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Hurricane of '38: Wind that Shook the World

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(page 5 of 7)

"The stars came out and the wind died down," Harriet Moore told a reporter later. They saw light in the southern sky -- the glow of New London on fire. They talked and hugged each other, trying to get warm. "We called out intermittently all night long," she reflected. "Of course, we did not know the catastrophe was so far reaching."

Harriet Moore was not alone in her ignorance. All over dark, battered New England, thousands of huddling refugees were asking themselves that same question: how extensive had the great storm been? Why hadn't they been warned?

By the next morning -- survivors remember it as being a glorious sunrise --news of the devastation had barely reached New York; and from isolated places like Westerly it would require days to get the story out to the world.

Units of the National Guard and Civilian Conservation Corps were stationed on roads leading to Westerly's beaches as hastily organized search parties headed that way at dawn. Among them were Bill Cawley and Charlie Utter (whose family owned the Westerly Sun), Don Friend, Stan and Ken Higginbotham, and several volunteers from Ken's fraternity who drove down to help search for survivors.

The grim labor of digging through the piled-up houses commenced. There was an aura of unreality about the work: someone found a woman's severed finger with a beautiful diamond ring on it. Dogs chained to posts had gone mad trying to free themselves. Picking up a board, Stan found the body of his Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Bishop. One by one, bodies were transported into Westerly and lined up in a makeshift morgue in the gym at the city high school. Stan identified the body of Don Friend's mother, Ruth; the other ladies of Christ Church were found nearby.

Bill Cawley set out for New Haven around 4:00 A.M. on Friday. Driving over golf courses and through backyards to avoid downed power lines and uprooted trees, talking his way through police and military barricades, Cawley finally staggered into the office of the Associated Press several hours later. An editor on duty refused to believe the horror story he told about Westerly. As authorizing calls were placed to Washington, Cawley sat down to write his first-person account. His story broke on the front page of the Washington, D.C., Evening Star that afternoon.

"I reached the outside world today after witnessing the scenes of horror and desolation that came in the hours after a tidal wave, hurled miles inland by a hurricane, engulfed Westerly, Rhode Island, my home, two days ago.

"I counted bodies -- row upon sickening row of them -- stretched out in the old town high school after all the city's morgues were filled. When I left at four o'clock this morning, there were 74 dead and almost 100 missing..."

The world now knew about the horror at Westerly.

That same day Stan and Ken Higginbotham learned the fate of their little brother Jimmy. He was found, unclothed, under eight feet of rubble, near Brightman's Pond. "At the high school, when I picked him up," recalls Stan," a photographer wanted to take my picture with him. I picked up a fireman's axe and almost killed the poor fellow. A doctor determined that Jimmy didn't drown. He died of fright."

On Friday afternoon, employing antique handpress, the editors of the Sun put out an emergency edition of the paper that listed the local dead and injured. Telegrams were pouring into the newspaper and Red Cross offices from all over the world, inquiring about the fate of loved ones. Doctors, it was reported, were giving emotionally shattered relief workers sleeping pills to permit them to rest.