Weather: Storm Watch

Sixty-five years ago today, the Hurricane of 1938, the worst natural disaster in Rhode Island history, took 262 lives. Here's a look back in the words of survivors.

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, September 21, 2003

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

The TVs in our newsroom brought the latest reports of Hurricane Isabel last week; graphics and weather maps showed the storm veering west, passing well south of Rhode Island.

A couple of my colleagues groaned at the news. They had quietly hoped for the thrill of a hurricane. I understood. Earlier that day, Tuesday, I had harbored the same feelings. Then I walked up to the Rhode Island Historical Society's archives, where I spent hours reading oral histories from people who had lived through the Hurricane of 1938.

After reading their stories, I will never again hope for a hurricane.

The histories were gathered in the late 1980s by students from the University of Rhode Island and Providence College, a project assigned by history Prof. Albert T. Klyberg.

Journal file photo A SEA OF CARS: Motorists are bogged down as they try to navigate downtown Providence, in front of the old train station, during the Hurricane of 1938.

I was tempted to weave some kind of narrative from the histories that I read, but sometimes the best thing a writer can do is stand back and get out of the way. Here, with some editing to tighten scenes, are the stories of Rhode Islanders who lived through the Great Hurricane of Sept. 21, 1938.

EILEEN HUGHES, Narragansett, 12 years old on that Wednesday morning, 65 years ago today (as told to Mark A. Long):

"I remember in the morning a friend of mine and myself were walking to school, and that morning it was very, very, very yellow. Really yellow, and very still. It was creepy. And I remember she said, 'God, it feels like the end of the world.'

"Shortly before noontime -- my mother was a schoolteacher at the time -- she sent a note to my brother and I in our respective classrooms."

The note said: "Do not go home without me."

School let out early; outside, the devastation of Narragansett had begun.

"I was so horrified, so horrified. Now I was 12 years old -- and all I could see was all this water. It was coming over the towers, and you couldn't see the park."

[That night her uncle came to the house, where Boon Street is today, and Hughes heard her mother say: "We won't say anything to the children."]

"They thought my father was dead. 'Cause what happened . . . he and these two men were putting a big board up, they were trying to board up [the Dunes Club] windows because of the storm.

"And my aunt was standing there saying, 'Let's get out of here . . . it's weird, let's get out of here.'

"Then Aunt Margaret said, 'My God, look at this wave coming.' And that's all they remember. The other two men were killed, and my father and my aunt lived. See, it wasn't their time to die."

AIR PRESSURE rests on the ocean like a large hand, pushing the water down. When the eye of a hurricane passes, air pressure dramatically drops. It's as if the hand has been lifted, and the sea surface suddenly pops up. This is called a storm surge.

In Rhode Island, the sea surged 15 to 20 feet, according to Jeff Donnelly, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Donnelly specializes in reconstructing the intensity of past hurricanes by studying historical documents and the geologic record.

Journal file photo IN RUINS: A tangle of timber jams Brakeman's Cove in Misquamicut in the aftermath of the Hurricane of 1938.

FRED ENNIS, Charlestown (as told to Clair Lutes):

"I guess it started after I got out of school that day. We got out of [Westerly High] School at our regular time, which was 2:10 p.m., and during the bus ride home [to Charlestown], trees 100, 150 feet tall were swaying and toppling over in the wind. There was an ax on the bus for emergencies and several times during the ride home the bus driver had to stop the bus, get out and chop away at fallen limbs and trunks obstructing the road.

"After Dad got home, we looked in our backyard and the Charlestown [salt] pond, which usually was a block away, was lapping at our garden. That's when Dad decided to move the family to higher ground. So we all went up to my grandparents' farm. . . . We securely boarded up the barn with the five cows and one horse . . . we didn't lose the barn.

"It was late at night when the beach disaster was discovered. . . . Only then was it discovered that the whole Charlestown Beach community of 185 houses had completely vanished. You can't imagine what a shock it was. Before the hurricane, houses were jammed together; even the large hotel on the beach had vanished.

"I think local history books claim that 32 people died in the 14-foot tidal wave at Charlestown Beach. After the hurricane, the north shores of the coastal ponds had debris 15, 20 feet deep in places. The Community Club on the Old Post Road, which was about two doors down from the Cross Mills Fire Station, served as a temporary morgue."

ESTHER FISHER BENSON, Newport, 30 years old then, living with her husband, noted artist John Howard Benson, in an 18th-century house (as told to Elliott Caldwell):

"By about 2 o'clock, I guess even before 2 o'clock, the tide hadn't gone down. It was way, way up everywhere and then suddenly this whistling started. It's strange that something you can't see like the wind can make a noise so loud. And it just whisked, and where the spray was pulled up out of the water, you couldn't see clearly out there because it was so filled with spray from the wind taking the top off the water.

"By the peak of the hurricane the breakers were breaking right on my porch. The cellar was filled with water. . . . You couldn't think, you couldn't do a sensible thing because of the noise and disorder of all this.

"In Jamestown, the schoolchildren, wasn't that terrible? Oh, terrible."

[A killer wave surged into Jamestown's Mackerel Cove where it broadsided a school bus driving across the narrow causeway at the cove's head. The bus carried eight children; seven drowned.]

"I think it made us more cautious about the weather, but it hasn't lasted because: see, it's another generation, the generation that lived through the hurricane is beginning to get quite thin. . . . Now they don't believe it. They just don't believe what happens when you have one of those things."

BERNARD COURNOYER, 14 in '38, son of a mill worker in the West Warwick village of Arctic (as told to S.B. Cournoyer):

"We had seen the steeple of St. John's swaying as it got worse. All you could hear was the bell in the tower ringing, that and the wind. No one expected it to be standing when it was over. . . . It was all built with oak beams and held together with wood pegs. The damn thing swayed and swayed but those pegs held. It was damaged, though, and they had to tear it down. There wasn't a piece of glass left in any of the storefronts in Arctic."

[The next day.] "We all went to Rocky Point. Everything was wrecked. The Ferris wheel, the roller coasters, and all that was flattened. . . . The big shore dinner hall was wrecked, and that big pier they had there was gone. The arcade was flattened and we found pennies, whole pocketfuls. Pennies everywhere. Went home rich that day."

CLIFTON HOWARD, a 34-year-old mill worker at Brown & Sharpe, Providence (as told to Linda S. Stubbs):

"Wednesday, Sept. 21, 1938, started out like any other normal work day, except that my wife was in Homeopathic Hospital (now Roger Williams Hospital) for minor surgery, and I was alone for a few days in our house on Victory Street in Cranston. I got up that morning around 6 a.m., showered, got dressed, and turned on the radio for company while I ate breakfast in the kitchen. I listened to the weather forecast on the radio while I made my lunch for work, but there were no warnings or indications that a storm was coming."

[At work.] "There was a funny smell in the air -- like sulfur -- and the winds started picking up around 3:30 p.m. By 4 p.m., we were told by our supervisor to get out of the building and to go straight home."

[Walking to the parking lot, Howard was almost blown from a bridge; driving home, the crown of a falling tree clipped his car. At home, he again turned on his radio.]

"I couldn't believe what I was hearing. People were dead in the streets of Providence."

FLORA HYLAND, 15 and a junior attending St. Xavier's Academy at Broad and Pine Streets, Providence. Interviewer Donna Brennan wrote Hyland's story in the third person; we pick it up as Hyland ducked into a restaurant in downtown Providence just before the storm surge pulsed through the streets:

"The cafeteria occupied the area from Westminster Street through to what is now known as Kennedy Plaza. There were large plate-glass windows on both streets. She remembers a woman being blown through the window on the Westminster Street side and into the restaurant.

"The water started to come in from under the door. At first they thought it was rainwater running in from the street, but they were told that the water was coming from the river. . . . Most people climbed up on the tables when their feet started to get wet. Flora said that she thought they were surely going to drown; they couldn't go outside because of the water level and the wind, and they could not go higher in the building.

"They found a stairway that went up to the second floor where the bakery for the cafeteria was located, but the door was locked. . . . Finally, some of the men broke down the door to the bakery and told them the women and children were to go up first. The water was rising at a steady pace, and some people were starting to panic.

"The room was small and filled with large commercial baking ovens, and with approximately 30 people it was very confining. They discovered that there was gas leaking. They realized they could not stay on this floor either because of the gas fumes.

"There was one window; so they opened it and some men went up the fire escape and were able to open a window to the third floor. . . . The men said they would stay on the fire escape and would help guide everyone up. . . . Flora took a pie."

[From the third floor the trapped people monitored the water level. It reached its peak at 1 1/2 stories deep, about 14 feet. While waiting for the waters to recede, young Flora Hyland and some friends ate the pie with their hands.] "She said it was an apple pie and that they ate every bite of it," Brennon wrote.

[After the water receded, the police temporarily prevented people from leaving the building.] "Flora now realizes that it was because the police and firemen were trying to clean up the bodies and prevent looting."

ANNETTE CAPOTOSTO, 17, traveled from Lakewood, in Warwick, to Providence on the day after the storm (as told to Steven Weekly):

"I saw the streets littered with glass from the showrooms of department stores and restaurants. One of the sites I won't forget was the number of rats running along the streets. They apparently had been washed up from the sewers. Also, the odor in the streets was terrible."

[Later, she went to Conimicut.] "I could not believe what I saw. The only thing remaining on Conimicut Point was a few foundations from the homes which were literally swept away by the tidal wave. We later learned many families were lost. Two of our high school classmates who lived on the Point were also drowned."

HELEN LATHROP was 15 when the hurricane hit, and lived in Westerly (as told to Bethann Gallo):

"Maybe the greatest dramatic tragedy was the fact that there was this whole group of women from Christ Church, a mother's club. The young mothers from the church were having a picnic, and they got caught at Misquamicut. The storm came up before they broke up. They went down to have a picnic, it was a lovely day, the sun was warm, the surf was big and fun to see."

[Twelve mothers attended the picnic at Misquamicut Beach that morning, dropped off by the pastor who returned to town to officiate at a funeral. When the storm surge hit, tidal waves rolled across Misquamicut, sweeping it clean of hotels and cottages. All of the women drowned; their bodies were recovered.]

"My worst memory of the '38 hurricane is that every time a body was found, and there were so many people lost in this area, that a temporary morgue was set up in the basement of the old Westerly High School" [near Wilcox Park].

"Every time they found a body they would blow the fire whistle over and over again. That was to notify people who had lost people who hadn't been found yet so they could go down to the morgue to try to identify [them]. . . . They would blow the whistle, and you could see the people, we were near the center of town, you could see the people running down the hill, going to see if it was their mother, wife, child, or what have you. That really got to me."

The oral histories cited in this report are from the Albert T. Klyberg Papers, Manuscripts Division, of the Rhode Island Historical Society.