For Sale —American Paradise (48 page)

Margaret added a few hasty notes to her letter: “Storm terrific. One awning on store blown away. House rocking. Have our bags packed and blankets ready
to leave if possible. Big piece of roofing blown off house. Wires down all around.”

And nightfall was coming early.

“It is getting dark which adds to our fear,” Best wrote. “Part of house blown away. We are going to try to be brave. Love.”

The residents of the farming communities around Lake Okeechobee also were getting pummeled by the hurricane. By five p.m., the winds were just starting to arrive. At Canal Point, the wind was clocked at about forty miles an hour.

Nineteen people had gathered at the home of Pat Burke near the southern shore of the big lake. Burke's small one-story house was in the tiny farming community of Chosen, just outside Belle Glade. Residents had taken the name from biblical references to “a chosen place.”

Burke's stepdaughter, Helen McCormick, was among the group that had assembled to ride out the storm. Her mother had discussed leaving the lake area with her husband, but they'd decided against it because it was a fifty-mile drive to the town of Okeechobee on the northern shore of the lake.

“We all had a big day with a big dinner, and the children playing and all,” McCormick recalled, “and that night we was gathered in the front room and everyone was talking about where they'd go if they had to leave the house.”

In Belle Glade, seventeen-year-old Jabo Tryon was tired and hungry. He'd gotten up at four o'clock that morning to go to work at his job at the local ice plant, and had worked more than twelve hours delivering ice with only a cup of coffee for sustenance. Storm or no storm, he was determined to get something to eat. He went to a restaurant in Belle Glade's small business district.

“So I went in there and ordered me a cup of coffee and a piece of pie,” Tryon recalled in 1988. “She had some mighty fine pie.”

Shortly before six p.m. the eye of San Felipe was just offshore from the oceanfront mansions of Palm Beach, and its winds were ripping away at downtown West Palm Beach on the other side of Lake Worth. Forty miles away on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee, the intensifying winds were piling up water against the flimsy mud dikes.

Jack Zuber noticed that the water in a nearby canal had been steadily rising since around four p.m., and that made his wife Celia nervous.

“So was I,” Zuber admitted. But they had two children: a son, Robert, and an infant. They were trying not to show their nervousness because of their kids.

San Felipe's eye touched land at Palm Beach around seven p.m. Its barometric pressure reading was 27.43 inches—even more intense than the hurricane that had hit Miami only two years earlier. At the time, it was the most intense hurricane on record to make landfall in the United States.

And then, suddenly, stillness. The eye of the storm had reached West Palm
Beach.

“A little after seven the lull came and it was just about as terrifying as the storm,” Frances Ball wrote in the letter to her parents. “Several people went reconnoitering but we stayed put.”

As the winds died to a whisper, more storm refugees scurried into the Harvey Building seeking shelter.

“Mothers with tiny new babies,” Ball wrote. “Women with canaries and dogs, fathers and youngsters—oh! It was pitiful. The lobby was jam full of women and children.”

And then, after about a thirty-minute lull, bedlam returned.

“All of a sudden the wind changed,” Ball said. “The lull was over and back she came in full fury. And one of the men had the bright idea that the glass might blow in because the wind had changed. So he had everybody move up to the second story and on up to the fifth.

“Now I'm not exaggerating one little bit when I say that he had no more got everybody out of the lobby, off the first stairway, when there came the most bloodcurdling
bang crash
! The steel girders were bent and twisted, and the lobby and stairway one mass of wall, tile, brick, and timber. Jimmy and I had been sitting on the next-to-the-bottom stair.

“We hadn't been gone five minutes before that whole thing caved in,” Ball said. “It was pitch dark, and you should have heard the women and children scream! There simply are no words adequate to describe the terror of those few minutes. The air was full of chipped walls, plaster, sand, and glass.”

The
Miami Daily News
later reported that the destruction had been caused when a heavy chimney gave way to the winds and crashed through the entire fourteen floors of the Harvey Building.

Ball and her friend Jimmy sat down on a stairwell on the third floor and leaned against a wall.

“As we were leaning there we could hear things go thudding down behind the walls of the stairway,” Ball wrote. “It sounded awful and nearly petrified me, but we never breathed a word for fear of creating a panic.”

But the winds seemed to be easing a bit.

“A little lull would come, then a new rush of wind and a series of crashes and dull thuds,” Ball said. “The whole stairway would quiver and sway. Lord! It was awful.”

Forty miles inland, the counterclockwise circulation of San Felipe's outer winds were starting to work on Lake Okeechobee, piling water higher and higher along the dikes on the southern shore.

“So it was just a little bit before dark that the water began to get right to the top of the dike, which was simply a muck dike, probably four, five feet high,” said Vernon Boots. “So the water elevation was a good bit higher than the houses.”

A hurricane's powerful winds move water even when it's far out to sea, crossing deep ocean waters. But in deep water, the effect is reduced because the deep water absorbs the wind's energy, and not as much water is piled up by the winds.

When a hurricane blows across shallow water, however, the wind's effects are far greater because the water's depth cannot absorb the wind's energy. So the water piles up.

Zora Neale Hurston eloquently described how the 1928 hurricane affected the lake.

“It woke up old Okeechobee and the monster began to roll in his bed,” she wrote in
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. “Began to roll and complain like a peevish world on the grumble.”

The lake became steadily more raucous as the hurricane moved inland and its eye passed West Palm Beach and started across the Everglades.

Hurricanes inevitably lose their power when they move over land. The land disrupts the storm's circulation, slows its momentum, and diminishes its winds. The deterioration usually happens quickly.

It's about forty miles from West Palm Beach to the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee. Usually, a hurricane has lost at least some of its intensity after traveling that far inland, but during the wet summer of 1928, the downpour from the August hurricane and the rains that had fallen almost continuously since early September had made the Everglades wetter than usual. San Felipe, in effect, was still over water as it roared inland toward Lake Okeechobee. And that probably allowed it to retain most of its monstrous power.

In Belle Glade, Jabo Tryon was digging into his pie. Outside, the winds were steadily increasing.

“And I'm setting there, when she set my coffee down and the pie, I took a bite of pie,” Tryon recalled. “But the building was rocking so that my coffee was slopping out of the cup.”

Tryon and another man sitting beside him at the counter were the only customers in the restaurant at the time. Tryon looked at the man and said, “This building ain't going to stand much of this. Look at my coffee cup, how it's rocking.”

The winds began to claw away pieces of the building. “I guess I took one sip of my coffee, and the plaster began to fall out of the ceiling, into my pie and coffee,” Tryon said.

Chunks of a false front over the entrance of the building began to tumble into the street. Two women who worked in the restaurant screamed and ran for the door, but Tryon and the other man persuaded them to wait until the pieces of the false front had stopped falling.

When the shower of debris ended, Tryon and the other man helped the women cross the alley to the Tedder Hotel, where other refugees had gathered. They joined the crowd in the hotel.

The winds increased with stunning quickness. A few minutes before eight p.m., the barometric pressure reading in nearby Canal Point was 28.54, and winds were blowing at sixty miles per hour. Only fifteen minutes later, the pressure had dropped to 28.25 and the winds were clocked at seventy-five.

Jack Zuber walked into the kitchen of his house and looked through a window in the back door. “It was jet dark, but every once in a while lightning gave me a glimpse of things.”

Zuber guessed that he stood at the door staring into the storm for at least an hour.

At nine p.m., the barometer at Canal Point was reading 27.97, and winds were blowing at 150 miles an hour or more. And the barometer was still falling, which meant that the worst of the hurricane was still to come.

“Water was lapping up over the porch, I remember, when an exceptionally hard gust of wind came,” Zuber said. “It just seemed that the house was going to pieces.”

Zuber checked on his family. His wife was restraining her fear as she held their children.

“I went back into the kitchen again and as I looked through the window, lightning flashed just in time to show me the garage as it went over on its side, balanced there for a second, then crashed into a tree and was demolished,” he said.

Celia cried out in terror. Zuber sat down beside her and took her hand. “I could feel that she was shaking all over,” he said.

In the Tedder Hotel in Belle Glade, Jabo Tryon realized something bad had happened. Water was rushing under the hotel door.

“Well,” Tryon said to a man standing next to him, “the dike's broke.”

“Hush,” the man said. “You want to start people screamin' and hollerin,' make 'em have fits?” the man said.

“You ain't gonna keep that a secret,” the teenager retorted. “It's coming.”

Soon the water was knee-deep in the hotel. “I could feel the muck come down my breeches leg, the muck that was floating in that rushing water. And that was muck that come off the plowed fields.”

In the labor camps where migrant workers were huddling in their shacks for protection from the storm, chaos had been unleashed when the dikes gave way.

At Jack Zuber's farm, the water had risen to more than a foot deep in his living room.

“Suddenly there seemed to come a kind of wave, and the water must have risen about a foot all at once,” Zuber said. “Celia jumped up, still holding both children. I took Robert from her.”

“Things happened fast after that,” Zuber said.

The building lurched, nearly throwing them off their feet. Another lurch sent Celia to the floor and Jack flying across the room. He decided he had to get his family out of the house. But then the house started coming apart.

“It seemed to me I was being washed miles and miles, then I felt the weight off and found myself on top of the water,” he said.

Zuber was floating atop a wall that had been part of his house. “I looked around for Celia, and I just glimpsed her as she passed out of sight,” he said. “She just kind of faded away in the water.”

Zuber's raft of wreckage was swept on by the storm for what seemed an endless time. Finally the wall lodged firmly between two trees. Then Zuber passed out.

San Felipe's winds had driven more and more water against the dikes until they finally gave way and freed the beast of Lake Okeechobee, Hurston wrote. The raging water was pushing the disintegrating dikes ahead of it, and the muddy wall slammed into the migrants' shacks and “uprooted them like grass,” Hurston wrote.

The workers fled for their lives, dodging flying debris as they went.

“They had to fight to keep from being pushed the wrong way and to hold together,” Hurston wrote. “They saw other people like themselves struggling along. A house down, here and there, frightened cattle. But above all the drive of the wind and the water. And the lake. Under its multiplied roar could be heard a mighty sound of grinding rock and timber and a wail. They looked back. Saw people trying to run in raging waters and screaming when they found they couldn't. A huge barrier of the makings of the dike to which the cabins had been added was rolling and tumbling forward. Ten feet higher than and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-
up waters like a road
crusher on a cosmic scale.”

All along the southern shore, water was tumbling out of Lake Okeechobee and driving everything before it. It was slamming into cottages, filling ground-floor living rooms, tearing infants from their mothers' arms, pushing still-
occupied homes off their foundations, and carrying their occupants on a horrifying, deadly ride.

Water began filling the house where nineteen people, including Helen McCormick, had enjoyed a wonderful Sunday lunch only a few hours before.

“Everyone wanted to go to the roof, so they cut a hole through the roof,” McCormick recalled. “When they got it cut through, the water was up around my waist.”