Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (6 page)

Charles Dickens did no favors to any suicidal readers. In his first novel,
The Pickwick Papers,
a character known as the dismal man says to Mr. Pickwick: “Did it ever strike you, on such a morning as this, that drowning would be happiness and peace?”

Mr. Pickwick, to his credit, is horrified at the suggestion, but then the dismal man explains his rationale, and darned if he doesn't make drowning sound like a day at the beach: “I have thought so, often. The calm, cool water seems to me to murmur an invitation to repose and rest. A bound, a splash, a brief struggle; there is an eddy for an instant, it gradually subsides into a gentle ripple; the waters have closed above your head, and the world has closed upon your miseries and misfortunes forever.”

And drowning hasn't been limited to writers' imaginations. The twentieth-century poet Hart Crane—who was a fan of Eliot's
The Waste Land,
incidentally—committed suicide by jumping overboard in the Gulf of Mexico. He should have known better than to drown himself: Crane grew up in Garrettsville, Ohio, which had its share of flood in 1913 when he was a fourteen-year-old lad. But the most famous writer to drown on purpose was British author Virginia Woolf, who, on March 28, 1941, wrote a last good-bye to her husband, filled her overcoat's pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse.

It's easy to see why drowning might be considered a relatively peaceful way to go. There is no gun, no knife, no being clocked on the head by a tire iron. No gore or gratuitous bloodshed, and often drowning occurs underneath a spectacular vista, as the sunset shimmers over the water or near a grove of trees or a burbling brook or even in a swimming pool where often the sound of children's laughter can be heard.

But, in reality, drowning isn't pleasant at all. It must be one of the most miserable, agonizing, and unpleasant ways to die. You really don't want to know what it's like.

If you were to know, you would discover that your first inclination, even if you were attempting to drown on purpose, would be to automatically hold your breath and buy yourself some time. If you are in danger of drowning, and you are lucky, you aren't panicking, which means you could buy some time that might help your situation. For instance, where are the bubbles you're releasing going? If you're confused and don't know which way is up and which way is down, follow the bubbles.

Unfortunately, if you are drowning, especially in a fast-moving river, you probably are panicking—you're moving fast, maybe 25 miles an hour or faster, and you can't see because mud, sand, and silt are blocking your view, all while the current is tossing you every which way, further hindering your ability to figure out which way is up, so it would be virtually impossible not to panic. If you are in strong physical condition and drowning in a river, you may last a full minute or two holding your breath. If you are unhealthy or elderly, or your lungs aren't very strong, you may only be able to hold your breath for a handful of seconds, which is probably a blessing. Either way, while you're not inhaling and doing what you can not to drown, carbon dioxide is building up in your muscles and organs and being carried through your bloodstream to your lungs.

Your lungs do not like carbon dioxide. Which means, like it or not (and you won't like it), your oxygen-starved brain will send a signal to your mouth, which will then, to your utter horror, open.

You will then swallow water, and, desperately wanting air, you will gasp, and you will panic as water, not air, fills your lungs. As your throat spasms, trying to block the path of the water, your stomach will begin filling up. So will your bloodstream. Not that you'll care to know the definition at this point, but
hyperkalemia
is setting in, which means there's a concentration of the electrolyte potassium in your blood, and it's elevated. The water is breaking down your red blood cells, and potassium is being released throughout your body. This is bad because on top of drowning, you're also dying of potassium poisoning, which means that your muscles and nerves are about to malfunction. The potassium and the lack of oxygen will cause your already wildly beating heart to beat irregularly.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the lack of oxygen will then begin to shut down your brain; and from there, yes, the poets and authors are right: drowning can be described as rather peaceful. You're still alive, and your heart and lungs are still trying to work, but at this point you don't know that.

But during the time when you are conscious, and you know exactly what is happening, drowning is a grisly way to go, and drowning in a river flood, instead of a still pool of water, has even more challenges. Hagner, Garrison, and the Rothenberger brothers were in a stew of destruction. Roy may have found himself stuck in underbrush while he was drowning; Roscoe might have been struck by branches, stones, bricks, electrical wiring, and whatever else was caught in the torrent. Garrison and Hagner may well have died not from drowning but from slamming into a bed of rock or a pile of debris.

Ray and Roscoe Rothenberger, Wallace Garrison, and John Hagner were among the first, and possibly the first, drowning victims of the Great Flood of 1913. There wasn't anything peaceful or romantic about it.

TUESDAY,

MARCH 25, 1913

Chapter Three

Some of the People in the Way

Monday, March 24

Cincinnati, late afternoon

Standing in the rain after school, several boys found themselves on an embankment near a sewer tunnel. They could as easily have been exploring some of the nearby factories or following the nearby railroad and daydreaming about riding the boxcars. But the sewer tunnel was far more interesting, for below them was a pond that hadn't been there a couple of days before. Boys being boys, ten-year-old Ralph Korengel and his friends felt compelled to check it out.

That having been done, the boys started tossing pieces of wood into the pond, watching each piece swiftly sail into the open sewer tunnel and disappear into the darkness. Then Ralph picked up a railroad tie, or, in layman's terms, a wooden plank that the steel part of railroad tracks rest on. Thinking the wooden plank might float nicely, Ralph pushed it over the edge of the dirt cliff. Unfortunately for him, he also went tumbling down the side of the embankment and into the pond.

Even if Ralph could have swum, it wouldn't have mattered: he was sucked right into the sewer tunnel. Screaming for help, the remaining boys raced to the factories, one of them being a rubber factory where Ralph's father worked as a foreman. At least two men, Edward Miller and Mike Cassidy, came running to help.

Quickly surveying the situation, Miller and Cassidy decided that they needed to rush to the other side of the sewer, three blocks away, where Ralph would come out and, with any luck, still be alive.

Inside the tunnel, Ralph was fighting to keep his head above water and losing badly, until he suddenly saw his railroad tie floating past him. He lunged for it and hung on.

Above ground, the boys and men reached the end of the tunnel, where water spilled into Duck Creek. There was no sign of Ralph. The boys or men would later report that another ten minutes would pass. If that's true—it may have just seemed like ten minutes—it makes one wonder what Ralph was doing all that time. Maybe he was able to stop himself from shooting down the tunnel for a while and attempt to crawl back the way he came. In any case, Ralph shot out of the tunnel and into Duck Creek, and, while he didn't look well, he was alive. Before being carried down Duck Creek, Ralph managed to grab a hanging tree branch, which quickly snapped, and he was swept away again. The boys and men gave chase.

Ralph grabbed another branch, but that broke too, and Duck Creek, which wanted him badly, carried him further until he crashed into the side of a tree. Screaming for help, Ralph then sank out of sight. Miller and Cassidy dropped into the creek, the water coming up to their necks, and fished him out. Ralph didn't appear to be breathing.

Miller and Cassidy carried Ralph to a nearby barrel, draping his body over it so that water easily spilled out of his lungs. It took a few minutes, but Ralph eventually came to.

A doctor was called, and just before Ralph was taken home, he weakly offered instructions to everyone. “Don't tell Mother I nearly was drowned,” Ralph pleaded. “Just say I got wet.”

Ralph Korengel, who would live a good long life and pass away in 1980, lived in a world in which swimming was not yet much of a sport, and as a pastime was only now starting to become mainstream. In 1909, the YMCA—which was still off-limits to anyone without a
Y chromosome—began a campaign to teach every man and boy in the country to swim. But in May of 1913, Syracuse, New York's park commission let it be known that girls were going to be given swimming lessons, and three months later, forty-eight girls in Janesville, Wisconsin, participated in the town's first swimming lessons. Some universities were even making swimming lessons a required part of the curriculum, a trend that really caught on for a while. At its peak, in 1977, forty-two percent of colleges had a swimming requirement. Just five years later, the number of colleges that mandated swimming before handing out a diploma had plummeted to only eight percent. Today, there are just several universities and colleges across the country that enforce swimming. Some high schools require students to swim, but many don't, and as budgets shrink and public swimming pools close, arguably, large swaths of the population aren't learning to swim. There are some understandable arguments for not forcing students to swim—not everyone is physically adept enough to swim well enough to pass a test, some people don't feel comfortable being in a bathing suit in public—and yet, anyone who goes throughout life not knowing how to swim is putting their life at risk. That's underscored every time there is a drowning in the news, of course, but during the summer of 2010, when six teenagers in the Red River drowned in Shreveport, Louisiana, it put a spotlight on how many African-Americans don't know how to swim: seventy percent of black youth, according to many of the reports that came out shortly after the tragedy. Children at a family get-together waded into the Red River, and one of the teenagers stepped off a ledge, falling into water almost twenty-five feet deep. A cousin tried to rescue him but also slipped over the ledge. More teenaged relatives and friends attempted to help the two, but they didn't know how to swim and drowned. The grownups watched, horror-stricken, but none of them knew how to swim either.

It wasn't a tough call for many communities to include the female persuasion in swimming lessons. Women and girls drowned just as easily as men and boys, although it did seem to usually be the latter who did drown. In a culture in which girls were considered nonathletic, dainty, and pure, the boys took more risks. One syndicated article that ran in May 1913, around the country in papers like Frederick, Maryland's
Daily News,
observed: “Every mother of a boy who is near
enough a swimming pool is haunted during the summer by the fear that her child will meet his death.… Every boy likes to show his prowess by going out farther than the others and oftentimes this venturesome spirit is the cause of drowning.”

In fact, since at least the 1880s, the term “drowning season” has been employed to describe the summertime. As
Washington Post
noted in a July 15, 1913 editorial, two days earlier, eight people in Boston had drowned and four more near Philadelphia, “and every large city reported one or more similar accidents on the same day.” The editorial pointed out that boys who grew up near the wharves of a big city, “the kind we call street urchins, rarely die from drowning. They learn to swim when they are 7 or 8 years old, and they never forget how to take care of themselves in the water.”

The editorial concluded with a chilling suggestion that was clearly influenced by the March and April floods in the country just a few months before: “Both boys and girls should be taught to swim, not only in bathing suits, but with heavy clothes on their bodies.”

Nobody could argue that. In fact, the phrase “don't rock the boat” appears to have started because so many people didn't know how to swim, and the last thing you wanted, when you were climbing into a tiny vessel floating in a muddy, fast-moving current, was for the boat to rock.

March 24, Dayton, Ohio

John H. Patterson wasn't preparing for a flood. He was preparing to go to jail.

Several weeks earlier, on February 13, Patterson, the founder of Dayton's famed National Cash Register Company, and his right-hand man, sales manager Thomas J. Watson, who would someday create a little company known as IBM, were found guilty in an anti-trust suit, accused of creating a monopoly.

This was not, at least not for Patterson's competition, simply about trying to get a piece of the pie of the lucrative cash register market in an ethical and legal way. If the charges against Patterson were true, and there is ample evidence that they were, Patterson's salesmen literally threatened their competitors' salesmen. They bribed freight agents to hold up shipments of the other guy's products and then poured sand
in their competitors' machines to put them out of order. Patterson's men then opened offices next door to new companies selling cash registers with super cheap prices that would knock them out of business. They hired salesmen at rival companies and paid them to spy on their employer and report back to NCR. Patterson's tactics were ugly but effective. By 1905, when Patterson was sixty-one, it was believed that NCR had about ninety-five percent of the domestic cash register market.

In 1913, there had been a lengthy court case, after which a judge sentenced Patterson to a year in prison. His attorneys were appealing the conviction, but the 69-year-old was facing the very real possibility that on top of a $5,000 fine, negligible for a man like Patterson, he might soon be sitting in a cell at the nearby Miami County Jail in Troy, Ohio for a full year, with common criminals as bunkmates. This was not a luxury hotel for white-collar criminals—the term white-collar criminal wouldn't even be coined until 1939—but a jail with dirt floors. (In October 1913, Wilbur Ballard, a sixteen-year-old in jail for stealing a horse, would tunnel his way out with a spoon.) In the 1920s, one criminal attorney-turned-bootlegger, George Remus, would spend some time in the Miami County jail and call it a “dirty hell hole,” and one presumes it wasn't any better and may just have been even worse when Patterson was facing the prospects of living there. But if he was worried, he didn't show it. When he was convicted in court, he was very calm, much more so than the agitated spectators, and after receiving his sentence, Patterson thanked the court for their service, and when the judge asked if he wanted to speak further, he replied, “I have nothing to say, your Honor,” and he sat down.