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A PERFECT DAY
At the tail end of the bleakest summer in memory, weeks as gray as weathered shingles and drenching downpours, September 21st arrived in Southern New England like a gift from the gods. The surf was spectacular, the best of the season—long breakers rolling in, crescendos of sparkling foam, the water temperature surprisingly warm, and no pesky seagulls to swoop off with lunch. Silky cirrus threaded across a pastel sky, and the tang of salt was on the hot air, the air itself motionless, as if time had paused to savor the moment. For vacationers lingering after Labor Day, this was the reprise they had hoped for—a last perfect beach day.
The morning began softly on Narragansett Bay—just the flat, steady slap of the sea against the wooden hulls of the fishing boats easing out of the harbors of Rhode Island at first light. Through a thin morning fog, the sun was a silver-white dollar, promising a bright day. The beam from the Beavertail Lighthouse at the southern tip of Jamestown Island guided the boats out. The goose-like honk of the lighthouse horn and the random shout of one fisherman to another carried across the water. Otherwise, the bay was strangely silent. No gulls trailed the wakes, calling to one another and diving for breakfast. There was no bird song at all.
Carl Chellis, the light keeper, was up with the dawn, watching the boats glide out. There were swordfish boats, forty or fifty footers with long pulpits and high lookouts so they could sneak up on their catch, and big trawlers, holds packed with ice, crews curled in the cabin or sprawled on the deck sleeping off the night before. Striped bass and blues, the catch of weekend fishermen, were running off Block Island, so plentiful you could almost lean over the side of the boat and scoop them up. But the big trawlers were in the hard, dirty business of commercial fishing. They bottom fished, dragging for halibut, skate, swordfish, cod, haddock, mackerel, the white fish that found their way to the meatless Friday supper tables of Catholic families throughout the Northeast. The old-guard Yankees were becoming a minority in southern New England. Irish, Italian and Portuguese immigrants were changing the demographics and politics of the larger cities.
Out on the bay, hand-liners, two guys in a dory working maybe a dozen lines over the side, slapped the wakes of the big fishing boats, and in his lone rowboat, a single fisherman leaned into the oars, pulled back, leaned in, as rhythmic as the tide. Chellis recognized the young Greek—Gianitis, his name was. Nobody knew much about him. He had come to Jamestown in early September, against the summer tide. How he got from Ionia to the shores of a small Yankee island in Narragansett Bay was anybody’s guess, but he’d been living for two weeks in a fishing shack a couple of miles north, with his wife and two sons, a pair of sweet, serious-faced little boys who looked like twins. They were five and six years old, with eyes as black as kalamata olives. The shack had outdoor plumbing, no heat, and walls like cheesecloth, yet in the Great Depression, four flimsy walls and a leaky roof could seem like a blessing.
Chellis had two boys of his own. Bill, sixteen, was mellow and even-keeled like his father. In another year, he would join the navy and serve for thirty years. Clayton, eleven, was the wild one, who would do anything on a dare. He was a seal in the water and a handful anywhere. Then there was seven-year-old Marion, the family sweetheart. Her mother Ethel dressed her like a princess, and wrapped her blonde hair in rags to make banana curls. Everybody said Marion looked like Shirley Temple.
Jamestown is Newport’s sister island. The two sit side by side at the entrance to Narragansett Bay, and like many sisters, they share a history and little else. Jamestown is a place to live. Newport with its fabled estates is a place to visit. Just nine square miles of rugged beauty, Jamestown is formed by a pair of long ovals—Beavertail to the southwest and a much larger oval to the northeast. A narrow causeway created by a low-lying sandbar links the two. Mackerel Cove, the town beach, is on one side of the causeway, Sheffield Cove, an excellent spot for clamming, is on the other.
Jamestown was founded in 1656 when Benedict Arnold, first governor of Rhode Island and the staunchly upright great grandfather of the notorious Revolutionary War traitor, led a group of Newport families across the bay. They bought the island from the Narragansett Indians and divided it into twenty-two farms. Arnold chose Fox Hill Farm for himself. It was one of the most beautiful spots on the island, one thousand acres with pastures that slope to the edge of Mackerel Cove.
Beavertail hadn’t changed much since Governor Arnold lived there: open fields as far as the eye can see, sweeping views of the ocean in every direction, and along its rugged banks, glacial outcrops—slate ledges and sea-bleached shelves of rock and shale above the tide line; slime green slopes below.
The village of Jamestown grew up in the larger, northerly section, which looks across the bay passage to Newport. In the Gilded Era when fortunes were truly fabulous, Newport became the playing field of New York’s Four Hundred. They moved from Fifth Avenue to Bellevue Avenue for the season, arriving with steamer trunks and servants by private railcar and yacht. Their favorite sport was one-upmanship, and in the spirit of the game, Vanderbilts and Astors built summer palaces, one more grandiose than the next. For a brief time, Jamestown basked in the reflected glow. Hotels and guesthouses, accommodating more than one thousand, lined its east harbor, just a short ferry ride from Newport.
War and the Depression brought an end to Jamestown’s prosperity. By 1938, only two summer hotels remained in service. Still, summers were lively. At Mackerel Cove, there was a handsome bathing pavilion, two stories of shingles and latticework, almost three hundred feet long with one hundred bathhouses downstairs and a ballroom upstairs. Jazz bands played in the gazebo on Shoreby Hill in the long cool evenings. The Navy’s Atlantic Fleet summered in the bay, and there was the excitement of the America’s Cup Race.
Accessible only by water, Jamestown became icebound and bleak in winter. In the bare-boned off-season just ekking out a living was a struggle. But this was September, the optimal time of year. The weather was fine, and the islanders were free, flush and filled with a proprietary feeling as they reclaimed their island and their children returned to school.
• • • • •
The sun was burning the morning haze when the Jamestown school bus pulled up at the Beavertail light. Norm Caswell picked up the Chellis kids, then stopped at one of the summer fishing camps clustered along the rocky shore for the Gianitis boys. His final stop on this run would be Fox Hill Farm.
Though not one of the original founding families, the Caswells had lived on the island for generations. They were an enterprising lot. Norm’s grandfather was the last of the sail-ferry captains, and his uncle Philip was among the first to capitalize on Jamestown’s natural charms. In the 1860s, Philip Caswell and his brother John, both druggists, moved to Newport where they met a man named Massey and formed a toiletries company. The firm of Caswell & Massey moved to New York and prospered beyond their wildest dreams. When Philip Caswell returned to Rhode Island, he was a wealthy man. By then, Newport had been transformed from a small port into a grand resort. Looking across the bay to the unspoiled island of his birth, Caswell saw a golden opportunity. He bought two hundred forty acres south of the ferry dock, divided the land into plots, and sold the sites for summer cottages.
Norm Caswell kept up the family tradition, after a fashion. When he wasn’t driving the school bus or fishing with his brothers Connie and Earl, Norm ran Caswell Express, a local delivery service, down by the Jamestown-Newport ferry slip. Business was solid all summer, best in June and September when the summer people were shipping their trunks. Norm probably did as much business in those two months as he did in the other ten. Once the summer folk went back to Philadelphia and St. Louis, the wealth on the island dropped like an anchor in the bay. Norm was a good sort, not a man of towering ambition, but amiable and reliable, in his mid-forties, a father of three, he was popular with alll the children who rode the school bus.
• • • • •
Joseph Matoes, Jr. stretched, bending his shoulders back to ease the cramp that was forming and squinted into the distance, hoping the flash of yellow at the edge of the pasture was just an oriole. It was the tenth day of a new school year, and the boy had been up since the first light helping his father with the haying. The yellow flash was growing, rumbling up the road toward the farm. He would have to finish the job after school. Across the fields domes of hay loomed like primitive burial mounds through the breaking mist. Cows grazed in the meadows that rolled to the edge of Mackerel Cove, and low dividing walls no higher than three feet, stone on stone, gathered from the fields and rocky coast and piled one on top of the other, drew a grid across the fields. Joseph started in, not reluctant as much as resigned. It had rained for days, and the pastures were mud baths, pitted with puddles, some as big as ponds. His thigh-high rubber boots were encrusted.
Joseph was tall, a good head taller than anyone else in his class, and handsome, although he didn’t realize it. He had black curly hair, soft dark eyes, and wind-dark skin from working outside in every weather. He looked like a teenage Clark Gable, but there was a sadness that seemed a part of him, like salt in sea air. Joseph was too old to be in sixth grade, but he was not much of a student. He didn’t have time for schoolwork—or for much of anything else except the farm. So he kept to himself, went to school and worked on the farm, school, farm, school, farm. His father depended on him. He was the only son in a family of seven. The Matoes rented the pastures of Fox Hill Farm and the small tenant farmhouse across the road from the gambrel-roofed main house. Joe, Sr., and his second wife Lily were both widowed when they met, and their combined families included Joe’s three children—Joseph, Jr,, fourteen, Mary, seventeen and Theresa, ten; Lily’s daughter Dorothy, called Dotty, also ten; and Joe and Lily’s daughter Eunice, seven.
The boy’s future seemed certain, circumscribed by the shores of the island. When he finished eighth grade, he would work on the farm fulltime with his father, and if he married, the reception would be held at the Holy Ghost Social Hall over on Narragansett Avenue. The hall was the hub of Portuguese life on the island.
Sometime in the 1880s, Portuguese families had begun settling in New England coastal towns from New Bedford to New London, forming close, self-contained neighborhoods. Although everyone knew everyone, island life was stratified according to ethnic and religious lines. The Portuguese, almost entirely Roman Catholic, had their own grocery store, Midway Market, owned by Joe Matoes’ brother Manny, and socialized together at the Holy Ghost Hall.
Except for the Portuguese, most of Jamestown’s year-round residents were WASPs, many descended from the founding families. They were land-rich and cash-poor, and, like Norm Caswell, they got through the off-season on the money they made from the summer trade. As one of them put it, “We were awful glad to see the summer folk come in June, and we were awful glad to see them go in September.” Like most coastal towns of Southern New England during the tough Depression era, Jamestown had three groups: the haves who were the summer people; the have-nots, the year-round people; and the dirt poor.
At Fox Hill Farm, the school bus was pulling up beside the Matoes’ house, and the three girls trooped out. Waving to Norm, Joseph crossed the road and went into the barn to take off his boots. He could hear his stepmother yelling at him to hurry up; he was making his sisters late for school. Lily Matoes was always yelling at her stepchildren. Her features were as sharp as her voice, and her hair was witch-black. Joseph and his sisters Mary and Theresa took care of one another and kept out of their stepmother’s way as much as they could.
Joseph stopped at the pump to wash his hands and throw some water on his face, then he climbed on the bus, tired before the school day had begun. His sisters were sitting together. Theresa was the prettiest girl in the sixth grade, and Dotty was as bright as the morning in a new red skirt and white blouse. Eunice, still the baby at seven, was sitting with Marion Chellis. They looked like Rose Red and Snow White. The two little Greek boys, Constantine and John Gianitis, sat together in the front seat, silent and solemn-faced. Clayton Chellis was sprawled across the backseat with his brother Bill. Clayton, Joseph, Theresa and Dorothy were all in the sixth grade. Clayton was the ringleader of the boys, a hellion and utterly fearless.
Norm Caswell pulled a U-turn. The sweet smell of the newly cut hay trailed the school bus as it rolled back down the farm road and mixed with the sea smells rising from Mackerel Cove. As the bus turned from Fox Hill Farm onto the causeway that linked the two parts of the island, long swells were forming far out in Narragansett Bay, and bright sunshine shimmered off the white lattice trim of the beach pavilion. School should be forbidden on such a perfect day.
• • • • •
At the opposite end of Rhode Island, along Napatree, a pair of sandpipers raced the tide, darting after the ebbing water, skittering in and out so fast their black stick legs blurred like ink lines, so light their feet left only scratch marks on the sand. The western-most spit of land in Rhode Island, Napatree is a scythe of barrier beach that juts from the toney resort of Watch Hill, its face to the open Atlantic, its back to Little Narragansett Bay. At the eastern end, a breakwater protects the Watch Hill Yacht Club and Beach Club, and in the distance, the Watch Hill estates rise like summer castles. A rocky beach and abandoned fort guarded the far point, and curving west from the fort stretched another mile or so of open beach that residents called the sand spit.
Lillian Tetlow and Jack Kinney trailed the pipers, walking hand in hand at the edge of the surf. Lillian was seventeen, small-boned and delicate. She was born in England and retained the suggestion of an accent, although her family had emigrated when she was a child. Jack was twenty-three, a shade under six feet, with good shoulders and a smile that said she was the only girl in the world for him.
Lillian had never been to Napatree before, and she turned back to admire the row of summer houses that lined the beach, thirty-nine strong, as gracious if not quite as splendid as their Watch Hill neighbors. They were two and three stories of weathered shingles, their broad front porches a few strides from the Atlantic. Cement walls, three, maybe four feet high, protected them from the sea’s darker moods. On the bay side across the single narrow blacktop called Fort Road a private dock extended behind almost every house. The younger children practiced swimming by paddling from one dock to the next.
Lillian and Jack strolled toward the western point. Beyond, where the beach crested, dune grass swayed in the freshening breeze. The sun was high, and at the horizon, slivers of light reached down, touching the single sail that sat off the point and the buoy that marked the bay entrance. They passed a couple of clammers on their way out, brothers-in-law from Pawcatuck, their big buckets almost full of quahogs and little necks. Otherwise, Lillian and Jack had the beach to themselves. The sea was running high. Long rollers formed far out and swept in, crashing onto the beach. Lillian and Jack darted in and out of the breakers like the birds, splashing water at each other and shrieking when a shower of spray caught them, young lovers on a sandy beach, whiling away a perfect September day.
Napatree felt like a private place they had wandered into. It was exclusively a summer colony, and half the houses were shuttered for the season. The rest would be closing in the next week or so. By October, an off-season melancholy would settle over the place. This morning, though, the water was warm, the combers long and smooth. A line of clothes snapped on a line behind one house. A solitary beach umbrella stuck up from the sand in front of another. A pair of small boats scooted down the bay. The shouts of the boys in the second boat carried on the wind.
• • • • •
Geoffrey Moore, Jr., flew along Little Narragansett Bay, whooping and laughing, oars high in the air. Except for an occasional thump, the rowboat skimmed the surface, barely touching the water. A sailboat zipped along just ahead, pushed by a quickening southeast wind. He leaned out of the rowboat brandishing an oar and tried to snag it. The sailboat had broken loose from its mooring behind the house. Geoffrey had been talking to Andy Pupillo, a Westerly boy who had just started working for the Moores, when they saw it go. The two raced down to the dock, jumped in a rowboat and gave chase.
Geoffrey’s hair, tousled and sun-streaked, snapped in his eyes. He pushed it back and made another stab at the sailboat. The wind was carrying them so fast he didn’t have to row, but the sailboat, usually cumbersome and slow, was empty and moving fast, just out of reach. Andy hollered that Geoffrey would capsize them if he wasn’t careful. The boy laughed and lunged again. He was thirteen years old, small for his age, but fast and agile, a natural athlete, and in that place on that day, he seemed the quintessential golden boy—blue eyes, a lightly freckled face, smooth bare chest tanned a deep brown; a strong swimmer and skilled sailor as easy on the water as he was on land, an oldest child and only son.
On that Wednesday, September 21, 1938, his future seemed certain. He would return to The Canterbury School in Milford, Connecticut, at the end of the week to start the Second Form. A half-packed steamer trunk sat in the corner of his room at Napatree. From prep school, he would go onto college, then join the family business like his father, his uncles and his grandfather.
George C. Moore, Geoffrey’s grandfather, was an Englishman who deserted his horse artillery regiment and fled to America. Oversized in all things except height, Moore was a man of quick wits (he filed almost as many patents as Thomas Edison) and quick fists. When he settled in Westerly around 1912, he was in his early thirties, a widower with enough capital saved up to invest in a small mill that manufactured elastic webbing. He also bought a horse and buggy and set about to win the affections of Elizabeth Fahey, an Irish bricklayer’s daughter. Elizabeth was just as feisty as he and several inches taller. (To offset her natural advantage, Moore wore high-heeled shoes.)
Elizabeth and George had four sons. Their father put them to work in the mill as soon as they were big enough to operate the equipment. Elastic webbing was in demand as a substitute for whale bones in ladies corsets, and George C. Moore & Company prospered. The First World War brought a further business boom, because the same elastic webbing that gave a woman an hourglass figure made gas masks a snug fit. By 1938, the Moores were the wealthiest family in Westerly. They lived in splendor in Elmore, a mansion built by Stanford White on a private street named Moore Lane. Two of George’s sons, Jeff and Cy, built summer homes on nearby Napatree.
A summer idyll on the very edge of the ocean, Napatree was sunshine, surf and salt air blown over a thousand miles of open sea. Those who lived there called it “heaven on earth." They came back summer after summer, the well-to-do with live-in help, and their children grew up, married and returned with their children. They surf-cast for blackfish from the rocks at the Point, raced each other in their Alden O sailboats on Little Narragansett Bay, and occasionally lamented the fact that in all the years they’d been coming to Napatree, they'd never weathered a real lollapalooza of a storm. Hurricane was a foreign word in New England in 1938. People didn’t know how to pronounce it. They didn’t know what it meant, and whatever it meant, they were sure it couldn’t happen to them—until September 21.
On that last perfect beach day, a maverick storm was sprinting a mile a minute up the Atlantic seaboard. Lke a giant Cyclops, the storm had a single, intense, sky-blue eye, and it was fixed on New England.
Most hurricanes attack with three weapons: swirling winds so strong that chickens are plucked clean of their feathers, rain so heavy it turns tributaries into rampaging Mississippis, and waves so high that at first glance they may look like a fog bank rolling in. The Great Hurricane of 1938 had a fourth weapon: surprise.
On that capricious Wednesday at the ragtag end of summer, a strange yellow light came off the ocean and an eerie siren filled the air like a wordless chantey. In the next instant, serene bays became swirling cauldrons, and everything moored and unmoored was picked up and whipped in—fishing tackle, teapots, corsets, porch gliders, the porch itself, picnic baskets, beach umbrellas, bathing caps, clamming rakes, washboards, front doors, barn doors, car doors, sand pails and shovels, sand pipers, sea horses, girls in summer dresses, men in flannel trousers, lovers on an empty beach, children in their innocence. Joseph Matoes and his three sisters on the Jamestown school bus, Geoffrey Moore and his three sisters in their Napatree beach house were scooped up and tossed into the maelstrom.
The Last of the Old New England Summers
An extreme hurricane is both the most spectacular show on earth, and the deadliest. By comparison, the atom bomb is a firecracker on the Fourth of July. Scientists estimate its force variously as the equivalent of an H-bomb going off every sixty seconds or three ten-megaton bombs exploding every hour. The Great Hurricane of 1938 was just such an extreme storm. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, it was one of the ten “storms of the century” and the most violent and destructive natural disaster in New England history. Although the sea had been running high and small craft warning were in effect, as late as mid-afternoon there was no alert that a killer storm was prowling the coast. Rampaging through seven states in seven hours, it would rip up the famous boardwalk in Atlantic City, flood the Connecticut River Valley, and turn downtown Providence into a seventeen-foot lake....
When the shift in the weather came, it was swift and dramatic. Around noon, the day began to feel heavy as if it had changed from lawn cotton into wool, and the wind stole in. At first, it was a nuisance—slamming doors, knocking a jar of zinnias off a window ledge. If you put anything down, it disappeared. By mid-afternoon the Atlantic turned a sulky gray. The sky took on a jaundiced cast. Wind gusted out of the southeast in strong bursts that sent the cirrus threads scudding. It ripped out wisteria vines and toppled fences. All along the Northeast coast, wind riled the sea, turning it magnificent and mad.
Old salts eyed the chameleon day and tightened mooring lines. Neighbors gathered on the beaches to enjoy the spectacle—to marvel at the odd mustardy sky and the magnificent rolling breakers. When the wind was banging on their beach house windows and the first rain oozed under sills and door-jams, they “snugged up” and battened the hatches with the high spirits they usually expended preparing a clambake. They rolled up the rugs and got out the mops. They shut all the windows, stuffed them with Turkish towels, and shored up the doors with whatever heavy object was handy.
In inland towns and cities where the weather did not dictate the day’s activities, radios were tuned into CBS Studio Nine. Correspondent William Shirer was reporting from Berlin that Hitler had just won his first slice of Czechoslovakia. At eleven o’clock, under intense pressure from Britain and France to concede or fight alone, the Czechs had capitulated. Was it “peace in our time” or a “base betrayal”? CBS correspondent Ed Murrow was standing by In London for a live broadcast with Anthony Eden. No weather advisories interrupted the program.
• • • • •
As swift and sure as a Joe Louis punch, the hurricane darted up the Atlantic coast at fifty, sixty and seventy miles-an-hour, faster than most cars could travel in 1938. No hurricane had ever raced as fast. It arrived unannounced. It struck without warning, and it showed no mercy.
Town by town, the Northeast darkened and was silenced. The brilliant inventions of modern life were knocked out. Phones failed. Lights failed. Cars flooded. Busses and trolleys stalled. Trains derailed. Long Island could not alert Connecticut. Connecticut could not warn Rhode Island. Each community stood alone, isolated against the onslaught. What had been assumed permanent was lost, and the familiar was made strange.
Houses went to sea, boats came ashore, and ordinary objects were recast. A safe harbor became a cemetery, the family car, a tomb. Rooftops were rafts. A shingle became a deadly projectile. A pier, wrenched from its pilings, became a battering ram. A rude 12-foot square cabin glowed like a palace. Salvation and destruction, redemption and death were as random as the flip of a coin, and the air was so thick with salt and murky spray that day was as blind as night.
Ponds became white-ruffled seas. Waves appeared sky-high. Geography, topography, the lay of the land became a critical factor. The surging water washed out bridges, eroded rail beds, and buckled highways. It rolled cars like drunks in a dark alley, sank them in tidal ponds, carried them out to sea, and flooded them in city streets. The ancient elms that canopied Main Streets, the white church steeples that had defined the landscape of New England since colonial days, fell. Memories, landmarks, family treasures washed away, and still the tide rose.
Trains and tankers were tossed aside like toys. Waves as high as fifty feet swept homes and families into the sea. Mothers strapped their babies on mattresses, launched them on the rampaging sea and prayed. Sea spray was flung like fusillade, and windowpanes in Montpelier, Vermont, one hundred twenty miles from the sea, were coated with salt.
Wealthy families in ocean-front mansions and fishermen’s families in tar-paper shacks, prep school boys and college coeds returning to school for the new year were caught in the storm. Even when they were trapped in the surge of wind and water, many never realized what was happening to them—and those who did could not believe it. No one who had lived a lifetime in the Northeast had ever witnessed such a tumult or heard such an uproar. The noise was deafening—a cacophony of shorted trolley bells and car horns, the shriek of the wind, the din of a world being sundered.
No one will ever know the strength of the winds in the Hurricane of 1938, because they destroyed every instrument designed to measure them. Before it blew, the anemometer at the Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, Massachusetts, some seventy miles from the eye of the storm, recorded gusts of 186 miles per hour and a sustained wind of 121 miles per hour.
At the peak of the hurricane, the world became wind and the wind the world. It surrounded you, owned you. It hummed, whistled, whined, keened, screeched. Everyone who heard it was struck deaf and mute. Its voice was incessant, exhausting, encompassing. It was impossible to think above its clamor, to hear or be heard. Immovable objects met its irresistible force and surrendered. It caused rain to slash and sea spray to bite, it took your breath away, and then choked you with rain and spindrift. Breathing in was like swallowing shrapnel.
A storm surge of apocalyptic dimensions plundered the coast from Long Island to Massachusetts, gouging out beaches, leveling dunes, and rolling over bluffs, and when it had finished destroying its own handiwork, it took on human constructions. The ocean banged on doors and windows and burst through walls. It swirled into first-floor rooms, and knocked down walls and stairways. Then, it went upstairs into the bedrooms where families sought refuge, and chased them higher yet, into third floors, attics, onto rooftops, until there was no place to go but into the sea.
Under the double whammy of wind and wave, homes that had sheltered generations and weathered years of September gales folded as if they were built of cards. The sea swallowed some houses whole and smashed others to smithereens. Still others it lifted as carefully as a housewife rearranging the living room furniture and set down at a different place, sometimes a mile or more away, without splashing the milk in the creamer.
The suddenness of the storm surge was startling. Propelled by the furious wind, it came at such a speed that a man sixty feet from his front door and running all out just made it into the house. Beach residents moved fast, but the sea moved faster. What to wear? What to bring? If they took time to pack an overnight bag, grab a toothbrush or a change of underwear, find a child's rubbers… if they ran back for the family silver or to check the gas burners, they might be wasting their last moment. A minute spent or saved was too often the difference between life and death.
At two o’clock, the swath of coastline from Cape May to Maine was one of the wealthiest and most populous in the world. By evening, it was desolate. Some ocean-side towns were reduced to mounds of wreckage ten and twelve feet high. Others were wiped away as cleanly as if swept by a broom. There was nothing left, except a few telephone poles, a couple of cement steps, a tub or toilet half-submerged in the sand. Four hundred died in Rhode Island alone.
”The greens and commons of New England will never be the same,” the Associated Press reported. “Picture postcard mementos of the oldest part of the U. S. are gone with the wind and flood. The day of ‘the biggest wind’ has just passed, and a great part of the most picturesque America, as old as the Pilgrims, has gone beyond recall or replacement.”
Six hundred eighty-two people died in seven states, more than four hundred in Rhode Island alone. “No one was untouched,” Arthur Raynor of Long Island said. “Everybody lost something; many someone”....
To those who lived to tell the tale, more than any other single event, the hurricane marked the beginning of modern times. What nature’s storm began, the storms of war would complete and a gracious, circumscribed way of life was lost forever.
In an area always resistant to change, culture, identity and history were disrupted in a flash, and before New England could recover from the shock of the hurricane, there came a second terrible surprise: Pearl Harbor. Bad luck always comes in threes, they say. The hurricane was sandwiched between two national catastrophes. It came on the heels of the Great Depression and was followed by the Second World War. Almost to the day a year later, the storm troops of the Third Reich marched into Poland.
The Great Hurricane of 1938 was more than a storm. It was the end of a world.
