Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (7 page)

A jail sentence would be the period on what had so far been a spectacularly interesting life. Patterson was born on a family farm near Dayton in 1844, and although he grew up with money, he understood the value of a dollar and what it took to earn it. As a young man, Patterson spent time working as a toll collector on the Miami and Erie Canal, and in 1864, as was common then for many youth who didn't enlist to fight, he spent a hundred days as a Northern soldier in the Civil War, taking on duties away from combat, which allowed more veteran soldiers to stay on the front lines. He was a school teacher around 1870, and then in his mid-thirties he joined his brother to develop coal and iron mines in Jackson County, Ohio.

From there, he went to Coalton, Ohio, to become the general manager for the company store at the Southern Coal and Iron Company. In running the shop, the future business magnate recognized the need for something like a cash register machine. The store was losing money despite doing brisk business, and Patterson read that manufacturers John and James S. Ritty had invented a machine that would tabulate sales as they were made, and that it also had a receptacle for money. Patterson ordered two machines, loved what he saw, and, with his brother, immediately bought stock of the National Manufacturing Company. Two years later, in 1884, they bought enough that they were given control. They weren't thrilled with the plant, however, and decided to build a better factory on better land. They selected a site near the family farm, on land where they had played, worked, and grown up.

Ultimately, their company became one of the world's most successful enterprises, a company still thriving today as a global technology firm that focuses on ATMs and software and other technological marvels that are light-years away from the simple cash register. Patterson would have approved the changes. He was all about following the money.

In 1913, Patterson's business, long since renamed the National Cash Register Company, which everyone referred to by its initials, NCR, employed 5,500 and, aside from the main factory in Dayton, had branches in Toronto and Berlin. But it was Dayton where NCR's success was impossible not to notice. Its headquarters covered thirty-six acres of floor space in fifteen buildings on a manufacturing property occupying 140 acres of ground. Fortunately, for Patterson and everyone in Dayton, the headquarters was on the highest ground of those 140 acres.

Patterson was a tough competitor, but he was a good boss and became better as the years progressed—especially if you compare him to other employers of the age like George Pullman, inventor of the Pullman Sleeper Car, which allowed people to sleep in trains. Pullman's claim to evil-boss fame stems from the company town that he had built just south of Chicago for the employees of his railroad car business. The town really was a town. There were churches, a library, and places to shop; but as landlords go, Pullman was the worst. In 1894, when he cut employees' wages by twenty-five percent, he didn't lower his employees' rent; there was a strike and violence that ended
after President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to restore order. After Pullman died on October 19, 1897, he was interred in a pit eight feet deep with floors and walls of steel-reinforced concrete. Why? People were afraid his former employees would try to desecrate his corpse. Patterson also acquits himself quite well if you compare him to Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the owners and operators of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, where the men employed immigrant women, paying them next to nothing and keeping them in a building that was locked from the outside; on March 25, 1911, two years to the day before the start of the Great Flood of 1913, there was a fire in the building that killed 146 people, 17 men and 129 women, ranging from forty-eight down to eleven years old.

Around the time Pullman was dealing with his strike, Patterson had a major epiphany after a $50,000 shipment of cash registers was returned from England because the mechanics were faulty; acid had been poured into them, apparently by a disgruntled employee or perhaps several workers.

Patterson went to the floor of the factory to see how it had happened that his employees would turn in such shoddy machinery; and in looking at their work environment, he had to admit that if he were his own employee, he wouldn't care about what he was producing. Patterson raised wages, cleaned the factory, added ventilation, and made dangerous manufacturing equipment safer. He soon went further: dressing rooms and showers, available for employees to use on company time, were introduced, and he opened a factory cafeteria that served subsidized hot lunches. Eventually he went even further: long before corporate retreats became part of the lexicon, NCR employees occasionally went on morale-boosting field trips, like to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The National Cash Register Company started a lending library and started offering free medical care. If those “Best Boss Ever” mugs had been around, Patterson would have had a few hundred in his cabinets.

He was a visionary in other ways as well. It was once estimated that from 1910 until 1930, one-sixth of the business executives in the United States had once worked for Patterson's company. Patterson was a pioneer in sales, giving salespeople scripts and urging his staff to look at the sales cycle as a four-stage process: the initial approach, the proposition, the product demonstration, and closing the deal.

But Patterson wasn't perfect. He could be petty and vindictive, and just plain odd, taking the eccentric-millionaire-boss stereotype to new heights, or depths. When some of his executives weren't around, and Patterson found their desks to be too messy, he'd dump the contents of the drawers into the trash, so they could start work fresh. When he got the idea that everyone should learn to ride a horse properly, which he believed would help his executives master other facets of life, Patterson started making them come to the factory before 6
A
.
M
., for an early morning ride. Company lore has it that Patterson even fired an employee for not being able to ride a horse properly; another employee, he is said to have terminated for not knowing why a flag was flying a certain way.

One of Patterson's righthand men, Charles Palmer, a personal trainer in England before they met, enabled his quirks. Palmer claimed he could read faces, and; so the story goes, Patterson asked Palmer to read the faces of his executives, and then, based on some of those “readings,” fired several stunned men.

Patterson, who became something of a health nut later in life, had his employees weighed and measured every six months. Those who were underweight were given free malted milk. Combs and brushes, sterilized every day, were available for grooming, and whenever it rained, company umbrellas were given to female workers going home. Palmer also, with Patterson's blessings, banned bread and butter, tea and coffee and salt and pepper from sales meetings (and replaced them with what?), which didn't go over well with the sales folk. Hugh Chalmers, an NCR vice president who had worked his way up through the company from an office boy, overruled that decision. When Patterson got wind of this, he canned Chalmers and several other top sales coffee-loving executives. Chalmers, who was pulling in $72,000 in salary every year, a fortune at the time, was infuriated and vowed to bring Patterson down.

This was all started over, remember, drinks and condiments.

Five years later, Chalmers, now making automobiles at the Chalmers Motor Company in Detroit, got his chance to exact revenge. When Patterson was taken to court for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, Chalmers was a convincing key government witness during the fiftyday court case, in which a grand jury took just ten hours to declare
Patterson and his executives corrupt. Patterson and most of the executives on trial were sentenced to a year in jail.

In previous years Patterson had dined with heads of state, but now people across the country were reading the headline
INDICTED CASH REGISTER HEAD.
Below the awkwardly worded headline was Patterson's photo, showing a somber-looking man with bifocals, a receding hairline, and a neatly trimmed white mustache. The headline, photo, and brief caption explaining his conviction had been syndicated, appearing across the country almost every week. Even as late as March 20, the
Atchison Daily Globe,
in Kansas, had run the news item, which was by now over a month old. Word was gradually getting out. John H. Patterson was a sleazy white-collar crook.

There was a downpour of rain in Dayton on Monday; it had been raining since around midnight, in fact, but most people weren't thinking at all about any serious flooding. But if Patterson had been privy to a flood coming his way, it would have seemed appropriate. He was drowning, all right.

Sometime in the evening, Fort Wayne, Indiana

The St. Marys River finally reached the first floor of the Allen County Orphans Home; once it did, the teachers hurried the children upstairs. It was about this time when two men and a boat arrived, sent by Henry E. Branning, one of the city's trustees whose title was Overseer of the Poor. The boat was small, though, and it could only fit six people, including the two men. Mrs. Ida Overmeyer, the headmistress, did her quick calculations, figuring for sixty-two children and about a dozen adults. Just for the children, assuming the two men were in the boat with four children, fifteen trips would be required. With darkness falling, and the water only grazing the first floor of a sturdy brick building, it didn't seem necessary to go to all that trouble for a little flooding, and it seemed the children would be safer remaining where they were.

It was a tough call, and ultimately the wrong one, but Mrs. Overmeyer understandably decided that they would remain where they were. The children seemed happy, and they had ample food and water for the time being, and coal for the three stoves that had been moved upstairs, although it was in short supply. The flooding couldn't
continue much longer, and they could revisit the idea of leaving the orphanage in the morning.

Sometime in the evening, Cincinnati, Ohio

The Queen City hadn't seen much flooding, but there was plenty of wind: witness a 22-year-old male whose name, according to the papers, was Valenti Boeh, son of a cafe store owner. One can only wonder what went through his mind in the last moments of his life as he was blown off the street and into the raging waters of the Ohio and Erie Canal.

7:10
P
.
M
., Makanda, Illinois

Whether technically part of the storm system affecting the Midwest, Northeast, and parts of the South, or just some additional fun that nature wanted to throw into the mix, a storm with 75-mile-an-hour winds ripped through the village. Almost nonstop lightning kept the sky bright, and a funnel cloud emerged, possibly the seventh or thirteenth tornado, depending, again, on what sources one wants to go with. The wind targeted an Illinois Central freight train with forty-one cars, blowing twenty-one of them off the track and obliterating ten of them, such was the power of this tornado.

The contents of the train and much of the village spilled onto the track, fields, and roads but were soon washed away by three inches of rain.

Thirty-nine farmers saw either their house or barn blown to bits, ten people were injured, and three people were killed.

7:30
P
.
M
., Peru, Indiana

The flooding didn't seem all that serious to many people in this town of approximately sixteen thousand, located seventy miles north of Indianapolis and sixty miles southwest of Ft. Wayne. It was probably easy to dismiss something like the weather. The bustling community was on the move, with plenty to distract it. The city had five public schools, several society clubs, a much-admired library, and numerous manufacturing plants. Six rail lines, three electric and three steam, brought goods and passengers into the city. Peru supported three daily newspapers and two weeklies, and in recent years, the community had opened up a city park with electric lights
and a bandstand. The fire station had just been modernized in the last year, purchasing two trucks, with pumps that could spray five hundred gallons of water per minute. It was a growing, dynamic city that would soon be covered in muddy river water. The elevenman police force would be tested as never before.

But on the evening of March 24, Peru residents had no idea what was coming. Nobody could turn to a 24-hour news network to learn that some random people had drowned in communities several hours away and start putting the dots together that this was not an average seasonal flood. There were no radio stations to listen to, although radio technology was making inroads into some levels of society, with the
Titanic
memorably using their radio room almost a year earlier. Information was dribbling in to the local newspapers, which were preparing issues for the next morning. People could look out their window or get the occasional phone call or telegram to learn what was going on away from their own home.

The river ambushed Peru in a surprise attack, with the river storming the city all at once, versus gradually coming into the streets. Officials would conclude that part of the reason the river rushed out of its banks was a railroad bridge that had been built too low. Debris piled up, creating a dam that eventually burst, allowing an obscene amount of water to come into the city at full force.

The water attacked downtown Peru. Clarence Breen, the section foreman for the railroad leading into Peru, was one of the first to see it coming. He didn't stick around to regard it for long, of course, since he and his crew were too busy running for higher ground. Up until then, the 33-year-old and his men had been clearing the railroad of debris. The storm that had come through the day before, part of the tempest that hit Omaha, Nebraska, littered the tracks with ripped-off barn roofs, fragments of horse-drawn buggies, and, mostly, downed tree branches. Breen and his crew had spent much of Sunday night and Monday tending to this task.