September 1947
Before hurricanes were named, one called the Fort Lauderdale Cyclone, hit Miami and traveled the Gulf Coast toward the Mississippi/Louisiana coast line. New Orleans was tumbled about and my world at Barnett Crossroads, Alabama got slammed with side winds.
I had started school at the first of the month as a first grader at A. D. Kelly in Wallace. I didn't know a hurricane from a rain storm. I did understand something different was coming for us as Daddy and Mama put everybody into the cotton patch to try and gather what hadn't been harvested by that time. Neighbors were there to help and all the adults talked about what they were hearing on the radio from Brewton's WEBJ. ( I googled that fact) The station owned by William E. Brooks was located in the old Lovelace Hotel and came on the air August 1st, 1947. Our static old radio was tuned to WEBJ for News and Farm reports in between listening to gospel music and hoping to hear some Earnest Tubb. The clouds were gathering, the air was humid and gusty, there was an urgency among us. One little redheaded, corkscrew haired neighbor, younger than myself by one year, was pretending to pick while announcing to all the field hands, "There is a storm on hand, there is a storm on hand". She was the self-appointed official CIO for updates on the coming event. To this day when I hear of bad weather headed our way I think of that long ago playmate/neighbor and her weather reports. Now a sweet and funny memory.
I cannot say if all the cotton got picked and put into the cribs, but the night of the big blow was imprinted on my memory like no other. Our house had been electrified in 1946, but the power lines had blown down earlier in the evening leaving us to use the old handy kerosene lamps for light. The storm brought sounds of the wind howling and tearing away things that thumped against the house, smoke house, chicken house, and barn.
Mama and Daddy made us get into bed earlier than normal because their nerves were edgy. Sleep was not in the cards that night.
I cannot say what time the worst happened, but it was deep into the nighttime when we could hear someone knocking on the front door and loud calling/ shouting as the door opened to have two families come tumbling through as the wind and rain, blowing sideways, came inside also. Yes, they just opened and staggered in as we didn't lock doors back then.
The neighbors lived up the road a few miles from us and they were frightened enough to seek shelter with us as their houses were old and in need of stabilizing. They decided the Smith's house was the newest in the community,( built in 1945, framed from fat liddard timbers repurposed from a long ago built home) and most secure, so they, "came in from the storm", so to speak.
I can remember clawing out of bed to sit by the fireplace to listen to the talk from all those adults. Winds howled, lightening flashed, nerves frayed, babies sucked thumbs and nuzzled in Mama's lap. Daddy and the men would go outside to try and determine how things were holding. The night raged and roiled. We young'uns finally fell asleep on pallets of quilts dragged off the beds as the women prayed, laughed and tightened their shoulders. The oldest neighbor lady wore her straw sun hat all night as she dozed by the fire.
Daybreak brought calming, cats came from underneath the house where they must have hunkered down wedged between the support timbers, dogs licked their parts, chickens, wet and frazzled, ruffed feathers while walking about looking for bugs that were long blown away. The barn gates had blown open to allow the mules to get out and graze the wet grasses next to the yard fence. A few pieces of Daddy's prize shiny bright aluminum roofing from off the barn had come loose, now in need of nailing back. He was worried about the leaking he would have to deal with later.
Our outhouse was tumped over. Mama's newly planted chinaberry tree was stripped of leaves and berries. The house stood solid, we were safe and hungry for breakfast.
The most memorable thing about the Hurricane of 1947 was seeing all the big pine trees laying flat and pointing northwest. The woods were thinned almost to half of what was there before the storm.
To have such a vivid memory of this event, I cannot remember the timber being harvested, but I'm sure it was done by Alger Sullivan. I have lived through other hurricanes but for some reason this one made the biggest impact on me.
***My second most memorable hurricane was in 1995 when Opel bent us down. I saw the edge of the eye for a few brief moments of stillness and weird looking sky before I went back inside to endure a long anxious night of hearing a big oak tree fall onto our house. All together we lost eleven red oaks, five tall pines, half the barn roof and many days of sweat and hard labor digging out of that one. We sheltered two of our elderly neighbors and two friends of our son from UWF who came with him to ride it out with us at our home in Laurel Hill. Our daughter and son-in-law were in Moscow Russia where she was working for the Moscow Times. She mailed us a now famous picture of the house floating in the bay at Destin. We hadn't seen anything as we were without power for so long. She saw things from half a world away that were destroyed just south of us while we did a massive cleanup.
That picture is classic.
