For Sale —American Paradise (47 page)

Despite the ferocity of the storm, the advance warnings saved lives in Puerto Rico. In Coamo, only about eighteen miles northwest of where the storm came ashore, Felicia Cartegena, a telephone operator, stayed at her switchboard while the hurricane roared around her. She sent warnings to other parts of the islands and dispatched help for those who'd been injured.

She paid for her bravery with her life.

In Cayey, ten miles north of Guayama, a mother tucked a child under each arm and tried desperately to find shelter. She and her children were nearly cut in two when the storm sent pieces of a roof whirling through the air. Not far away, a merchant who opened his door to admit a man seeking shelter battled the winds to try to close the door. Suddenly the wind snatched him up, hurled him through a window, and into a river, where he drowned.

And there was one more unusual death. Franz Romer, a twenty-nine-year-old German-born veteran of World War I, had launched a sail-
powered kayak into the Atlantic at Lisbon, Portugal, on March 31, 1928, planning to sail the tiny craft, just over twenty-one feet long, across the Atlantic to Miami.

By early September, an exhausted Romer had reached Puerto Rico. After recuperating for several days in San Juan, he set out again. About an hour after he left, the first hurricane warning reached San Juan.

Romer was never seen again, and no trace of him or his tiny boat was found.

More than 300 people were killed in Puerto Rico before San Felipe was finished with its deadly work. Red Cross officials later estimated that the hurricane had left half of the island's population—perhaps 600,000 people—homeless.

The
Palm Beach Post
of Friday, September 14, 1928, had a front-
page story saying that Florida was not threatened by the hurricane that had devastated Puerto Rico.

“While weather bureau officials emphasized there is no cause for alarm on the Florida coast, as the hurricane may deviate from its present course or dissipate itself at sea, they said it was undoubtedly the worst this year, and may be of the proportions of the hurricane which swept Miami in 1926,” the
Post
story said.

Actually, San Felipe was a little more powerful than the 1926 hurricane. And it was approaching Florida at a very bad time. Heavy rain had resumed again in late August and early September, and Lake Okeechobee had begun to rise again.

The rains continued during the first two weeks of September, when as much as another foot fell in some places. By mid-month, Lake Okeechobee was frighteningly high, and once again lakeside residents were nervously eyeing the water lapping at the low mud dikes.

On Saturday, September 15, the front page of the
Palm Beach Post
was dominated by a blaring headline: “Florida May Feel Storm's Wrath.” It must have been jarring to
Post
readers who just the day before had been told there was “no cause for alarm” about the hurricane.

“Giving ironclad forecasts upon the hurricane is practically impossible,” the
Post
story admitted. “Possibilities were apparent last night that the storm might veer to the right and travel northward, which would head it again to sea,” the story continued. “Again, it may continue to the Florida coast and strike at a point which it is now too early to determine.”

San Felipe had lost some of its fierceness since it had devastated Puerto Rico, but it was still a very powerful, dangerous, and deadly storm. Around three p.m. Saturday, the eye of the storm passed over the German steamer
August Leon-hardt
near the southeastern tip of the Bahamas, about 450 miles east-
southeast
of West Palm Beach.

A ship's officer on the
August Leonhardt
struggled to describe San Felipe's power.

“The force of the wind, if more or less, could only be judged by the noise made by the storm, which reminded me of the New York subway going full speed passing switches,” the officer later wrote.

At eleven p.m. Saturday night, the US Weather Bureau in Washington, DC, issued a statement saying that winds on the southern Florida peninsula could exceed fifty miles an hour. “There was no indication last night that Miami or vicinity will be in the path of dangerous winds,” the statement said. “Indications were that when the storm reaches a position due east of Miami Sunday morning it will be 170 miles to sea and winds during the day should shift to the north and diminish as the storm moves up the coast.”

The Weather Bureau's forecast wasn't entirely wrong. Miami would get little more than a windy rainstorm from the hurricane. And Arthur Brisbane apparently was keeping an eye on the forecasts. The
Palm Beach Post
's edition for Sunday, September 16, published the optimistic forecast and Brisbane's “Today” column on the front page.

Brisbane was detached and flippant about the powerful storm that was bearing down on Florida, noting that at about the same time the hurricane was devastating Puerto Rico, a tornado was killing eleven people in South Dakota and Nebraska.

“But science can foresee a day when high winds will be under man's control,” Brisbane wrote. One day, “in the days far off, perhaps 50,000 years or 500,000 years hence,” humans would control the earth's temperature and transfer “surplus heat” from the equator to the poles. The winds that caused such destruction today would blow “where man says it shall blow, and at a speed prescribed by him,” he wrote. “There is nothing fanciful about that.”

That same morning, American Red Cross vice chairman James Fieser read the forecasts for Florida and had a very different reaction than Brisbane. He was alarmed. He picked up his phone and ordered experienced disaster workers to go to Jacksonville and wait for the storm to pass. He called local Red Cross chapters in southern Florida counties and told them to prepare for a disaster. And he sent a telegram to Florida governor John Martin, advising him that the Red Cross was alerting its relief workers to prepare to deal with a tragedy.

On his small farm near Belle Glade, Jack Zuber was getting ready for “a hard wind.”

“I nailed boards over the windows and reinforced my garage doors with heavy timbers,” Zuber said. “We felt comparatively safe after that.”

Zuber was optimistic. He had ridden out the hurricane two years earlier in the same house. The water had only gotten a couple of feet deep and his house had withstood the blow, so he figured it would withstand this storm.

It seemed like a safe assumption.

At 10:30 Sunday morning, the US Weather Bureau in Washington, DC, ordered hurricane warnings to be hoisted from Miami to Daytona Beach. “This hurricane is of wide extent and great severity,” the Weather Bureau advisory read. “Every precaution should be taken against destructive winds and high tides on Florida east coast, especially West Palm Beach to Daytona.”

By early Sunday afternoon, San Felipe's outer winds were raking the Florida coast. Attorney Everett Muskoff Jr. and his wife were driving north from Miami and reached West Palm Beach shortly after noon.

“A brisk wind was blowing,” Muskoff recalled. “We were looking at the skies when suddenly a roof of a building went hurtling by. We went to the first hotel we could find. When we got out of the car we could hardly walk, so strong was the wind.”

The hotel lobby was already crowded. “The crowd stood about, looking out the doors,” Muskoff said. “By this time a drenching rain had set in. There could be heard crashes and rumblings. The tiles of the hotel roof clanked off to the pavement at irregular intervals. It sort of got on one's nerves.”

Around the same time, Frances Ball left the Hotel Pennsylvania in West Palm Beach with a friend named Jimmy to get some lunch. Then they went to visit a friend whose office was in the Harvey Building, a fourteen-story skyscraper that was the tallest building in downtown West Palm Beach. It was around 1:30 p.m.

“The gale was blowing so strong at the time that we could just barely make headway against it,” she later wrote in a letter to her parents. “Half the time we [were] just pawing the air.”

The electricity to the Harvey Building had already been cut, so Ball and her friend had to walk up fourteen stories to their friend's office. “The whole top was swaying enough to make you seasick,” Ball told her parents. “We left immediately for the ground floor but in that short time the wind and rain had increased so that you couldn't stand up. Naturally we stayed in that building.”

About forty miles inland from West Palm Beach, fifteen-
year-old Vernon
Boots and his young friends were enjoying the windy day. The winds weren't yet as fierce as those that were already slashing at West Palm Beach.

“Us boys, we were having a big time,” Boots recalled in 1988.

Boots and his friends were making propellers by nailing a piece of a shingle to a stick and holding it up to the wind.

“And actually, the wind got to blowing so hard, the prop would turn so fast, it would burn a hole right through [the propeller],” Boots said.

Boots and his family lived on a farm on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee, where they grew beans, potatoes, tomatoes, and other produce. Vernon's father, William Boots, also worked for the state highway department.

They had no idea that the wind was a harbinger of disaster. “Of course, we were enjoying it, you know, not having sense enough to know something bad was about to take place.”

Around 2:30 p.m., downtown West Palm Beach was being drenched by rain and raked by steadily increasing winds when Margaret Best started writing her thoughts into a letter to her sister in Lowell, Massachusetts. She and her husband, Amos, were riding out the storm in the downtown cafeteria they operated. With them were their son and two of their daughters.

Amos Best and his family had spent the day trying to prepare for the hurricane, bracing doors, protecting plate-
glass windows, gathering candles. Now all they could do was wait and listen to San Felipe's howling arrival.

“The wind is blowing a mile a minute, believe me, and overhead there is a rumble like thunder,” Margaret Best wrote. “The rain is sweeping the street in sheets.”

Margaret was already wondering whether their building would withstand the storm, and she and her husband were discussing whether to move to the cellar of a friend who lived nearby.

“We have candles all ready,” she wrote. “The lights are all out and there is no power in the store. Dave came by about an hour ago with the latest reports of this being the worst storm ever here. . . . It is only 2:30 now and it is not expected to strike until 7 o'clock. It will be a wonder if there is anything left of us by then, it is so bad now.”

Contemplating the roaring hurricane outside and the uncertainty of her fate, Margaret jotted a note on the back of the envelope containing the letter to her sister. “Someone Please Mail,” she wrote.

At the Harvey Building, Frances Ball and her friend Jimmy were riding out the storm with other refugees.

“There were about 12 of us shut up in there,” Ball wrote. “The water was pouring in through the doors and windows. All of a sudden, crack—then a second of silence—then a deafening, crashing, splintering of plate-
glass windows!
You should have heard the air scream through the transoms and around the corners.”

Among the businesses in the building was a pharmacy on the ground floor, “all glass, too, and lighted by skylights,” Ball said.

“The first thing we know one of the skylights came crashing down and it was pandemonium let loose inside there,” she said. “The owner had some expensive stuff that must not get wet so he and two others dashed in to get it.”

Moments later came another deafening crash, and the three terrified men raced out of the pharmacy. The roof and shelves lining the walls had collapsed. The stench of spilled chemicals followed the fleeing men.

“By that time the entire building was swaying and trembling in a manner to strike terror to your heart,” Ball wrote.

And the worst part of the hurricane was still several hours away.

By five p.m. Margaret and Amos Best and their children had moved to the neighbor's cellar.