Hurricane Audrey Remembered, History: Cameron Parish, Louisiana Source: Lake Charles American Press Sept 15, 2003 Pg. 1 Submitted by Kathy Tell Date Submitted: Jan 2006 **** Legal Notice **** ** ********************************************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ********************************************** ** ~~~~~~ THROUGH GENEVA’S EYES Audrey’s aftermath had own set of challenges BY GENEVA GRIFFITH AMERICAN PRESS EDITOR’S NOTE: Geneva Griffith is retiring as the longtime Cameron Parish correspondent for the American Press. Her journalism career began in 1956 with the Cameron Pilot; later, she began a longtime association with the American Press as well. Perhaps no story she wrote has had more lasting impact than her harrowing, and candid, firstperson account of surviving Hurricane Audrey in 1957. Though she wrote it in 1987 on the 30 th anniversary of the storm, the memories were still fresh for her. In conjunction with her retirement, the story is reprinted here, in the conclusion of a two-part story that began in Sunday’s American Press. A string of orange beads had become caught on the next higher limb. I spent the rest of the day watching those beads swing in the wind and staring at the snake. As the water inched higher, the snake slithered closer to my son. I began to plan how I could jump and catch the limb in front of the snake before he could get to Leslie. We watched all day for rescue planes. I asked my husband if he thought help would come. "I don’t think so, because I don’t believe anyone knows," he said. "I think everyone is dead but us." It seemed as if we were caught up in the end of the world. But I remembered that when God had ended the world with the Great Flood and only Noah and his family were saved. He had promised that this would never happen again. By this time I had a high fever, which along with the AUDREY: After hurricane passed, 30 acres of land was all the Griffiths owned terrified state of mind, made my thinking quite incoherent. The fury recedes As the eye of the storm passed, everything became eerily quiet — a welcome relief from the awful roar we had endured for hours. D.W. cautioned us about losing our hold on the tree. It was not long before the other side of the storm hit, but this did not seem to be as fierce as the first part of the hurricane. By this time, I was more numb and had very little feeling left. The water slowly began receding. We saw the top of a cedar fence post emerge from the water, and later the top of the ridge on which our house had stood came out. A roof had settled at a 45-degree angle to the tree. We climbed down onto it, huddling under a piece of our living room carpet D.W. had found. I do not ever remember being so cold, and to this day I can endure the heat, but not the cold. The first land we saw come out of the water was a piece of ridge to the west of where our house had stood. D.W. pointed to it. "I am coming back and will build my house on that piece of land," he said. I looked at him. I thought he was crazy, and said so. "Well, I’m not," I said. "If I ever get out of this tree, I am going to put miles between me and Cameron Parish." I later had to eat those words. A tearful rebuilding I came back. I remember what D.W.’s great aunt Dice Jones had often said: " Don’t ever sell your land. That is the most valuable possession you have." When Audrey was over, our 30 acres of land was literally the only thing we had left in the world. The first people we saw after the storm were two young men picking their way across the ridge heading west. D.W waded waist deep through the water up to the ridge to meet them. These men said they were oilfield workers and had passed the night down at Uncle Buster Welch’s house. They said Uncle Buster, Aunt Dora and their three children were safe; but Bernice Peyton, who babysat with Cherie at our home each day, had drowned. Her husband Coon had survived. The men said there was no sign of Uncle Shine and Aunt Lita Welch, who lived in the house just east of ours. D.W. told them that I had a crushed ankle and that Cherie and I both had high fevers and help would be needed to get us out. Some men arrived to help us to South Cameron High School, exactly a mile west of our home, where other survivors were gathering. The two young men had reported our situation, and the rescuers brought a school chair with them to carry me back. We waded out of the woods in waist-deep water and picked our way across the top of the ridge. The litter and debris of what once had been houses made the going difficult. Eventually the chair was abandoned, and I had to hop along on one bare foot while holding the two men. I remember passing what had been the two-story Stephen Carter home, now unrecognizable because the second story was sitting on the ground where the first story had been. Though the whole south side was gone, we could see the upstairs bedroom with the covers and spread still on the bed in perfect order. Outside the high school, the water was still so deep that we had to pick our way by walking on top of the brick fence. James and Boyd Allen Nunez helped us walk across to shelter. Relief in band uniforms When we got inside the school gym, Ruby Rutherford came up and hugged me and said, "Don’t worry, we have plenty of food and dry clothes." I said, "Where in the world did your find food and clothes?" She informed me that they had found band uniforms on top shelves in the band room that were in plastic wrappers and there were cans of food from the lunch room. My mother-in-law, Leslie and I were glad to wear the warm band uniforms. Cherie was so little that only a white majorette uniform would fit. We were some of the last survivors to reach the school before dark that night. All our friends and neighbors were comparing notes, asking about who had survived and who hadn’t. No one was hysterical, but all were in a state of shock and told their tales of horror in very calm voices. Inside the shelter of the high school, Ruby and my husband, D.W., both insisted I eat something. Though the pain from my broken ankle and high fever removed all thoughts of hunger, I said I might eat a little canned fruit if they had it. Ruby opened a gallon can of peaches, and I felt obliged to eat a few spoonfuls because she had gone to so much trouble. The men managed to shove most of the water out of the gym then took the mats off the walls and put them on the floor for us to sleep on. Just before we settled down for the night — there was no light and we were completely in the dark — Elie Conner called on Wallace Primeaux, pastor of the Oak Grove Baptist Church, to lead us all in prayer of thanksgiving for having our lives spared. There was hardly a family among us that had not suffered a loss that day. Cherie and I slept fitfully that night, burning up with fever. The mat we were on was full of people. I remember that Mrs. Red Nunez was next to me, but do not remember who the others were. The Warren family along with more slept on the auditorium stage. The day after At sunrise the men set about building a fire in the field in back of the school. They found some freezers washed into the marsh and began frying some meat and other things. As more survivors showed up, each person was greeted with love and compassion by that little group of friends and neighbors huddled there. Wilson Conner came from the west to report that he had lost all of his family. My long hair was matted, and I was having trouble keeping it out of my face. One of Ervis Portie’s little girls came up to me and tried to comb it back with a hair brush she had retrieved from somewhere. Finally, about mid-morning help began to arrive. Some uniformed men landed an Army helicopter behind the school. They said they had Army ducks coming that would take us out. Someone arrived in a motorboat, looking for their people. They volunteered to take some of us out to Creole where a rescue station and field hospital had been set up on the road. Since I was injured, they put me in the boat, along with Cherie and others. The water had receded from the road, and the able-bodied set out for the station on foot. At Creole, we found several doctors and nurses under a make-shift first-aid station with the Red Cross insignia on it. Cherie and I were laid on a cot on the highway directly in front of the B. Nunez home. I saw cases of medicine and noticed that a bar had also been set up that several people seemed to be drinking from. A doctor approached me and examined my leg, which by now was hurting unbearably. He said my ankle was crushed and that he would give me a shot of Demerol. I pleaded with him not to give me anything that would knock me out and asked for just a drink of the whiskey to deaden the pain until I could get to Lake Charles. He refused and shot me with the Demerol anyway. We were placed aboard an Army amphibian duck and started down the Creole highway toward Lake Charles. At the first culvert in the road, I could see that the bridge had completely washed away. Our driver veered to the left, and we sailed down the shoulder into a ditch filled up to the level of the road with water. In the passenger’s seat, I was frightened nearly to death. I thought "I have gone through all this, and am now going to drown in a ditch." The duck, however, simply scooted across the water and climbed back up onto the highway, and we continued on to the Gibbs town bridge over the Intracoastal Canal. For some reason, we stopped on the swing-type bridge. I remember miles and miles of boats and barges were backed up on the canal, for the bridge was locked shut. A man from one of the boats came onto the duck and held out a box of cold drinks for us —much appreciated, both because of the fever and the hot wool band uniform I was wearing. At the bridge we were transferred into open Army trucks, and we continued along through Sweet Lake and turned west at Cox’s corner. At Boone’s Corner several civil defense ambulances were waiting to transport the injured. I was put on an ambulance, but they would not let me take Cherie because my leg would have to be set in a hospital, so she went with D.W. One of the passing ambulance drivers stopped and stared at me. "Aren’t you Geneva Ellerbee?" How I was recognized by Wyone Noble, a girl that I had gone to elementary school with, I will never know. She and her husband belonged to the Groves, Texas, Civil Defense and had driven their ambulance over to help out. Wyone instructed them to put me on her ambulance, along with Dallas Domingue, his wife and daughter. Dallas’ wife, Lucille, was in really bad shape with both her legs scraped raw. Lucille’s sister-in-law had been on the truck bed with us and sat in stunned silence all the way to Sweetlake. Her children had been swept off the roof they were all clinging to and were lost. My school friend called the Port Arthur Police Department on the ambulance radio and asked them to get in touch with my parents and tell them we were all alive except PaPa Griffith. This was the first message my people had gotten from us. In Lake Charles I was taken to Lake Charles Memorial Hospital. A Dr. Schneider X-rayed my ankle and told me it was broken. After washing my leg, he put a cast on it up to my knee. I also had a bad cut just below my ankle, but nothing was done about it. They put me on a cot and put me out in the hall where there were people on other cots. I was desperate to try to get back with my family, which I had determined were at McNeese State College, which was being used as a rallying point for the survivors. I was praying hard for help. About this time, I looked down the hall and two Marines were coming my way. I heard them asking everyone if there was anything they could do to help. "Over here, please," I hollered. The man came over and I told him I needed to get out to McNeese College as soon as . picked up my stretcher, walked out of the hospital, put me on the Army ambulance and transported me to the college. I still had not checked out of the hospital. Family reunion At McNeese they took me into the cattle arena, in which a sea of cots had been set up, put me on a cot and left. About the time Dr. Stephen Carter’s wife, Ducie, came by carrying her baby with the twins hanging to her skirt. She asked me if I would watch them while she got them a change of clothes so they could catch a bus to New Orleans to her mother’s. I took the baby and let the twins play around the cot on the dirt floor; but told them not to wander off, because I only had one healthy leg and no crutches. One worker passed by to ask if I needed a diaper — she had a stack in her arms — and when she saw the cast on my leg, she said, "Oh you poor dear, here take the whole stack." I took them all and put them in Ducie’s empty suitcase. Ducie told me that they had all ridden out the storm in Stephen’s grandfather’s huge two-story home in Creole. She also said that Brandon, Stephen’s brother, and a neighbor of mine, had lost his wife and two children and had ended up in the water in his grandfather’s yard. A man that I had seen in Cameron that worked out of the Health Unit passed by, recognized me, and told me that he would go home and bring me a pair of crutches he had there. I told him to please do, because I desperately needed them. Francis Ezernack, the Soil Conservation Service man, found me and asked if there was anything he could do to help me. I told him that I needed to find my family and he asked what they looked like. When I told him Cherie had on a white majorette uniform, he said, "Oh I saw her not long ago. Everyone was remarking about that beautiful little blackhaired girl in that band uniform." He went to look for them, and it was not long before D.W. and the children were with me. I made them wait until the man had brought the crutches, then we prepared to leave. D.W. said his cousin Lucille Crosby had come to take us to her house. As we exited the arena, trying to walk with the crutches with my husband’s help, I fainted. The whole arena was whirling around me as I hit the dirt. We managed to get me up, with the help of passersby, and got to Lucille’s car where her husband Luckey was waiting to take us to their house. It was at Lucille’s house that my people finally found me. My brother-in-law Roy Hardin and my childhood friend looking for us. They had started hunting for us all over Lake Charles, checking the hospitals, and had even seen my X- ray at Memorial, but ran into a dead end there when they could not find me. They then started trying to call D.W.’s kinfolks in Lake Charles but could not find us because Lucille’s phone was out of order. Mother, daddy, sister and Dodie Reichle also came hunting us. My mother had found out where we were from Aunt Carrie Beam, who also lived in Lake Charles and was Nannie Griffith’s sister. Uncle Buster and his family were at Aunt Carrie’s. The children and I and Nanny went back to Port Arthur and D.W. stayed in Lake Charles to hunt for his daddy. He searched all the places where bodies were being brought. He found his father’s body at a Lake Charles ice house. They had his funeral at Trinity Baptist Church, and everyone said it was the largest funeral ever conducted in the church. Papa always believed in honoring the dead and always took off from work to attend funerals, so I guess he was paid back. I was still too sick to attend the funeral but had said my goodbye to him in the water. Leslie was very touched over all of this and joined the church the following Sunday and was baptized before we moved back. My daddy’s sister and her husband, Aunt Ordra and Uncle Harley Gibson, came down during the week to see if they could help. Aunt Ordra was very upset over my high fever which I still had — Cherie’s had subsided — and insisted that I see a local doctor about it. Daddy had a doctor come out and check out both Cherie and me as soon as I got to their house and he had only given me medicine for the fever. I got mother to take me to his office and insisted that he take my cast off, because I told him I knew there was a cut on my ankle and the pain was excruciating. I believed the fever was coming from it. The doctor took a saw and cut the cast off and was horrified with what he saw underneath. My ankle and leg were black — I had gangrene. He ran out of the office and got his partner. The doctor asked me if there was a possibility I was bit by a snake because there were two puncture wounds, like fangs marks. They immediately started giving me shots for snake bites. I hobbled home on the crutches and continued with the shots until my fever finally went down. The gangrenous leg also healed, and I suffered no after effects from it. I was in a quandary what to do with my life at this time — I could see that my body would heal and that I had decisions to make to start over again. I also had time now to ponder over the events that had happened and talked to my daddy about how I was feeling. I asked him if he could explain why God had not answered my prayers when I had begged Him for help and claimed His promise to show me what to show to do. My daddy said, "Baby, don’t you know that He did indeed answer your prayer; but not in the way you expected. He gave the knowledge to the strongest one, and that was not you — it was D.W." I asked D.W. how he knew what to do, and why he brought in the three things out of the barn: the rope, the ax, and the saw. He said he didn’t know; it just seemed the right thing to do. I then realized that every decision he made was the right one, and that death lay right behind all of our moves. I was still adamant about returning to Cameron Parish, and Daddy told me that I must go back because that was where D.W.’s job was and where he wanted to live and we must keep the family together. Daddy lived long enough to see us get our new house started and died from a heart attack 10 months later. D.W.’s uncle, Will Welch, who was so close to us; came over and he and D.W. built a little one room building from the remains of the other house, the roof, and other lumber; and we were able to return to the parish just before Christmas. We lived there a year until D.W. got the big house built. My job was to paint the building. I told everyone that it would probably start peeling after a short time because there was more water than oil in the paint, from my tears. I cried and cried over having to come back and hear the constant roar of the Gulf two miles out in front of my house. While the parish was rebuilding, we all had to live in Lake Charles and travel back and forth. I worked for the Department of Agriculture in the Cameron Courthouse. We lived in a converted store building, across from a fire station. Leslie had gotten an infection in his toes from the effects of keeping his tennis shoes on for so long with all of that salt water. Dr. Carter came by and prescribed some salve, and we had to stuff cotton between each toe to keep them from sticking together while they healed. I would leave his lunch on the table by the couch each day when I left for work and left money across the street with the fireman to bring a cold drink at noon for his lunch. He had to stay on that couch until his toes healed up — all of the skin having peeled off in the meantime. Time has helped to deaden the pain and the memories of past storms. I imagine that someday, when present generations are gone, our descendants will be brave enough to stay in the face of danger. I don’t think that the date of June 27, 1957, will ever be forgotten when the history of Cameron Parish is written. That is the day Cameron Parish, Louisiana, was recognized by the world. Hurricane Audrey killed more than 400 people. In Cameron Parish, the government still shuts down for a day on the anniversary of the storm. D.W. Griffith died in 1972 in an automobile accident. Geneva Griffith retired this year after longtime service as a news correspondent for the American Press and the DeQuincy News. She now lives in Baton Rouge, having moved from Cameron Parish land that had been in the family since the 1850s.