Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (23 page)

Using a wooden plank, sticking out of the window, one end weighted down inside the home and the other end resting on a telephone wire, Mellie Meyer, Ralph, and Norma walked onto the wood. Their feet were planted on one wire; their hands grabbed on to one of the wires above it. Then they began to walk along the cable. Norma's father may have been there, holding one of Norma's younger sisters. Even if that wasn't the case, there are accounts of several parents who navigated the wires, with their young, terrified children hanging on to them.

Norma, like many girls, changed out of her dress and put on men's clothing, knowing that it would be warmer and easier to maneuver in. She and her family carefully made their way down the street on the telephone cables. Below them was the water, rushing past them and between the buildings in downtown Dayton, carrying everything from nails and plywood and dead horses and Model T Fords to fallen trees.

One newspaper account in the
Hartford Herald,
Hartford, Kentucky's paper, described Mellie's maneuvering over the telephone wire: “When just over the boiling torrent beneath, she swayed as
though faint, slipped and the crowd stood with abated breath. By a lucky chance her senses came back to her in time and she grasped one of the wires.”

George Timmerman kept walking the wires. It was exhausting, and he kept having to try and stop, recalibrating his grip and, while doing so, doing his best to rest. The crowd, six blocks and less away, had now noticed him and were shouting words of encouragement. Timmerman even saw some people he knew and heard them shouting his name. But Timmerman, every step of the way, was sure he was stepping his last. Then his cap blew or fell off his head, and he could hear the crowd gasp, as if anticipating he would go next.

Finally, after six blocks, Timmerman was able to climb down a telephone pole to what was actual dry land, a hill where rescuers were waiting for him. Timmerman had reached the National Cash Register headquarters. By now, Timmerman was described as being in a “semi-hysterical condition,” sobbing, crying, and quivering, but he did sputter to self-appointed rescuers that he had left a mother and three children behind who desperately needed saving before passing out. Along with numerous other flood refugees, he was carried into the National Cash Register headquarters.

About the time a boat was being sent for the stranded mother and three children—they were rescued, Timmerman would later be told—Norma Thoma and her family members had walked the wires for three blocks. At that point, a rescuer, possibly alerted by Timmerman to the fact that other people still needed help, was waiting and climbed the telephone pole to help the family down into a boat, where they were carried to safety.

Eventually, the family made their way, like so many, to the NCR headquarters. A reporter captured the exchange that Norma had with one of the workers who was taking the names of the flood refugees.

“What's your name?”

“Norma Thoma.”

Apparently, Norma was wearing a hat with her men's clothes because the registrar sounded surprised. “Norma?”

“Yes, I'm a girl,” she said.

Ralph Meyer, Norma's cousin, was with her. According to the reporter, Meyer was accompanied by his wife and their
three-month-old baby, which would be news to Ralph's descendants. He was only seventeen at the time, and, to the best of their knowledge, not married yet and not a father. Still, even if the reporter got some of the names and information wrong, it sounds as if there was some set of young parents and a baby that day who made their way across telephone wires to safety.

Over on the top of the telephone building, John Bell remained at his post, patching the city's most important people through to the outside world when he could, and keeping both the governor and the occasional reporter informed of what was happening in the city.

Bell could only know what he was seeing, but from the top of his four-story building, he saw enough to know that his city was falling apart. Far off in the distance, he watched buildings on fire. There were at least two going on: the one that started at Saettel's, and another that had broken out at an ice cream factory just outside the business center. Meanwhile, the entire business section of Dayton was like a stormy lake, at least ten to twelve feet deep, he told a reporter listening in Phoneton.

Bell was wet—it began raining again—and he was exhausted from lack of sleep but supremely grateful to be on a building that didn't seem to be planning on going anywhere. His gratitude expanded whenever he saw someone who would have given anything to have traded places with him. He watched two men rowing a boat, desperately trying to keep it afloat. They were unsuccessful. They managed to grab a lamp post, however, and clung to it for half an hour before someone managed to throw a rope to them. The men were pulled into the second-story window of the nearest building.

Bell saw quite a few objects floating past the building that looked like bundles of clothing. He eventually came to the sickening realization that he was seeing bodies.

But what must have been even worse, the stuff post-traumatic stress is made from, was the sight of a woman and a child on top of a house floating by. The woman was screaming and begging for help while her child lay still at her feet. Bell watched from afar until the house was carried over a dam and he could see them no more.

Chapter Nine

Desperation

3
P
.
M
., Columbus, Ohio

Casper Sareu, the workhouse prisoner who was caught up in the flood and then a passenger on a raft, was coming to the end of his travels. For a while, he had drifted among voting houses, which were popular in cities and were just what they sound like. They were small houses built for the express intent of voting for elected officials; they began to go out of favor as the population grew, and communities started using schools and other public buildings more frequently to give a place for people to vote. The voting houses had easily come off their foundations and were bobbing up and down, menacingly. They were small buildings, but they were still buildings, and they came close to crushing Sareu.

From there, Sareu's raft took him past a butcher's shop, where stranded men unsuccessfully tried to throw ropes to him.

After Sareu's raft took him between two floating houses, which threatened to flatten him into a human pancake, he began to lose any hope of being rescued. His luck started to turn, however, when he floated near the car barns, or garages that housed the streetcars and where maintenance workers did repairs. Some of the car men saw
Sareu and threw a rope. He grabbed it, but knowing he lacked the strength to hang on to it if they pulled him in, he tied it around his waist. They did reel him in, and Sareu spent the rest of the day and night with his saviors—with very little food among them. The next morning, a boat picked him up and took him to dry land, where Sareu would give himself up to an incredulous police officer.

3
P
.
M
., Dayton, Ohio

The residence of Aunt Fannie and Uncle Ottie Fries, where the Adamses were hiding out, now had a few inches of water making its home on the first floor of their house on Warder Street. The road itself, which was always a bit of a trench, being four feet deeper than the front yards, was now a swiftly moving river itself, six or seven feet deep and getting deeper by the moment.

Fannie and Ottie's furnace was long submerged, and of course the gas and water supplies were shut off. As the Adamses had discussed for the last few hours, it was going to be a cold night, with no food, and they had two babies to consider. The last thing they wanted their children to catch was pneumonia or to be thirsty and hungry. So they shouted until they were able to hail a rescuer in a boat, which thankfully were plentiful in this part of the city. The rescuer's first name was Carl. His last name was the unfortunately prophetic Sinks.

Charles told Carl Sinks they wanted to go to what was now known as the Geyer Street landing, or to a rescue center that had been set up at Forest and Grand Avenues, all around two or three blocks away. That proximity between their house and the rescue center may have given Charles and Viola a false sense of security.

The babies were both wrapped in shawls, and the grownups were in heavy overcoats. They climbed into the boat, rocking in the current. Once they were all in, Carl Sinks pushed the boat away from the porch railing, and like a roller coaster lurching forward, the current caught its coaster, whipping it forward—and into the tree in the front yard.

The boat flipped over. Everyone fell into the water.

In her heavy overcoat, Viola screamed “Hon, I'm drowning,” as the waves ripped her baby son from her arms. Grandpa Adams lunged for Christopher, Jr., scooping up the baby, as Charles, holding on to Lois, reached for Viola.

In doing so, Charles somehow—he was never sure how it happened—loosened his grip on Lois, who was sucked into the current. The girl, just a month shy of her first birthday, disappeared into the rapids. He would never forgive himself for that.

But there was no time to even think about what had just happened. In nine-foot-deep freezing and muddy water, Charles was fighting to save his wife's life; Grandpa John Adams, holding on to his grandson as tightly as possible, was trying to gain footing on a terrace or porch that he felt beneath him, but couldn't and found himself swept down the current; Carl Sinks, too, was swept away.

In the background—not that Charles, Viola, Grandpa Adams, and the others could hear over the river—frantic neighbors screamed, unable to do anything, although across the street from the Fries' home, a neighbor, Dr. Charles Whitney, remembered an old pistol that he had in the house. He searched his house, found it, and fired his revolver into the air, a known signal of distress. His hope was that someone would come with a boat or a rope. Harold Miller, a rescuer in a boat too far away to do anything useful, began shouting as well. Bill Chryst, a neighbor and an engineer, came running when his wife shouted for him, and right away he knew he had to try to do something.

Viola and Charles managed to each get an arm across the upturned boat and swam with it to a small tree sapling about a hundred feet away, where Grandpa Adams and Carl Sinks had landed. They were each hanging on to a branch, desperately trying not to be carried off.

They let go of the boat, which had sunk but lodged itself into the tree, and with his right hand, Charles hung on to a tree branch and with his left tried to steady Viola. Their long, soaked overcoats, weighing them down, made survival even harder, but somehow they kept glued to the slight tree. As much as he could, Charles braced himself with one foot in the underside of the boat, but his raincoat kept getting in the way of his feet.

Once they seemed to be able to stay put for the moment, Viola asked the question she must have been terrified to ask but had to: “Where are the babies?”

“I have one,” said Grandpa Adams.

“Which one is it?” Viola asked.

Grandpa Adams wasn't sure—they were twins, after all, and they were being rained on and struggling to hang on to a tree—but he turned the baby's face to their parents. Charles, Jr. Both parents forced themselves to look downstream. Just below them, in the branches of another tree near their own, was a white shawl, dangling in the water. There was no Lois inside it.

Just then, Charles, Viola, Grandpa Adams, and Carl Sinks could see Bill Chryst wading toward them. It became too deep, however, and everyone realized he was risking his life as he started swimming toward them. Chryst wasn't much of a swimmer, but he reached the tree. It was probably about then that it occurred to him that he had no rope, no boat, and no way of getting any of these tree-bound people back to shore, but he was nonetheless a big help. Chryst's energy hadn't been sapped by the cold water—yet—and he was able to help the others stay tethered to the tree.

It seemed like hours that they hung there. The shouting didn't stop. There were more gunshots. The roar of the river was unceasing. It kept raining. But eventually Charles saw a man rowing a boat, a man he recognized, John Ryan, a fellow member of the Knights of Pythias, a club that they both were members of and an organization that had been around since 1864. Charles shouted like he never had before, and was certain, as the boat was rowing away, that Ryan hadn't heard him.

But Ryan had. He was trying to figure out a way to reach them in the formidable current. Once he arrived, Bill Chryst and Charles Adams helped Viola into the boat. She then asked for the baby, and Grandpa Adams carefully handed over her son.

Viola gratefully accepted the baby, and then, from Charles's point of view, she suddenly disappeared. Bewildered, Charles realized when Viola had reached for Charles, Jr., she had tipped the boat slightly, and waves flooded it, knocking it over. John Ryan lunged for one of the tree branches, but Viola and her baby son weren't as fortunate. They had been swept away. Just like that. One moment they were near death and then almost saved, and now they were gone again.

Charles would later remember the memory only vaguely, like looking at a faded negative of a film. “I can just dimly see them sinking into that seething river,” he would write.

Charles held on to the tree, but only out of instinct. He was aghast and empty. His father could see it.

“Hold on, my boy, don't let go,” Grandpa Adams kept shouting.

Charles kept trying to think of reasons why not to let go. His wife and babies were gone. He had been supposed to watch over them, and he had failed. And there was no boat to save him. Why hang on?

He probably would have let go, but almost immediately another boat arrived. Two firemen, Jack Korn and Warren Marquardt, had heard a gunshot, brought their boat to the tree, and pulled in Charles and Grandpa Adams. The other men—Bill Chryst, Carl Sinks, and John Ryan—would be safely rescued soon after.

Once Charles rolled into the boat, he lay on the floor, shivering and teeth chattering and barely able to move, except for his shaking. The conversation—in the rain and wind and with the backdrop of the roar of the river—must have been a jumble of shouts and confusion. Following instinct more than anything else, Charles told Korn and Marquardt to take him back to the house of Reverend Fries, where he had started this journey of death. They obliged, somehow steering the boat through the current toward the house. While Charles lay in a heap, wanting to die, Korn and Marquardt interrupted his thoughts and informed him that his wife and son had been rescued.