Dade County FlArchives History - Books .....Sunrise And Disaster, Chapter 14 1965 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/fl/flfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00001.html#0000031 April 5, 2009, 4:46 pm Book Title: Memories Of Old Miami CHAPTER FOURTEEN Sunrise and Disaster THE whole eastern sky had the color of polished brass. I had never seen a sunrise like that morning of Sept. 17, 1926, and I have never seen such a sunrise since. If I ever see another one I'd be scared, for I'll know that disaster is approaching. We had known for several days that a hig [sic] hurricane was coming up out of the eastern Caribbean. Richard W. Gray, in charge of the Miami weather bureau, had been in touch with the storm through wireless reports from ships. Mr. Gray used a powerful wireless station on Miami Beach, at Collins Avenue and 21st Street, to keep in touch with ships in the vicinity of storms. By getting barometer readings* wind direction and velocity from four or five ships, he could pretty well plot the position of a hurricane. By following it in this way from day to day he could determine a storm's size and plot its direction. The newspapers carried Mr. Gray's reports, but with the greatest Boom in the world in progress, editors had little space to give storm warnings. It had been 16 years since Miami had had a hurricane, and during this time it had grown from a town to an important city. A northeast breeze began to raise a silvery ripple on Biscayne Bay during the afternoon of Sept. 17, but otherwise we had no noticeable signs during the daylight hours that a dangerous storm was heading toward the Florida peninsula. Even as darkness fell I don't believe many Miamians thought much about a hurricane. For although Mr. Gray had warned of a dangerous storm, I don't remember of seeing anybody boarding up or taking other precautions. Most people then living in Miami had never seen a hurricane and knew nothing about one of these big tropical storms. So, Mr. Gray was like a prophet calling in the wilderness; and I feel sure that the inhabitants of the wilderness would have given his voice more heed. Mr. Gray was a slender, scholarly man who, like J. E. Lummus the banker, always carried an umbrella. Ho had opened the Miami weather bureau in the old Miami post office at NE First Avenue and NE First Street - where the First Federal Savings and Loan Association is now located - in 1911. Until the Boom got underway everybody in Miami recognized Mr. Gray. One day I met him on the street. "Mr. Gray," I said, "I see that you're carrying your umbrella even though you predicted fair weather today." "Hoyt," Mr. Gray said, "you know we're here on the edge of the Atlantic and it's only 100 miles across the peninsula to the Gulf. It's possible for a squall to come in unexpected from either direction." We lacked the communications and the advanced weather predicting apparatus in those days that we have now. Although Mr. Gray was respected as a man, people paid only slight attention to his weather forecasting. And, since Miami had not experienced a hurricane since Mr. Gray opened the weather bureau, people probably classed his hurricane forecasting along with his daily weather forecasting. The wind began to blow a little harder after sundown. By eight o'clock squalls were, lashing the coconut fronds; and people who emerged from the movie houses at nine o'clock had their faces stung by pelting rain drops. The squalls followed closer behind one another. There was no change in the wind direction. The cheap barometer I owned kept falling. I knew from experience that when the barometer drops two hundredths of an inch an hour, with the wind holding a steady direction, that you can be sure a tropical storm is heading in your direction. By about 11 p.m. we ware getting hard squalls accompanied by full gale winds. I got on the telephone and called Mr. Gray. "Mr. Gray,, this is Hoyt," I said. "Looks like we're in for a bad storm." "It's a real, bad one," Mr. Gray said. "It's just off shore and it's coming right for us. Tell your neighbors to stay indoors and to take all precautions." There were six of us that night in my parents' new home at 221 NE 17th Street. Mother and Dad were spending the summer at the Stephen Foster Hotel at White Springs, on the Suwanee River. My brother John and sister Alice were living there, as well as my wife and two-year-old daughter, Janice. And my mother-in-law, Mrs. W. F. Fleming, had come over to spend the night. Realizing that we were going to have a hurricane, my brother John and I brought in boards from the garage and nailed them across the windows on the exposed side and stuffed pillows between them and the panes. This was a precaution we had learned from the pioneers. The windows wouldn't blow in unless struck by a flying object. I can't remember what time it was, but it didn't seem long after midnight before we were getting a steady wind of full gale and sometimes of hurricane intensity. The lights went out and the telephone wires began to go down. The wind grew stronger and stronger, roaring so loudly that you had to shout to make yourself heard. For light we had only candles. Now there was no let up in the wind; only the steady roar, accompanied by the snapping of branches, the sounds of ripping, cracking, pinging, framming and. tumbling. We knew that outside great destruction was taking place, yet we felt safe because we knew that Dad wouldn't buy anything but a strong house. But we weren't expecting the drenching that we got. Leaks began soon after the hurricane winds hit us. First we set basins around to catch the water; but soon that, was hopeless. Water was pouring down - salty water that had been blown from the surface of the ocean and from Biscayne Bay. We took the rugs off the floor and covered the new piano that Dad had just bought my sister Alice. When daylight came the piano was the only dry object in the house. For the entire shingle type tarpaper roof had been ripped off by this time and water spilled in everywhere. When daylight came we could see several inches of water standing about the house, but it was not until the lull came at about eight o'clock that we realized that the tide had come up all the way from Biscayne Bay, three blocks away. We went outside to inspect the damage around us. Trees had been uprooted. Wires were down. Debris lay everywhere. Other people came out of their houses, too. They looked up at the blue sky and saw birds flying about. They thought that the storm was over. So did my brother John. John backed his new Packard sedan out of the garage and drove my wife and mother-in-law to 1520 NW Fifth Street, my mother-in-law's home, to see how it had fared. Because I had spent so much time around the pioneers, and especially the Conchs, I realized that the center of the storm was just passing over. John wouldn't believe it, but I refused to let my two-year-old daughter go with them. After they left I began making preparations for the second half of the hurricane. Since the wind had come from the northeast as the storm center approached, I knew that the wind would come from the southwest after the center passed over. My sister Alice, little Janice and I had to ride out the second half of the storm together. (Alice now Mrs. Julius Kaiser, lives at 775 NE 76th Street, while Janice, now Mrs. Walter DeBorde, lives at 1520 NW 175th Street.) It was not until afternoon, when the hurricane had passed), that we heard how narrowly the rest of the family escaped with their lives. After finding the Fleming home dry, they were approaching the Flagler Street bridge from the west when the back side of the hurricane hit. John said he saw a wall of water, "at least 15 feet high," coming up the Miami River. The wave, the crest of a hurricane tide, hit the bridge furiously and broke around it, trapping the Packard. John got Mrs. Fleming and my wife out of the car and they waded - they were swept - into a drugstore on the south side of Flagler Street. But no sooner than they got inside the whole front of the building caved in. Locking arms, they made their way across the flooded street into the old Gautier Funeral Home where they rode out the rest of the storm. Many others were not so fortunate. Scores caught in the hurricane wind and tide lost their lives. The total number of lives lost on Sept. 18, 1926, was later set at 124; but nobody will ever know the total. For several years after the 1926 hurricane skeletons were being found among the debris left in mangroves along Biscayne Bay. At least a thousand were injured, many of them seriously. Flimsy structures disappeared all together, Many of those who survived couldn't find a piece of two-by-four that, they could identify as part of their home. One of Miami's downtown skyscrapers, the recently finished 15-story Meyer-Kaiser building, was so badly twisted that the top seven stories had to be removed. I remember how clear the sky became that afternoon after the hurricane had passed. The sun came out, very bright and terribly hot. I'll never forget how bright the full moon came up that evening of Sept. 18. The hurricane had washed the atmosphere clean. You could read a newspaper in the moonlight. It was so bright that I made my way downtown through the debris that evening to see hundreds of workmen cleaning up the streets. They were working in the moonlight. No other light was necessary. I've never seen so much litter or so much broken glass. A million shattered pieces caught the moonlight and flashed it into my eyes. I looked up at the skyscrapers. Suddenly I couldn't believe my eyes. There was the moon shining right through the upperpart of the Meyer-Kaiser Building. It seemed that the top half had been blown out. Those who saw the effects of the 1926 hurricane never again doubted the terrible destructive powers of these monsters. That hurricane may have been the death knell for the Florida Boom, but it was the beginning of a more substantial era. At least Southeast Florida is now built on a substantial foundation. The new building code saw to that. Additional Comments: Extracted from: "Memories of Old Miami" by Hoyt Frazure as told to Nixon Smiley Reprinted from a series of articles first appearing in Sunday Magazine of The Miami Herald Undated, but circa 1965 File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/fl/dade/history/1965/memories/sunrisea46nms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.net/flfiles/ File size: 10.9 Kb