"Tell the Story About..."

One can't grow up in Rhode Island, or at least couldn't grow up when I did, without hearing stories about the hurricane of 1938. We we were raised with the older folks comparing that storm with each new hurricane or nor'easter which came along. There were several close contenders, including Carol, the one in 1954 which I "remembered" simply because of the softcover "Hurricane Book" we kept in the attic, comparing the devastation in that year against photos from 1938. The strong hurricane I actually did remember was Donna in 1963; we lost power for three days plus shingles from the roof, and the chimney cracked because the television antenna was fastened to it and it being blown about and torn apart by the winds shifted the bricks out of position. The power eventually came back on with the blat of the television and the rattling of the refrigerator motor, and my first comment was typical of a 60s seven-year-old: "Oh, goody, now I can watch TV!" We had a close call in the late 1970s when I was working at Trifari, but the worst it did was strew tree branches all over the Parkway that took me from I-195 to the building on Pawtucket Avenue.

The 1938 hurricane stayed in everyone's memory because it was a heartbreaker. It might as well have been Galveston 38 years earlier. No warnings were given because the Weather Bureau considered it unlikely that the hurricane would make landfall where it did. "Hurricanes don't hit New England," the head of the Bureau said, despite history to the contrary. When a junior meteorologist plotted the path of the storm and asked if people shouldn't be warned, this same bullheaded superior said no, that New Englanders wouldn't listen to it anyway. The stories are frightening and fascinating: a family who rode out the storm riding a portion of their attic which was swept inland by the storm surge, ten Baptist ladies having their annual picnic who could not escape the waves and were all drowned, the couple who married despite Providence flooding below them. Providence was jackhammered by the storm; at one point the water downtown was 14 feet deep, a level memorialized by a brass plaque on the old Providence Journal building. Providence was built on a marsh and the city stunk of rotting plants and sewage as the waters receded—then the looters showed up as the sun set. One woman drowned in her car in a parking lot only yards from safety. Rowboats floated through the streets. One memory that stayed with many people were the mournful tooting of automobile horns from cars with electrical systems that had short-circuited when swallowed by water.

My parents and their families lived through this terrible storm, but many were not so fortunate. Six hundred and eighty people from Long Island to eastern Massachusetts died and $4.7 billion dollars (in today's money) damage was done. The hurricane crushed homes, lighthouses, and fishing fleets. The train from New York to Boston was nearly overwhelmed by the storm surge. The wind and rain even did damage inland: it destroyed 25 percent of Vermont's maple trees and ruined lumbering in New Hampshire. Traditional New England towns with tree-lined streets and church steeples were changed forever.

From the time I was very small, I remember being a history addict. Mother and Dad watched a lot of older movies, including old war movies, and I knew my father (not to mention numerous uncles and cousins) had fought during World War II. I was brought up in a scrapbook full of old photographs, memories of radio series, and the life stories of D'Ambras and Lanzis who came before me. To me, World War II and the Depression weren't just words in history books; they were as alive as the Beatles and Vietnam were to my generation. Dad showed me his war photographs and told me about working from the time he was fourteen and playing hooky from English class and how he learned to swim in Dyer's Pond (someone basically threw him in the water and let him make his way to shore). Mom told me about her best friend Dora and poor Pat who got "poomonia" and growing up on Federal Hill, but two of her stories were my favorites.

"Tell me the story about the hurricane, Mommy."

My mother was 21 that year and working at Coro, the noted costume jewelry factory, as a "gluer-in" (she put all those tiny little colored stones in place with tweezers and patience). She'd been working since she was 17, having missed most of eleventh grade to care for my grandmother, who had contracted "coal dust lungs" when my grandfather was working in the mines in Lafferty, Ohio. They had moved specifically in 1924 to get my grandmother away from the dust, but she had never recovered completely. Mom brought most of her salary home to her parents, but dressed smartly if economically in the fashions of the time. Because so many people walked home for lunch, it was truly a "lunch hour" and Mom and her co-workers would wash up and eat their sandwiches as they hurried to a nearby bowling alley where they could bowl a game or two during their break.

Wednesday, September 21, was a typical workday to begin with, but as the afternoon wore on the wind picked up and clouds came boiling in. As she worked at her bench, occasionally she would glance sideways to the vast plate glass windows that made up one wall of the big room, and saw debris blowing past. Curious, when her break was called, instead of talking with the other "girls," she went to the window and leaned forward to figure out what was going on. "There were bricks flying by," she told me in chilling tones just as she told her co-workers a few minutes later, bricks from the factory chimney, bits of wood from window frames, stones, tree branches stripped of leaves, and the leaves themselves in wild, swirling gusts of wind. She was assured it was just a bad storm as the rain began and lashed the plate glass, for surely there would have been something on the radio if it were something worse! Despite the lights, the room grew darker and darker, and they could hear the wind howling outside. Finally at four, the height of the storm, the power failed and they were told to go home. Coro's building sat directly on the edge of downtown Providence and normally all Mom did was walk across what was later the land covered by I-95 and up Broadway through the Italian neighborhood of Federal Hill until she reached the house on Belknap Street. Luckily the husband of one of her co-workers, who also regularly walked home, had arrived to pick her up, and with the wind turning umbrellas inside out and the rain slashing down, agreed to give her a ride home.

By the time she arrived home, the winds had done their work everywhere on wires once strung tightly on telephone poles, and both power and phones were out. Mom raced upstairs to find her own mother nearly hysterical with worry. Not only had she been afraid for my mother walking home, but my grandfather was not home. Back in those days the family had "lots" (allotments) on which they grew tomatoes, zucchini, snap peas, cucumbers, and carrots on Smith Street near what is now Rhode Island College, and grandpa had taken the bus up there that morning to go tend the garden. Mom assured her mother that Grandpa would get no more that wet and he was used to that as a former farm boy, although in her heart she was less than sure. "You know Papa can take care of himself," she told Grandma.

The wind had already died down and the storm done its worst when Grandpa arrived home, soaking wet and puzzled why everything was so dark. He had not been able to get a bus back from Smith Street and had walked over three miles home using only the clearing sky for lights. He didn't speak any English, so he hadn't been able to ask anyone he saw on the way home why the streetlights were out and the homes like blacker shadows against the black sky. It was only as word spread between the triple-deckers and the duplexes of Belknap Street that they understood what had happened.

Newsreel About the Damage

Everett Allen's A Wind to Shake the World 

History Channel's The Great Hurricane of 1938 

A Camera Copy of the American Experience episode