The Hurricane of 1938
This is a link post. I blog-surfed and hit this …
The Morbid Equinox - The Hurricane of 1938
… September 21, marks the Fall Equinox. Sixty-nine years ago to the day my grandparents and my father rode out the greatest storm to ever strike New England, while to the west 600 people perished. It was a disaster my grandparents never forgot, something they didn’t talk about much, but with a tinge of fear, making it the ghost story of my childhood, a scary story reinforced by scrapbooks of photographs of storm damage and commemorative editions of the New Bedford Standard Times that detailed the destruction through photographs of wrecked beach cottages, submerged autos, and yachts cast incongruously across highways and train tracks. I pored over those photographs, and asked out loud when something as dramatic might happen again. I was shushed. It?s bad luck to whistle up a storm.
I am reading a good book, A Wind to Shake the World, by Everett S. Allen, the late journalist and Martha?s Vineyard native who spent his career at the Standard-Times, starting as a cub reporter on the day the hurricane struck. The fact this was a hurricane with no name (it occurred before the days when the National Weather Service dubbed them names such as Katrina and Andrew) may account for a lot of the mystery surrounding it. It was the most powerful hurricane to ever hit the eastern seaboard north of North Carolina.
Source: Churbuck.com
The blog post is a good read for anyone who knows the coastal area from New York, up through Connecticut, and along the Massachusetts shoreline. I think I will scrounge up a copy of Allen’s book.
