your life might end any moment, and you're in a torrential downpour and looking off the edge of a two-story home and seeing a river where your street once was.

And then it happened: the house, just like the others, came off its moorings. Worse, it began to float away in the current.

There was nothing anyone could do. The group now numbered thirteen. Frank Williams and the Guy family were a part of that thirteen. So was a woman named Mrs. Hunt and her daughter, May. There was a Nina M. Shipley and her daughter-in-law, and Mrs. Shipley's sister, a Mrs. Vine and three boys who were described as Hungarian. All everyone could do was wait and hope that wherever the current took them, it was somewhere safe. But Viola Gay didn't have much optimism. She handed her stepson her bank book, reasoning that if someone got out of this alive, it might be him, in which case he might need it.

10
A
.
M
., Hamilton, Ohio

If his fellow citizens didn't at first believe Welsh that a flood was coming, some minds changed as the evidence kept mounting. Plus, there was a rumor spreading that a dam had broken north of Hamilton, and everyone was pretty sure that the water behind the dam was coming for them, and they were all going to die.

The rumor started in part because of a completely incorrect message sent to Hamilton, about a dam breaking a hundred miles away. It had been forwarded
the previous evening
to a telegraph office in McGonigle, a tiny town about seven miles northwest of Hamilton. The operator passed it on, and apparently not much was thought of it when it reached Hamilton, because no panic broke out. But the McGonigle operator left it on his desk and, Tuesday morning, when the rivers were dangerously high and it was still raining, his replacement saw the message, thought it hadn't been sent, let his imagination go out of control, and then, because the telegraph lines were down, rushed to Hamilton.

Some accounts have said he took an automobile and broke speed records getting there; others later said the telegraph operator hopped on a railroad hand car. Either way, he reached Hamilton and let them know that a dam had burst, and word of mouth spread.

Some people rushed out of their houses, not fully dressed, running for the nearest hill.

But all of the misinformation out there, along with the way the weather was behaving, did spur people to what was ultimately the right decision: school officials decided to send the pupils home and
undoubtedly many young lives were saved, including that of J. Walter Wack, a high-schooler. He ran home, plopped his schoolbooks on the kitchen floor of his grandparents' house, and then ran to High Street to watch the Great Miami River.

As he recalled to his hometown newspaper fifty years later, “Trees and small sheds and lots of debris floated swiftly down the river, and much of it struck the underneath beams of the bridge. Then they closed the bridge to traffic.”

And as the river grew higher, the garbage against the bridge began piling up.

10
A
.
M
., Washington, D.C.

The telephone bell rang in the office of the National Red Cross at the War Department.

“Miss Boardman, this is the office of the Associated Press,” said the voice on the other end of the phone line. “The Miami River is rising in Ohio, and the town of Dayton is partly under water. Other rivers are rising, and it looks like there might be serious trouble.”

Mabel Boardman took down the information and sent a telegram to Ohio Governor James Cox, asking if he needed a hand, and then she returned to her main focus: getting help to Omaha.

Governor Cox telegraphed a reply, basically saying thanks, but everything's fine.

But a little later, Miss Boardman received another telegram from Cox, which read something to the effect of: matters were getting worse. Another telegram soon followed: the water was still rising, and there were already many deaths. And another: Ohio would be glad to have the assistance of the National Red Cross.

Miss Boardman flew into action. Their director-general, Ernest Bicknell, was on a train somewhere, on his way to Nebraska, but she knew he'd want to eventually head to Ohio, and so she telegraphed a Red Cross executive, Eugene Lies, in Chicago, to travel to Omaha, and a Mr. Edmonds of Cincinnati to take care of the situation in Dayton until Bicknell arrived.

10
A
.
M
., Dayton, Ohio

It was estimated that the Great Miami River, usually a few hundred feet in width, was now three miles wide.

10
A
.
M
., Columbus, Ohio

Governor James Cox was concerned. He knew about LaRue's flooding problems and had heard of a few more communities experiencing some flooding, but the Red Cross was asking him about Dayton?

The Red Cross
had
to be wrong. Dayton was Cox's hometown. Cox, less than a week away from his forty-third birthday and just over two months into his new job as governor, owned the
Dayton Daily News,
an arrangement that probably wouldn't go over well today. But the people of Ohio, if at all bothered that the most powerful person in the state also owned one of the most prominent media outlets, were impressed with their new governor's business acumen and ambition. Cox had managed to buy a newspaper at the age of twenty-eight, in large part due to a former employer who believed in him enough to invest $6,000 in his quest to raise $26,000 to buy the
Dayton Evening News.
Cox had some money saved up himself, borrowed yet more money, and then managed to raise the rest of the money by selling stock in the paper. If media critics ever questioned whether it was healthy for the governor of a state to own a city newspaper, or if the cozy relationship hurt the
Dayton Daily News
' journalistic integrity, there's no question that during the flood and its immediate aftermath, it was a connection that would end up helping everyone, if only because Cox had made his mark in Dayton and was a passionate advocate for the city.

It seems likely that Cox was spending most of his time checking on LaRue and monitoring the state of affairs in his current residence, Columbus; but as far as his memoirs and other documentation suggest, he didn't yet realize that the state was in serious disarray. After all, he lived in a time before CNN, smart phones, and the Internet, and Dayton's rudimentary phone service was already cut off. Cox would have relied mostly on telephone calls and telegrams, and very few had landed in his office, as the regions in the most trouble had already lost service.

The city workhouse—which held prisoners behind bars for nonviolent crimes like drunkenness and embezzlement—was in the process of moving its female prisoners in boats to the county jail while the male inmates remained behind. The river was rising fast, and because of that, about twenty prisoners from the workhouse were ordered to
reinforce the levee near the prison. It was a nice but pointless attempt to delay nature. The river not only rushed over the levee, it caught the prisoners and washed them away.

Most of the inmates struggled toward a house and then began swimming from house to house, escaping the flood and, even though it was unintentional, the city workhouse.

At least two men appeared to have drowned, observed Casper Sareu, a prisoner who managed to find a roof to hole up on. Sareu, being dumped on by the rain, trapped on a house that looked as if it would soon be overcome by the flood, was no more free than he had been when he was behind bars. In fact, the prison was starting to look pretty good to him. But for now, he would remain trapped on the roof of a house, sharing the predicament of thousands of other of his fellow citizens.

10:30
A
.
M
., Pulaski, Pennsylvania

Just over the Ohio border, the Shenango River was on a tear, overflowing its banks just under Pulaski's bridge, sending people out of their houses at the crack of dawn. But at 10:30
A
.
M
., Miss Lena Book, a news reporter with the paper, telephoned her editors in New Castle, Pennsylvania, to warn them that the Shenango River was rising rapidly, and that, if they hadn't already, they would soon see flooding.

10:30
A
.
M
., Dayton, Ohio

People were panicking. Someone at the Beckel House once again shouted “Fire,” and this time the warning seemed serious, causing the guests to flee into the rain and up the fire escapes onto their roof, and then scamper to the roofs of adjoining buildings. There the scared guests stood, among them Melville Shreves, the office supplies salesman from nearby Lima, and C. C. McDowell from places unknown, drenched as the sky dumped whatever it could on them, and they waited … and waited … and collectively everyone realized that there was no fire.