Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (39 page)

“Oh, Callahan people,” they would shout, “the fire has worked one door nearer. What do you say?”

Jones would then shout a question in response, and then hear something like:

“No, the bank is not burning yet.”

While there was a bank inside the Callahan building, there was another one a block away, across the street from the Beckel House. The guests from the Beckel House calculated that if the Fourth National Bank went up in flames, then it would probably jump across the street and strike the Beckel House. That meant the entire block would go up in flames, including the Callahan building. But the Fourth National Bank was said to be fireproof, and so everyone kept hoping for the best.

If it did burn, and the flames came, everyone had decided that they would divide into parties of three—two men to each woman. The consensus was that if anyone could and should be saved, it would be the mother in the group, and her child. The problem that nobody dared say out loud was that nobody could figure out how anyone, no matter how committed and serious, would possibly be able to do a thing to keep the mother and her son from burning up or drowning with everyone else. But having the plan made everyone feel better.

Nobody could see anyone. Even Jones, at the window, didn't have any moonlight; it was snowing and raining. Everyone was shivering,
although, as Jones put it, “Little was thought of cold, hunger or thirst. We were waiting, waiting, waiting, to know whether it was to be life or death.”

The men with the megaphones kept up their news bulletins well after midnight. “The Beckel does not seem to have caught yet,” they continued to shout. And then: “Oh, Callahan. Another store has caught but the bank is safe yet.”

And then: “The wind seems to be rising and blowing this way.”

Helpful to know, but the last thing they wanted to hear.

But at one in the morning, Jones suddenly heard: “Oh, Callahan; fire seems to be going down. Think the bank will stand. We believe your danger is almost over.”

Everyone in the two rooms—and arguably anyone on other floors throughout the Callahan building who heard the message—breathed a collective sigh of relief. Many people murmured, “Thank God.”

Jones felt a wave of hope wash over him. The last twelve hours in particular had been a nightmare. He wondered,
is it possible the worst is over?

Not quite. As if in answer to his question, an explosion rocked the building. There was light now—blood-red and green fire lit up the night air. Burning embers and sparks tumbled from the sky, and smoke drifted past everyone. The air was hot now. Jones wrote later, “I could only think of the Day of the Last Judgment.”

The fire had jumped across Third Street, harrowingly close to the Fourth National Bank but attacking the Lowe Brothers Paint Store Company instead. Paint was highly combustible, and the building exploded into oblivion.

It was time, several people shouted.

The judge spoke up sharply, trying to sound reasonable, hopeful, and confident, three characteristics he was not actually feeling. He told people that they had lasted this long, that going into the water was certain death, while waiting a little longer might keep everyone alive. Perhaps because of his years of training, speaking with authority from the bench, everyone remained. It was quite likely the longest night of everyone's lives; but by morning, thanks to Jones's calm and reasoned demeanor, everyone would be alive. The fire missed all of them.

*
 It's always fun when you come across in your research how much someone's salary was back in 1913. Miller's job paid $4,000 a year. The average salary in 1913 was $585 a year, and $1 in 1913 would be like having $22 today.

Chapter Seventeen

Light at the End

6
A
.
M
., Fort Wayne, Allen County Orphanage

The children who were sleeping were roused awake and given their breakfast. It was just another morning, if they could ignore the grownups standing around, the boats outside moored to the front porch, the horrific flashbacks of the drownings from the day before, and the sense of foreboding that filled the entire room.

Early morning, Dayton, Ohio

Ben Hecht woke up with a start. He was on a bed—well, a cot, really, and wearing a peculiar nightgown, peculiar because it wasn't his own. Baffled at first, Hecht gradually recognized where he was: the National Cash Register plant and surrounded by Red Cross staff and bedridden patients.

He had fallen asleep in his canoe, been “rescued,” and then brought here.

Hecht shouted for his clothes. A nurse came up to him and told him he couldn't leave until he had been examined by a doctor. Hecht protested—he was fine, he had just fallen asleep, he needed to go so he could file a story for the first edition of the
Chicago Daily Journal.
The nurse wouldn't be dissuaded. Hecht stood his ground, “yelling in my skimpy refugee's nightgown, as unlike a journalist as could be imagined.”

Suddenly, Hecht was joined by his old pal, Christian Dane Hagerty. He had been collecting information about the flood's refugees.

“Tell them, will you,” begged Hecht, looking imploringly at Hagerty. “Tell them I'm a newspaperman and not a goddamn refugee.”

Hagerty looked him over and smiled, as if he was considering telling the nurse otherwise. But then to Hecht's utter relief, Hagerty offered his confirmation: “He's a newspaperman.”

Morning in Dayton and Columbus

Governor Cox dreaded the thought of calling John Bell. Not that he didn't want to talk to him, but he knew the telephone operator was famished, weary, and wet, and, judging from the skies in Columbus, he couldn't imagine what Bell and Dayton were going through now.

Still, he asked Columbus operator Thomas Green to put him through.

“Good morning, Governor,” John Bell said, happy as a clam. “The sun is shining in Dayton.”

Snow would fall on the city later in the day, and Bell became less buoyant as the day wore on, but both men would later agree that it was a turning point. There had been hours of doubt, but now they knew that the flood couldn't last forever.

Approximately 7
A
.
M
., Fort Wayne

Seven-year-old Opal Jacobs, who remembered vividly the terror of her last boat ride, refused to board. Some of the men forced the screaming girl on the boat, who was then held and comforted by a woman from the First Presbyterian Church.

Four boats took all of the children, all at once, with the remaining adults in a fifth boat. Just as the last boat left, as if on cue, one of the porches of the home, the one connected to the fire escape, broke free from the house and floated a short distance into a grove of trees. That was the closest thing to anything going wrong on this boat ride. The sun was peeking through the clouds and the rain had finally stopped falling.

March 27, morning, from approximately 8 to 10
A
.
M
., Peru, Indiana

Sam Bundy was finding it increasingly challenging to steer his boat. After fifty-five hours of rowing down streets and plucking people out of houses and trees without even a nap, his body was finally begging for him to call it quits. But when Jake Marsh offered him two hundred dollars to rescue his wife and daughter and several other family members, trapped in at least two different places in the city, Bundy found himself torn.

The money would help out on the home front, and if he refused, and if these people didn't survive the flood because he hadn't gone after them, it would gnaw at him for the rest of his days.

It may not have been the smartest course of action in his exhausted state, but he said he would go.

Bundy only needed to travel three blocks in downtown Peru, but nobody else would take their boat for good reason. Those three blocks contained a raging current that still had not abated. When Phillip Landgrave, a local school official, watched Bundy board, he couldn't help somberly thinking,
Good-bye, Sam.
But to his and everyone's relief and surprise, around 10
A
.
M
., Bundy returned with the mother and daughter, two hours after he set out.

Landgrave explained Bundy's success to a reporter: “He did not do like the others, but he took his own time and did not become excited. He used his own sure method and came back with the folks he went after.”

But Bundy was depleted, and he knew if he tried another trip to pick up the rest of the family members, he wouldn't return. Bundy tracked down an extremely competent rescuer, Irwin Baldwin, and offered him the $200 instead, the whole enchilada, if he would make the second trip. Baldwin agreed and, to Bundy's relief, returned safely with the rest of Jake Marsh's family.

Bundy decided he was finished with rescue work. He had gone at it for fifty-seven hours straight. “I am glad that I came, even though it might be some time before I fully recover,” Bundy told a reporter. “I saw some harrowing scenes but no one can say that I faltered when duty called me. I'm going back home now to sleep—to dream of the flood.” Then he added, sincerely: “I hope not.”

Morning, March 27, New Castle, Pennsylvania

The city woke up to learn that civilization as they knew it was regressing. The west side of the city was hit the hardest, but people in all directions were without gas or water, and without much food. The grocery stores were mobbed, and by noon they were cleaned out.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the handful of crooked officers on the New Castle police force were men like Thomas Thomas. Aside from having a memorable name, Thomas was, by all accounts, an ethical, likeable man, not to mention a husband and father of three. He had only been on the force for about a year and a half, appointed by the mayor after working at the city's tin mill. He had been in the flooded streets of New Castle since Tuesday, leading and rowing people to safety. If the reports are true, Thomas Thomas hadn't taken a break since then.

For the last forty-eight hours, he had been rowing families to safety. Affected by the gratitude of those he helped and the cries of people whom he hadn't reached yet, Thomas apparently couldn't stand the thought of stopping. Even when it began to snow, he continued rowing.

Thomas was pushing himself too hard. He didn't realize it, but if he didn't stop and take a long break soon, his luck was going to run out.

Morning, Fort Wayne, Indiana

Judge J. Frank Mungovan turned loose ten drunks who had over-celebrated the fact that they worked a couple of hours helping to secure the Lakeside dike and at other danger points. He turned them free, the papers reported, because the jail was in such an unsanitary condition as a result of the failure of the water supply that he didn't want to send any more men to it.

Thursday morning, Indianapolis

Mischa Elman, the violinist, and Rudolph Ganz, the Swiss pianist, heard that the first train out of Indianapolis would be leaving that morning. Many of the guests decided to stay put, fearing that their train would crash through a bridge like so many had already done, or become embedded in a riverbank somewhere, but Elman and Ganz reasoned that with people already getting sick in
Indianapolis, and the potential for disease spreading in the flooded city, wherever they went probably wouldn't be much worse than staying where they were.

They took the first train. Elman was struck by the fact that there were no porters, which was eerie and inconvenient. He had to lug his Stradivarius and Amati with him.

It would take ten hours to make the two-hour trip to Goshen, Indiana, and as Elman told the New
York Times,
“We saw many dead bodies floating in the swollen river. Terrible! We also saw submerged houses, many, very many, poking their roofs out of the yellow swirling water that ran like a mill race, and other houses that leaned like drunkards up against bridges. We all felt shaky, of course, whenever our train passed over a bridge. At Goshen we caught a train for Toledo, where we had the good luck to make a close connection with the Lake Shore Limited. We were without food all day, except for a hot dog at one little way station. There was a man there who kept cutting open rolls as fast as he could and slapping in a piece of sausage. Those tasted good.”

But Elman found a lot of beauty and wonder in being in less than ideal circumstances with so many fellow travelers, saying, “It was a wonderful experience, and I would not have missed it for anything—but I would not care to go through it again,” and then he added, “Yes, I intend to compose a piece describing my feelings—and also my cold feet.”

Mid-morning, Fort Wayne, Ohio
Another day, another crisis.

The headline on a late morning edition of the
Fort Wayne Daily News
gave everyone a start. It blared:
DAM AT ST. MARY'S RESERVOIR BREAKS.

With the second headline, right underneath:
THE FLOOD WILL REACH FORT WAYNE IN FROM FOUR TO SIX HOURS SAYS WEATHERMAN PALMER.

So the dam at St. Mary's was broken. Just what the city needed. The paper didn't say how much water was behind it, but every resident over the age of six years in Fort Wayne knew that just twenty-five miles south of the city was the largest artificial body in the world, which had been completed in 1845 as a feeder for the Great Miami and Erie
Canal that went from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. In fact, it held over 13,000 acres of water, 2 billion cubic feet of liquid, and the way everyone saw it, a wall of water would hit St. Mary's first, and then go into Rockford and Willshire, both villages in Ohio. From there, it would take out Pleasant Mills, Indiana, Decatur, and then aim for destroying Fort Wayne.

The alarm had been sounded by someone manning an oil-pumping station near the dam, and he had said on the telephone, “Can tell no more. Must run for life.”

Morning, Dayton, Ohio

Dayton residents heard the news. St. Mary's dam had broken. Men dashed through the streets, shouting, “Flee for your lives,” and, “The reservoir has broken.”