by Willie Drye
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Blown Away
THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE THAT DELAYED PARKER HENDERSON JR.’S RETURN to Miami tore into Stuart and Fort Pierce with surprising fierceness on the morning of August 8, 1928. Electric wires and telegraph lines went down almost immediately, so newspapers from West Palm Beach to Vero Beach could not run their presses.
But Edwin Menninger, now publisher of both the South Florida Developer and the Stuart Daily News, was determined to get the story of the hurricane’s fury to the outside world—even if it meant risking his life.
As the storm still raged, Menninger got into his car and started a perilous journey north. Buffeted and rocked by high winds and slammed by driving rain, he pushed through the storm seeking a town where he could get his story to the Associated Press.
Along the way, he took note of the storm’s damage.
Menninger found electricity and phone service in Melbourne, about seventy miles up the coast from Stuart. He filed his story to the AP there.
The winds in the hurricane’s eye wall were around 90 miles an hour when it made landfall, Menninger said. Around midnight, the storm’s calm eye arrived, and all was quiet for an hour or so. But then the back side of the eye wall arrived, and the winds resumed with greater fury than before. Menninger later reported that the winds reached about 110 miles an hour after the eye passed. On the modern Saffir-Simpson scale—which rates hurricanes by wind speed and destructive potential—a hurricane with peak winds of 111 miles an hour is considered major.
Hundreds of homes and businesses from Stuart to Vero Beach were heavily damaged, and many had their roofs blown off, Menninger said. “Signboards, awnings, timbers, and parts of buildings lay all over the streets,” he wrote. “Broken tile, plate glass, and strips of felt and metal roofing covered the sidewalks.”
The winds had denuded tens of thousands of citrus trees and covered the ground with ripening grapefruit and oranges. “Citrus groves along the East coast [of Florida] looked like a winter scene in the North,” Menninger said.
Even in the middle of a story about destruction, however, Menninger found an opportunity for promotion. When he mentioned the storm’s damage to Stuart, he noted that the town was “famed for its fishing and great natural harbor.”
No deaths were reported from the storm. Still, one sad death during the storm was discovered later. The body of the thirty-five-year-old, unmarried postmaster at Olympia was found on August 9. He was sitting in a chair in his home. Police learned that he’d been deeply disappointed when a recent love affair had been broken off. So as the hurricane raged around him, the postmaster sat down in an easy chair, pondered his unhappiness, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger.
In his story for the Associated Press, Menninger reported that the storm had inflicted several million dollars’ worth of damage from Stuart to Vero Beach. But the hurricane’s worst effects wouldn’t become evident for a while. The storm dumped more than a foot of rain in some places in South Florida, and most of that water soon made its way to Lake Okeechobee.
Florida boosters are fond of pointing out that the lake is the nation’s second largest, if you exclude the four Great Lakes with shorelines that touch both the United States and Canada. The lake covers about 750 square miles and is about half the size of the state of Rhode Island.
The deepest part of Lake Okeechobee is at sea level. The shallow saucer-like lake’s average depth is about nine feet, so the saucer is pretty much filled when the surface of the water is fourteen or fifteen feet above sea level. Because the lake is so shallow, winds blowing across it can pile up water against shorelines and dikes.
In the days following the hurricane, water poured into Lake Okeechobee. Most of it was dumped into the lake by the Kissimmee River, which drains about 3,000 square miles as it flows southeasterly for about 130 miles down the center of the Florida peninsula to the lake’s northern shore. Two smaller creeks—Taylor Creek and Fisheating Creek—also emptied more water into the lake.
There was more water than the Kissimmee could handle, and it spilled over the river’s banks and spread out miles on both sides of the river. On August 14, the Palm Beach Post reported that the Kissimmee had reached the highest level since record-keeping had started.
And Lake Okeechobee was steadily rising. By mid-August it exceeded seventeen feet above sea level, approaching the eighteen-foot level that was considered dangerous. People living near the lake nervously watched the dikes and recalled what had happened only two years earlier when the hurricane that devastated Miami also sent water spilling over a dike, flooded Moore Haven, and killed hundreds of people.
One of those dikes near the town of Okeechobee on the lake’s northern shore gave way on August 14, flooding about 1,200 acres. It was a reminder to Glades residents that state politicians seemed incapable of solving a problem that had long bedeviled them.
Controlling the lake’s water level and eliminating flooding had been discussed in Tallahassee for decades, but the discussions had always broken down over how such a program would be administered. South Florida residents wanted to control how decisions would be made about a drainage program in their region. But opponents didn’t want to give up control of a program funded by residents of the entire state that would benefit only residents of one region.
When John W. Martin ran for governor in 1924, he had promised voters that if they elected him, he would do all he could to improve drainage around Lake Okeechobee and stop the frequent flooding.
But in early July 1928, near the end of his four-year term as governor and now running for the US Senate, Martin had thrown up his hands in frustration after Florida commissioner of agriculture Nathan Mayo refused to sign a bond issue that had been overwhelmingly approved by the state legislature. The bond would have provided $20 million—about $270 million in twenty-first-century dollars—for drainage improvements around Lake Okeechobee.
Mayo, whose signature was required along with those of the state treasurer, the state comptroller, and the state attorney general, said he wouldn’t sign the documents because a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the bond issue hadn’t been decided by the US Supreme Court. It didn’t matter to Mayo that the Florida Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of the plan that the legislature had approved.
State engineers did what they could to lower the lake level after the August 1928 hurricane. Thousands of gallons of water per second were pouring through the gates of the St. Lucie Canal, and a state engineer charged with monitoring the lake level said there was no danger that the dikes would give way. But William Griffis, editor of the Okeechobee News, disputed him. The Kissimmee and the two creeks were pouring water into the lake faster than the canal could drain it off, Griffis said.
By August 16, however, the Kissimmee had crested and the water level was falling, and Lake Okeechobee’s rise had stopped. Residents living near the lake relaxed a little and waited for the ground to dry out so they could return to tending their crops.
Many of the people who lived in those little lakeside farming towns—Clewiston, Belle Glade, Pahokee, Moore Haven, Canal Point, and South Bay—were drawn there by the prospect of working the dark, fertile soil around Lake Okeechobee. But they were a very different breed than the newcomers who had flocked to the stylish beach towns during the peak of the real estate speculation a few years earlier. Davida Gates, who grew up in Belle Glade in the 1920s and had become a schoolteacher, later wrote in her autobiography that the Glades people were “rough, tough, domineering, good-hearted men with uncomplaining, God-fearing wives and graceless, half-civilized, hardy children.”
They were joined by thousands of migrant workers, most of them black, many of them Haitians and other natives of the Caribbean who spoke little or no English. They came to plant and harvest green beans, sugarcane, and other crops.
In her classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, author Zora Neale Hurston described the scene around Lake Okeechobee during the waning da
ys of the summer of 1928. Every day, “hordes of workers poured in,” she wrote.
“They came in wagons from way up in Georgia, and they came in truck loads from east, west, north and south,” Hurston wrote. “Permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dogs in flivvers. All night, all day, hurrying in to pick beans. Skillets, beds, patched up spare inner tubes all hanging and dangling from the ancient cars on the outside and hopeful humanity, herded and hovered on the inside, chugging on to the muck. People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.”
So many migrants were coming to the towns around Lake Okeechobee in the late summer of 1928 that there was no place for them to sleep. Landowners started building nightly bonfires, and men slept on the ground near the fires. “But they had to pay the man whose land they slept on,” Hurston wrote. “He ran the fire just like his boarding place—for pay.”
Money had not poured into the Glades towns the way it had in Miami, Stuart, West Palm Beach, St. Petersburg, and other towns on the coast. Still, as the autumn of 1928 approached, community leaders in the lakeside towns were echoing the optimism that Herbert Hoover voiced when he accepted the Republican nomination for president on August 11 in California.
Hoover, a taciturn engineer who’d become a politician, told a crowd of 75,000 in the Stanford University football stadium that the United States was on the verge of accomplishing one of the most noble of human aspirations.
“We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,” Hoover said. “The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.”
Glades residents weren’t expecting to eliminate poverty, but better times did seem to be at hand.
“Almost as great a boom as the east coast of Florida had in 1925 is the development that is now under way in the upper Everglades,” the Canal Point News said in early September 1928. The weekly newspaper noted that two railroads were laying new track near the lake and new highways were being built by the state. Florida Power and Light Company was putting up new electrical lines from Pahokee to South Bay, a big new sugar mill was being built in Clewiston, and hundreds of acres of land were being cleared to plant sugarcane.
On September 10, an Associated Press story predicted that the same coastal towns that had been roughed up by the August hurricane were preparing for “the best winter season ever experienced” in Florida. The story even found a silver lining to the hurricane. Its destruction had been a stimulant to business because of all the building and repair that followed it.
The story closed on a reassuring note. “Meteorologists say the storm season virtually closes in September,” the story concluded.
There was no doubt in Edwin Menninger’s mind that happy days were about to return to Florida. His South Florida Developer of Friday, September 14, was brimming with optimism.
“Florida looks forward today to one of the best and most prosperous winters that the state has ever known,” the Developer predicted. “Every sign points to a banner season. The number of advance tourists, indicated by the foreign license tags you see daily on the streets now, foreshadows an influx a month or two months from now that will tax our resources of accommodation.”
“One thing is certain, the situation in Florida is improving,” the Developer said. “We have been on bedrock, and the next change will be upward and for the better.”
When events don’t unfold as expected, that’s irony. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted that while irony’s purpose is to humble and shame, it can be useful when it is applied to teach a lesson that leads to a good resolution and teaches people to show honor and gratitude.
When irony is not used for that purpose, it is rude and vulgar, Nietzsche said.
As Florida’s hopeful businessmen found reasons to be optimistic about the return of good times, a massive dose of irony was headed their way. But it would not lead to a good resolution.
Hurricanes draw their power from warm seawater, and by the first week of September, a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean between the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa and the Caribbean Sea had been heated by the summer sun until it had become a prime spawning ground for hurricanes. The windy thunderstorms—known as tropical depressions—that roll off Africa’s west coast at this time of year often pick up a counterclockwise circulation imparted by the spin of the earth, draw power from this warm seawater, and become tropical storms.
For all of their power, however, hurricanes are delicate, and even small changes in conditions—cooler water or upper-level winds that impede their circulation and disrupt their momentum—can cause a storm to weaken and even dissipate.
Every so often, though, one of these late-summer storms encounters exactly perfect conditions as it rumbles past the Cape Verdes and continues westward across the Atlantic. Sometimes, there is nothing to impede its development. Some of history’s worst hurricanes have been born from these conditions at this time of year. Those storms became so infamous that meteorologists gave them a special designation—Cape Verde hurricanes.
On September 6, a tropical depression found those perfect conditions just off the African west coast and quickly strengthened into a tropical storm as it moved south of the Cape Verde Islands. By September 10—when the Associated Press was predicting the greatest tourist season in Florida’s history and telling readers that hurricane season “virtually closes in September”—the storm had grown into a hurricane with maximum winds of about seventy-five miles an hour.
That same morning the SS Commack, an American freighter bound from Brazil to Philadelphia with a load of bananas, ran into a surprisingly strong storm about 1,600 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands. The ship’s captain, Samuel Kruppe, radioed the hurricane’s position.
It was the farthest east that a hurricane had ever been documented. Clearly, there was something sinister about this storm.
About 280 miles southwest of the Commack, the captain of the SS Clearwater was encountering the same rough weather. A rapidly falling barometer indicates that a bad storm is nearby. The captain of the Clearwater had been closely watching his barometer for about two hours. During that time, the reading had dropped one-tenth of an inch. That doesn’t sound like much of a change to a landlubber, but it’s an alarming drop to a sailor whose ship is being pounded by a bad storm thousands of miles from the nearest land.
By September 12, the storm had traveled 2,500 miles across warm summer seawater. As the hurricane approached the ring of islands marking the eastern boundary of the Caribbean, it was a bona fide monster, with maximum winds of around 145 miles an hour. It tore into the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe with savage fury. And it started killing people.
When a hurricane’s barometric pressure falls below 28 inches, it’s a very intense storm. Hurricane Charley, which carved a path of destruction across the Florida peninsula in 2004, had a barometric pressure reading of 27.79 just before it made landfall near Port Charlotte on Florida’s Gulf Coast. That storm’s maximum sustained winds reached at least 145 miles per hour.
A meteorologist in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, recorded a reading of 27.76 inches on September 12, 1928, as the hurricane passed over the island.
Alexander Hamilton, who was born in the British West Indies and later became the first US secretary of the treasury, was about fifteen years old and living on Guadeloupe in August 1772 when a very powerful hurricane crossed the island. He was astonished and deeply moved by the power he witnessed.
“It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place,” he later wrote in a letter to his father. “The roaring of the sea and wind—fiery meteors flying about in the air—the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning—the crash of the falling houses—and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels.”
The hurricane that crossed Guadeloupe in September 1928 was similar in power to the 1772 storm, and the island had been caught unprepared. A
s many as 1,200 people may have died as the hurricane thrashed across the island and entered the northeastern Caribbean Sea. The storm turned slightly to the northwest and gathered even more strength as it bore down on Puerto Rico.
Other islands in the hurricane’s path had a little more warning than Guadeloupe. At ten p.m. on September 12, a cannon boomed from the ramparts of Fort Christiansvaern on St. Croix. It was a warning to residents that they should come immediately to the ancient eighteenth-century citadel for protection from the approaching storm.
In Puerto Rico, ships were weighing anchor and leaving ports to avoid the storm. Police went door-to-door, warning residents to prepare for a very bad blow. The hurricane’s winds began to tear at Puerto Rico’s southeastern coast around four a.m. on September 13, 1928.
During its short, 320-mile run from Guadeloupe to Puerto Rico, the storm had feasted on the warm Caribbean waters. The hurricane’s eye reached Guayama on the southeast coast of the island around 2:30 p.m. The storm’s arrival happened to coincide with the Catholic Church’s celebration of the feast of Saint Philip, or San Felipe. It was the second time in Puerto Rico’s history that a hurricane had struck the island on that saint’s feast day. So the hurricane that pounded Puerto Rico on Thursday, September 13, 1928, came to be known as San Felipe Segundo, or Saint Philip the Second.
As the eye passed over Guayama, winds in San Juan, about 30 miles to the north, reached 160 miles an hour before the instruments measuring wind speed were blown away.
The San Lorenzo, a Puerto Rican passenger liner with British passengers aboard, was riding out the hurricane in the San Juan harbor.
“We could see whole houses hurtle past, and tall trees swept along by the wind,” passenger Estelle Rice later told The Times of London.
The noise from the storm was so loud that the passengers aboard the San Lorenzo did not hear an ammonia plant blow up during the hurricane, even though it was only a few hundred feet from where they were anchored.