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Hurricane of '38: Wind that Shook the World
(page 7 of 7)
For the past 24 years Don Friend has lived out at the beach, near Brightman's Pond, where his mother perished. He and Ken Higginbotham, he reports, often go sailing in Ken's 24-foot Bristol sloop. "But we never leave the protected bay," he adds soberly. "Never."
Stan Higginbotham, who retired a few years ago after selling Chevrolets in town for 34 years, spends a lot of time thinking about what happened to his father and, oddly enough, his '29 Essex.
Harold Higginbotham lost his job soon after the hurricane when American Thread shut its doors and moved out of town. For a pension Harold was given a modest $1,000 -- or about $500 less than he needed to bury his wife and youngest son. He never found a steady job in town again. "He was a proud man. Friends gave him odd jobs to do," says Stan. Finally, near the end of his life, Harold moved to Massachusetts and found a position at a mill. He died in 1978.
A lot of curious stories, Stan points out, came out of the Great Hurricane. Dogs were found alive in closets of shattered houses. A table set with china survived perfectly intact as the house came apart around it. Two babies survived by floating on a door. A man caught a two-pound river trout on Main Street with his bare hands. "Everyone who survived it has a peculiar singular memory he or she may wish to finally remember it by," Stan says.
His own goes like this: Not long after his mother and brother were buried, he found the remains of his '29 Essex out at the beach. All that was left of his dream car was a chassis, a battery, four tires, and two unbroken headlights.
He looked at it a while, then picked up a piece of driftwood, he says, and knocked out the headlights.
Read more:New England Numbers: Hurricane of '38
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