Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (33 page)

The story stated, “In view of the awful calamity that has visited the state of Ohio in the recent horrible flood, which has caused an enormous loss of life and property and thrown countless hundreds of men and women out of employment, the United Doctors have decided to throw open their doors once more to those who may be suffering and unable to take treatment owing to the flood conditions and their results.”

The article then went on to give the address of United Doctors and stated that people who showed up would receive “free consultation, advice and no charge for service whatever will be made. The only charge made will be sufficient to cover the medicine used in the treatment of the case. This is your last chance of Free Treatment and is made only because of the intense suffering caused by the flood.”

And just in case anyone wondered if they were a good candidate for United Doctors, the article finished by saying, “The United Doctors treat among other ailments Chronic and Deep-Seated diseases of the Nerves, Blood, Heart, Liver, Kidneys, Bladder, Skin, Spine, including Rheumatism, Epilepsy, Gallstones, Goitre, Constipation, Dyspepsia, Neuralgia, Dropsy, Asthma, Catarrh, Deafness, Loss of Nerve Force, Weak Lungs and Diseases of Women and Diseases of Men.”

In other words, everyone. Everyone with money for medicine, that is.

Lest one fault the newspapers for running these articles on the newspaper pages and next to flood articles, the editors often (but not always) put the initials “advt” afterward, standing for advertisement or advertorial. The editors at the
Newark Advocate
used the initials “s&m” at the article's conclusion. It may have been a sadomasochistic form of journalism, but it stood for sales and marketing, a point that most readers would miss or not understand.

United Doctors' offices would start closing within a few years, and the visits would stop, due to complaints from the public and lawmakers who started to catch on and began writing laws to stop fly-by-night medical operations; but during the flood of 1913, they ran rampant as lawmakers and other public officials were distracted with flood recovery. The incident in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, was not the only
instance either of rescuers trying to profit during the flood. It is the most infamous example, given that police officers were involved, but they were hardly the only greedy rescuers.

Newspapers reported many examples of people charging for boat and carfare to get people from here or there. In Peru, Indiana, some boatmen charged several new mothers with their babies in arms five dollars to be taken from a building to dry land. In Dayton, according to one newspaper account, a husky young doctor had an argument with one man who demanded ten dollars—five per passenger—before he would bring two injured women in his car to the hospital.

The doctor didn't have ten dollars, and the man kept insisting. Finally, the physician picked up a piece of driftwood and clocked him senseless. Then the doctor put the unconscious jerk into the car with the women, drove to the hospital, and treated all of them.

There was at least one other surgeon in Dayton—a Dr. Ray B. Harris—who couldn't take the greed either and, in his words, “I personally thrashed two drivers who presumed to haggle.”

In Columbus, a 35-year-old undertaker by the name of O. H. Osman was arrested by the police for taking possessions off dead bodies. Osman, who three years earlier had been a telephone operator at the Columbus State Hospital, an insane asylum, was now collecting bodies—and quite a bit more. Evidently thinking that most people were as dishonest as he was, Osman approached two Ohio National Guard soldiers, Clyde McCullough and an F. L. Killworth, asking them to “throw” all the bodies possible to him, saying that he would pay them if they did.

The two guardsmen arranged a meeting with Osman at the morgue, and when they arrived, the undertaker was in the middle of telling an underling to remove the clothing off an elderly woman's corpse and taking money out of the pockets. But instead of sealing a deal with Osman, McCullough and Killworth took the undertaker into custody.

This next tale appeared in one of the Dayton papers. It may be apocryphal, sort of a wish fulfillment story that made the rounds—but it may well be true, too. According to one news item, a Mr. Charles Thatcher, his wife Louise, and a neighbor were trapped on the floor of their house when a boatman offered to rescue them for
a cost of $100 per passenger. Mr. Thatcher proposed the boatman accept $25 a person, for that's all he had, but the offer wasn't accepted, and they were left behind. Later, they heard a shot, presumably from another angry homeowner. A few minutes later, the Thatchers and their neighbor saw the boat float by, with the boatman slumped over, dead.

Chapter Fourteen

Children in Harm's Way

March 26, shortly before 10
A
.
M
., Fort Wayne

From the first rays of daylight, rescuers were back in their boats, hauling families out of second-story windows and off of roofs. Among those families were Harry Laban Blair, a 66-year-old Canadian-born house painter, and his wife, Hattie, their daughter, Francis, and their son-in-law Ralph Leffler, a horseshoer. Their happiness turned to sheer terror, however, when they realized George, all of five years old, had not climbed into the boat with them.

It sounds incredulous and the height of irresponsibility that a set of grandparents and parents wouldn't realize their grandson and son hadn't climbed in their boat, but to give them the benefit of the doubt, they had all been stuck in the same house, and then on top of the house, for two days, with only one pancake to eat among them. They were starving and clearly not thinking straight.

To top it off, there were other people on the roof and a hoard of boats coming and going, carrying people to safety. It was melee and quite possibly, on top of everything else, raining. But the chaos they came from was nothing compared to what it was like on the boat once everyone discovered George was missing. The family was in hysterics,
especially when they were told that the current was too strong to go back for him.

It's just as well that they didn't risk their lives going back. The five-year-old had climbed into another rescue boat, just before the rest of his family had clambered into their own, and George was calmly waiting at the shoreline for everyone else to catch up with him. The experience only highlighted how marginal and disorganized rescue efforts were—noble and courageous, but it was clear that neither Fort Wayne or many other cities in the flood zone had any real plan in place to deal with flooding and bringing its citizens to safety in its wake. Later, communities would begin to address this.

The level of devastation inflicted by the flood was always a matter of perspective in every city, whether Fort Wayne, New Castle, or even Dayton. If you were marooned on your roof with no or little food, you tended to tell your friends that it was the worst flood ever. If your house was on dry, high ground, your life could go on in a relatively normal way—or you could use your resources to help your fellow neighbors. That was the tack the Peters family took in Fort Wayne.

Living above much of the city on the appropriately named Rockhill Street, Fred and Bessie Peters, a family with some wealth, opened their two-story, affluent home, which overlooked the St. Marys River, and allowed refugees to gather their wits and camp out. With the only working telephone in the area, the house became something of a social gathering place where neighbors could come and try to find out how family members and friends were faring.

“Men come in, in their wet clothing from the river, and are immediately given warm, dry clothing and hot coffee and sandwiches,” the
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
reported at the time. “Coffee is sent by Mrs. Peters to the workers. She has relieved a great number of people in the last few days and given a beautiful example as many of her friends as possible have tried to follow.”

Mrs. Peters let all of her three children, Fred Jr., Stuart, and Jane Alice help as much as they could and feel important to the flood relief cause, which probably boosted their confidence since the Peters otherwise had a rocky, dysfunctional marriage. Fred Peters had been
injured shortly before his marriage in a work-related accident that left him with only one good leg and, worse, periodic headaches that turned him into a tyrant. Which is why the following year, Bessie divorced her husband and transplanted herself and her children to California. And then many years later, her youngest, Jane Alice, just five years old during the flood, grew up to become the actress and comedienne famous for screwball comedies during the 1930s—Carole Lombard.

Lombard wasn't the only future celebrity caught up in the flood. Her future beau, movie star Clark Gable, was a twelve-year-old living in Cadiz, Ohio, at the time. According to Warren G. Harris' book
Clark Gable: A Biography,
the Gable family's house was threatened by rising waters: “… for a solid week the rains poured down and threatened to wash away their three year old home.”

Somewhere in the Indianapolis area was a future gangster, nine-year-old John Dillinger.

Roy Rogers, the famous singing cowboy film actor and singer, was almost two years old and living in Portsmouth, Ohio, which was also hammered by the flood. According to Robert W. Phillips's book,
Roy Rogers: A Biography, Radio History, Television Career Chronicle,
Rogers's dad, Andy, took the family's houseboat through the streets of Portsmouth, serving as a rescue boat for anyone in need of help.

Vincente Minnelli, future husband of Judy Garland and father of Liza Minnelli, not to mention acclaimed movie director, was a ten-year-old who had recently moved to Delaware, Ohio. He had been visiting there for years, to spend the winter with his grandparents; but his parents, who were touring the country in a theatre troupe called the Mighty Dramatic Company, decided to plant their roots and open a costume shop and settle on Fountain Street in Delaware. While the family survived the flood, they had entertainment equipment from their traveling theatre days stored near the river that wouldn't make it.

Bob Hope was also ten years old and living in Cleveland, where the city was affected by the flood but nowhere near to the degree of the rest of the state.

Down the St. Marys River, south of the house where the future Carole Lombard lived, the water was eleven inches deep in the first
floor of the Allen County Orphans' home. That in and of itself was not so terrible—it did not seem as if the water would ever reach the second floor—but the current was strong, and it was not a reach to fear that the orphanage might eventually collapse if the weight of the water kept increasing. Everyone felt that the children needed to be evacuated now. In another part of the city, the children at the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth, a name that would be changed to the much less stigmatized Fort Wayne State School twenty years later, were shepherded out of their home, where the waters had now reached the front yard. Everyone knew what had happened with the Allen County Orphans' home; nobody was going to take any chances with any other orphanage.

That morning, Miss Hammond went to the orphanage with Henry E. Branning, and they both stopped at the Gebhart farm. Miss Hammond waited at the front of the farm while Branning went looking for Charles Gebhart, a saloon owner. He found him behind his barn, feeding chickens. Branning asked Gebhart if he could man a rowboat and ferry the orphans to safer land. Gebhart didn't hesitate.

Gebhart secured a rowboat—probably his own, as he did live near the river—and they made their way to the orphanage, which was completely surrounded by water at this point. It wasn't very deep—the water was only eleven inches high on the first floor of the building—but it was moving quickly, and wading through it was foolhardy.

Gebhart rowed both Hammond and Branning to the orphanage, pulling the boat up to the fire escape, which seemed as if it would make a safe and easy platform for the children to leave from. Hammond and Gebhart remained in the boat while Branning went inside to arrange passage of the first of the children. The plan was to go to a farm that the county orphanage owned, just a fourth-mile to the west but on dry earth where the children would be safe. The first three passengers were Della Sturm, eight years old, and two seven-year-old girls, Opal Jacobs and Kittie Wise. The three girls huddled alongside Miss Hammond in the pouring rain. Next to board were three older girls. Mrs. Overmeyer had decided she would put three older girls as a counterpart to the younger children. If there was
trouble, the older girls could help Miss Hammond. And so Esther Kramer, Ardah Woods and Alice Mannen, all fourteen-year-old girls, carefully made their way into the boat.

“I am going to take my friend with me,” said Ardah, referring to her Bible tightly clasped in her hands. Everybody seemed to think this was a good idea. Particularly on a day like this.

Once they were in, right about 10
A
.
M
., Gebhart began to paddle toward a farmhouse about one-quarter mile to the west.

Opal dug her hands as deep into her muff as she could, trying to stay warm and be responsible. It was Miss Hammond's, and Opal had been told to take good care of it during the trip.

In another boat that had been commandeered from good Samaritans, E. G. Moore and Branning helped two more girls into the boat and were about to add more passengers when something went terribly wrong. “My God,” shouted Moore, “it's struck a post!”

It was, more accurately, a telegraph pole. Gebhart's boat hit it, sending everyone tumbling into the rushing river.

From the inside of the orphanage, the children who were watching—virtually all of them—broke into screams.

Gebhart saw Miss Hammond about twenty feet away, hugging the pole that the boat had hit. Underneath her arms were three girls, two of them under one arm, and one under the other. He didn't see the older girls.

The children in the orphanage saw them. So did Branning, Mrs. Overmeyer, Moore, and Mark Ormiston, a 42-year-old husband and father of two boys who was employed at a nearby brickyard, driving either a wagon or a truck. They watched the foamy, muddy yellow waves swallow the four older girls. One of them just seemed to vanish instantly. Two of the older girls, however, could be seen being dragged by the current toward the railroad tracks that normally carried the train from Fort Wayne to the town of Bluffton, Indiana. One of the four, Esther Kramer, could swim and managed to fight the waves for at least a few moments and then grab hold of a railroad track, to keep herself from being carried any farther. But a few seconds later, the water, moving too fast, jarred her free, and she was gone.