by Al Roker
But the main thing Cline liked about combining medicine and meteorology: he wanted to understand connections between weather and human illness. He wanted to use meteorology not only to help the army, and not only to provide accurate, useful information to ordinary American citizens. He most wanted, as he forthrightly thought of it, to aid mankind in its progress toward a better world. That better world was beginning to seem inevitable as Cline came of age, and to seem inevitably American.
As if he weren’t busy enough, Cline got also into the newspaper business in Abilene. A man named Sayles, a lawyer and former Confederate general, had his law offices near Cline’s First Order Weather Observation Station. Sayles owned the Abilene Daily and Weekly Reporter, and Cline (for recreation) wrote articles on local weather observations. From Sayles’s rewriting of his pieces, Cline learned much about clear written expression.
Soon Sayles invited Cline to take over editing and publishing the paper. Cline accepted, “as something to do in my recreation time,” he later explained. He set up an entire new print shop for putting out the news. The shop began making money printing other jobs too.
Meanwhile, cattle ranchers and sheep ranchers were duking it out on the range and in town. The former wanted free trade, the latter a tariff. Both supported Cline’s paper, and both wanted to control its editorial policy. These were rough men. But for all of his seemingly non-Texan abstemiousness, Cline remained unafraid.
He kept a loaded .45-caliber Winchester rifle, with a hair trigger, leaning against the wall near his desk in the newspaper office. In the end, he never had to use it for anything but hunting.
One of Cline’s editorial positions at the Abilene paper mixed his publishing efforts with his real job. He favored efforts to establish a Texas Weather Service, overseen by the state. Cline’s boss at the U.S. Army Signal Corps, General Adolphus W. Greely, agreed. A dedicated service for that huge region would have many advantages.
But a law to create the state Texas Service failed to pass the Texas legislature. When Cline reported that failure to Greely, the general had a new idea.
Greely told Cline he was creating a division of the U.S. Weather Service, a branch solely dedicated to Texas. This new division would have its headquarters in Galveston, the most important city in the state. Greely wanted Cline to be in charge.
Cline was twenty-seven. The former Tennessee country boy, fired as a youth with the ambition to serve his rising nation and the betterment of the world, handpicked to fulfill that ambition by studying meteorology, would spend eleven years in Galveston. There he would refine those abilities while serving the city, the state, and the nation. He had good reason to be supremely confident in the scope and quality of his many abilities.
In October 1890, soon after Isaac Cline’s move to Galveston, the U.S. Congress passed a sweeping law that transferred the entire Weather Service, with all of its employees, stations, and equipment, out of the army altogether. The service became part of the Department of Agriculture.
This was a benchmark moment both in the history of the service and in Cline’s own career. For if the Galveston assignment was a culmination in the progress of his rapid journey up the ranks of the Weather Service, the service itself, even younger than Cline, was making big strides too. With the transfer to the Department of Agriculture, the Weather Service was well on its way to becoming one of the most important agencies of the civilian federal government. Isaac Cline’s position in Galveston, overseeing meteorology for the entire state of Texas, would make him one of the most important federal officers in the country.
When the transfer occurred, General Greely was still Isaac Cline’s boss, and Greely was widely considered to have saved the service. Before the general’s time, the service had seen some rough years. During Cline’s first years in the organization, the service had become highly controversial, constantly investigated for fraud, scandal, and corruption. A Captain Henry W. Howgate, for example, the disbursing officer of the Signal Corps, had embezzled over $200,000 by submitting fake vouchers from contractors.
People believed members of the Weather Service had aided and abetted that rip-off. A War Department investigation revealed that, at the very least, the service had no real financial oversight. The Chicago Board of Trade petitioned Congress to reform the Weather Service. Highly placed people said the training school at Fort Myer should be shut down.
Meanwhile, army brass were getting sick of all of the Signal Corps officers’ cockiness—especially that of the weathermen. When, for example, von Herrmann, the heliograph expert who helped find Geronimo, first reported for that duty, his commanding officer began giving him the usual orders regarding barracks, mess times, and so forth, and von Herrmann interrupted to set the officer straight. Weathermen were not to be ordered about, von Herrmann reminded his C.O. Herrmann would sleep and eat where he pleased—now would the officer get on with it and assign troops to work on the heliograph?
That’s not the kind of attitude regular army liked to see. Furthermore, the War Department was waking up to the fact that the Weather Service had essentially taken over the Signal Corps. The whole corps was really nothing but weathermen now. If the army ever needed actual signaling, nobody would be available.
The accuracy of the forecasting, meanwhile, had become slipshod and unreliable—at least in the collective mind of a citizenry dependent on it. When the Weather Service began in 1870, simultaneous reporting and forecasting for the whole nation had been something of a miracle of modern science. And in fact the miracle only grew. By 1885, predictions were being made for the next thirty-two hours. In 1886, forecasts were made for states, and even parts of states, instead of big districts. Soon forecasts were extended for forty-eight hours.
Yet now people expected these forecasts, and they therefore often found them disappointing. For of course the reports weren’t always right. Sometimes dramatic events occurred that hadn’t been forecast, and sometimes, as in the Northeast blizzard of 1888, those events killed people—400 people in that case. Meanwhile, other events that had been forecast failed to materialize.
There was a sense that the inaccuracy might be resulting from a failing of the strict discipline and observational precision that Isaac Cline himself loved so much. So when General Greely took over, he was determined to address the discipline issue.
The general sent inspectors far and wide. Inspections of weather offices resulted in one hundred firings of weathermen. Isaac liked regulations, but many of his colleagues apparently didn’t. Some of them entertained, putting it politely, non-business visitors in the observation office. One weather officer in New England was using the office to shoot photos of nude women.
Another neat trick was to invent a full week’s worth of fake observations. Just hand them to a telegrapher in a batch. The telegrapher feeds them to Washington day by day at the appropriate times. You get in a week of fishing.
One observer pawned all his weather instruments to raise cash for gambling. At least that one kept up his reports: he went down to the pawnshop every day to take readings.
Soon Greely gave up. Under current circumstances, he told Congress, the weather reporting situation was not to be reformed. President Benjamin Harrison recommended transferring the Weather Service to the Department of Agriculture, and Congress promptly did so. The organization was now called the United States Weather Bureau.
Isaac Cline had a passion for discipline and regulation, a need to be ceaselessly working, and a deep desire to use his expertise in aid of greater American and human projects. Those qualities had long made him stand out in what was a troubled Weather Service. When Greely sent Cline to Galveston and expanded the Galveston office into a headquarters for a dedicated Texas department, the general was rewarding the young man for excellence in his profession.
Greely was also relying on Cline to help improve the entire Weather Bureau, for during inspections, the Galveston office had turned out to be among the worst. Located then in a building that also housed the pol
ice station and the courthouse, the office was more like a bad kennel, the inspector reported, than an office.
In order to read the barometers, the inspector had to clean them. He also noted that the citizens of Galveston ignored reports coming out of their own weather station. Instead, they checked the St. Louis and New Orleans papers.
Isaac Cline was there to change all that—and to expand the station into a major operation overseeing all of Texas. Along with daily readings, the office had to produce the monthly Texas Weather Bulletin in conjunction with the Galveston Cotton Exchange. Isaac Cline had thus become section director of the Texas Section of the U.S. Weather Bureau, executive director of the Galveston Weather Station, and executive director of the Cotton Region Services for Texas. To make all that work, he would need assistants. He got busy.
He also settled with great pleasure into bustling, growing Galveston. Back in Abilene, he’d married Cora May Bellew, whom he’d met in church. She’d been playing the organ at the time. The church connection, along with Cline’s overall punctiliousness, might have made the pair seem the ultimately straitlaced couple, but when their first child—a daughter—was born, they’d been married less than nine months.
In Galveston, they had a second daughter, and then a third. They moved into a large, sturdy, well-built house about a block from the gulf beach.
Family and work overlapped. Cline hired, as his chief assistant in Galveston, his younger brother Joseph. Joseph Cline had knocked about a bit after following in his brother’s footsteps and graduating from Hiwassee; he’d worked as a schoolteacher and traveling salesman and served a stint on the railroad before Isaac hired him. But Joseph became a good weatherman. He would play an important part in the wild events of September 1900.
Isaac Cline stayed busy, to say the least. Father of three, buried in the herculean task of turning the disastrous Galveston weather office into a national flagship for a new administration, he nevertheless felt the usual need for what he called recreation. This time it took the form of teaching medical climatology at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston. Meanwhile, he matriculated at the AddRan Male and Female College (named after the Clark brothers, Addison and Randolph). There he studied philosophy, sociology, and English literature. Soon he had his Ph.D. He credited his improved understanding of literature with aiding him in his weather observations.
But he found he had free time on Sundays. So he taught Sunday school.
And very quickly, the Galveston headquarters became everything Cline and General Greely had believed it could be. Isaac and Joseph, working together, turned the station into a shipshape operation handling more data on a daily basis than any other in America. Barometers were plumb, their vacuum seals tight, their dials clean. Daily readings were precise, detailed, and realistic. Resulting forecasts were more reliable. People in town and across the state began noticing. Under Isaac Cline, the Galveston office wasn’t merely providing excellent service. It was gaining respect, throughout Texas, for the entire U.S. Weather Bureau.
The office passed its first inspection under the Agriculture Department with flying colors. In his report, the inspector went out of his way to note that nobody in the field was better than Isaac Cline. Joseph too was deemed an admirable meteorologist—although his penmanship needed work, the inspector remarked. The Clines were doing an exemplary job, the inspector went on to say, handling with aplomb more information than any other office and meanwhile raising the profile of the bureau both in town and throughout Texas. Isaac’s mission in coming to Galveston had been accomplished.
In 1900, Isaac Cline, now thirty-nine, had long been a well-respected man around Galveston. A nationally recognized weather expert, with a multitude of important publications, running the biggest station in the nation, he’d continued to take his usual recreational interest in the study of local conditions, and he’d made some brilliant moves.
For one thing, Cline came up with a way to give Texas farmers three days’ notice of freezing conditions—and he bucked the central office in Washington to do so. In the capital, they’d said such predictions were impossible; anyway, all predictions were supposed to come from Washington, based on local reports. Information was local; forecasts were national. Local offices couldn’t make forecasts.
But Cline went ahead with his studies of local freezing on his own time. The resulting predictions of frosts were accurate enough to wow the bureau in Washington. Cline won official permission to issue cold-weather forecasts on his own.
Another instance of Cline’s leadership came in the spring of 1900, when Galveston’s weatherman saved untold lives by predicting the flooding of the Colorado and the Brazos Rivers. Again, only Washington could legally issue flood warnings, but Cline issued them anyway—and in the case of the Brazos, he called the flood’s high point with perfect accuracy, ten days in advance.
That was the biggest flood ever seen on the Brazos. Thanks to Isaac Cline’s early warnings, no lives were lost.
Here was the kind of success that close study, maverick intelligence, dedicated science, and bold application could achieve when it came to the weather. That had been Isaac Cline’s aspiration; now it was his achievement. Modern man (as people put it then) was approaching a new position. Soon human beings would be able to manage any and all of nature’s disastrous threats. Thanks to science, the world was on its way to becoming a safe, happy, and rational place. The twentieth century would be a great one.
So the citizens of Galveston were lucky to have as their resident meteorologist somebody with a proven national reputation for expertise in storms. It’s hardly surprising, given Isaac Cline’s status as a great weatherman, that civic leaders would seek his opinion regarding the city’s vulnerability to hurricanes.
During the Deep Water Committee’s dredging project, the great engineer Colonel Robert had proposed building a breakwater off the beach, just out in the gulf, to hinder waves and tides. There had also been intermittent talk of building a high seawall on the beach itself to push the waters back in the event of a storm.
The people of Galveston were, of course, used to storms, flooding, and damage, even to a few storm-related casualties every so often. As the city boomed, the civic tradition of jovial disdain for people who fearfully envisioned its washing away overnight continued.
Deep gutters were meanwhile dug in the streets to drain rain and floodwaters out of the city. Near sea level, the gutters were two to three feet deep, shallower as the streets rose to higher ground in the island’s interior. They often did a good job of moving water out.
But the question remained. As the letter writer had put it back in the 1870s, the city needed a reasonable argument to show that it would not one day all wash away.
So in 1891, after a nasty storm yet again caused flooding on the island, the Galveston Daily News asked for Dr. Cline’s opinion regarding the likelihood of a deadly hurricane’s smashing the city. Should the city really go to the expense and effort of building a high seawall along the gulf beach to keep rising gulf waters out of town?
Cline responded with his usual clarity and precision. He based his opinion on a mountain of just the sort of scientific fact and empirical evidence he’d employed to save crops when predicting frosts and to save lives when predicting floods.
It was overwhelmingly clear, he wrote in the Galveston Daily News: if a storm ever pushed high gulf surf into the island, the water would merely flow over the city, enter the bay, and then keep rolling onto the mainland plain of Texas. The city itself would barely feel the effect.
Too, the gulf coastline is shallow. It would fragment any incoming surf.
And really big hurricanes didn’t strike Texas anyway. “It would be impossible,” Isaac Cline wrote, “for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city.”
So there it was. According to possibly the best weatherman in the country, the city’s own Dr. Cline—who lived near the beach—Galveston was perfectly safe. Citizens who feared o
therwise, Cline said, were in the grip of “a severe delusion.”
Naturally the city took Dr. Cline’s advice. There was no seawall.
CHAPTER 5
THE STORM: FROM CUBA TO TEXAS
ON THE MORNING OF WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, THE STEAMSHIP Louisiana of the Cromwell Shipping Line passed the Port Eads weather station at the bottom of the Mississippi bayou channel, about eighty miles south of the port of New Orleans, nearly 400 miles east of Galveston. The Port Eads station stood near the channel’s entrance to the open Gulf of Mexico, and a storm-warning flag had been hoisted there. The wind was blowing hard out of the east-northeast.
But the ship’s captain, T. P. Halsey, was a veteran seaman. There had been no reports of any serious weather moving into the gulf from the south. Anyway, a storm was something he and his ship could handle. Halsey noted the storm warning, and his steamship crossed the bar, as sailors put it, and entered the Gulf of Mexico.
With a full crew, heavy cargo, and thirty passengers on board, Captain Halsey’s destination was New York City, and so the Louisiana was heading southeastward, across the gulf toward the Florida Keys. Keeping the warning flag in mind, Halsey did order the decks stripped and the hatches battened down in preparation for chop. The Louisiana went steaming down the gulf for the Keys.
That night was rough indeed, and all day Thursday the ship rose, fell, and rolled, fighting the rising seas, beaten by winds that had started to howl. Thursday night was even worse.
By Friday morning, most of the passengers were too sick to be frightened. They rolled miserably about in their berths, their cabins locked behind storm doors.
Captain Halsey wasn’t scared. He’d been through eight hurricanes at sea. He ordered the crew to hold course against the growing violence of the wind and the bucking waves.
On Friday morning, the wind became gale force; it had turned around now, and it came from the north-northeast, with what sailors call a “backing wind”—movement high up at the steamship’s smokestacks—turning hard from east to north.