Retelling of 1935 Florida Keys storm echoes present grief

  • By Randolph E. Schmid / Associated Press
  • Saturday, January 28, 2006 9:00pm
  • LifeGo-See-Do

George Hill was heading for the supply building on Lower Matacumbe Key when a hurricane-driven wave caught him and carried him 120 feet before his clothing caught on a pole. From there he watched the supposedly stormproof structure disintegrate and wash away with men still inside.

In an America still stunned by the devastation recent hurricanes have wreaked upon New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, few people recall the 1935 storm that swept the Florida Keys.

Phil Scott does a favor with his new book, “Hemingway’s Hurricane: The Great Florida Keys Storm of 1935,” reminding that deadly storms aren’t a new event but present a real human tragedy when they occur.

By the time the storm ended, more than 400 people were dead, many of them World War I veterans employed in government work during the Great Depression.

The book begins with a look at Ernest Hemingway’s life in Key West and comes back to him, recording that he sailed up to the Keys after the storm to view the damage and wrote an essay decrying the way the victims were treated.

But, despite its title, it’s not a book about Hemingway.

It’s a book about a tempest that claimed hundreds of lives; about how officials’ overconfidence and delays in making a decision prevented a train from arriving in time to save the veterans; and about how they battled the storm, how they died or were hurt, and how some survived.

Scott goes to many sources of the time to relate individual stories that can be frightening to read, but which are also engrossing:

“The wind knocked James Lindley into a banister and he fell to the ground; three times he got up and three times the wind blew him back down. Finally he stayed down and tried to crawl.”

“Seventy to 100 men sought shelter on the tank car. … A wall of water at least 25 feet high slammed into them and washed some off, and the wind blew more off, and then the car began tipping over and the others leaped rather than be squashed under its weight.”

“The mangroves held the majority of the dead suspended in their branches, twisted in grotesque, unnatural ways. A few of the bodies hung high, lifted there by the crest of the storm surge.”

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