Early September, 1961, school had been in session for a two weeks or so. It had been so hot and humid, without a break even at night. My dad had been preoccupied with the weather....more so than usual. He kept commenting that it was not good for it to be 90 degrees at 9 PM at night. It was hot all the time to me, I didn’t know what difference it made if it were 9 in the morning or 9 at night. Every time the weather came on, he got out a map and started writing things on it. Mom was letting him keep it on the kitchen table....odd since she never allowed anything to be piled on the table. That afternoon, I held the boards Dad had made to press into the outside window sills for storms, as he put them on all the windows. The house was dark like a dungeon, I wondered how long the windows would have to stay covered like that.
That night, as we watched news of the storm, now called Hurricane Carla, I noticed it covered the whole Gulf of Mexico. I asked my parents if it was going to hurt us....they both just ignored me and kept listening to the weather.
As I got ready to go to bed, I heard Mom tell my dad she would stay up so he could sleep. I thought that was odd....why didn’t they both sleep? Awakening a couple of hours later I heard a radio on. Slipping into the doorway of the kitchen, there sat mom, at the table, grading papers, listening to news about the storm. Mom didn’t even notice me in the doorway. I did hear the weather man say something about flooding. I went back to bed. When I woke up again, the radio was still on. I reached out of my bed and felt to see if the floor was wet. Nope, no flooding and turned over and went back to sleep.
The next time, I woke up to the overhead light in my room being turned on. “Get dressed, we’re leaving.”
“Leaving? Where? In the middle of the night?” I could hear the “whoop whoop” of a police car outside.
“They are telling everyone to evacuate, we have to leave, it is too dangerous to stay.”
“But we have always stayed before....”
About that time there was this terrible banging on the front door...in the middle of the night! Dad opened the door, a police officer in rain gear said in a loud voice,
“We need everyone to get out as soon as possible, we are not responsible for rescues after this order.”
“We are on our way out right now,” Dad told the man, as he stepped out the door.
I looked around, “What do I take?”
“Take clothes, what you will need to wear for the next couple of days...whatever, just get your stuff together.”
I walked outside, Dad had backed the car out of the garage. As I piled things in the car, I was still in disbelief.
“Daddy where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet, just way from the storm.”
“Oklahoma?”
“No probably not that far.......”
“To a hotel?”
“If we can find one...”
It was then that Mr. Hartzog, who was also packing his car, walked over from next door. He too asked where we were going. Dad told him he didn’t know, we didn’t have family closer than Oklahoma. Mr. Hartzog told us his mom lived in Palestine, Texas, we were welcome to come and we could follow them. He handed a piece of paper to Dad, that had his mother’s phone number. By then Mom had locked the door to the house and had joined us in the car. Both their car and ours backed up and headed out of Oak Park together.
In the car, Mom and Dad discussed what we should do. Mom thought we should go on to Oklahoma to her brother’s house. Dad felt we needed to stay closer so we could get back when the evacuation orders were lifted. We followed the Hartzog’s car for awhile, then lost them in the steady line of traffic. Cars continued to file on to the freeway at each entrance ramp. I was thinking about our house and all our stuff getting blown away and flooded. Before long I laid down in the back seat, thinking about it all, and fell asleep.
When I woke up it was clear, like there was no storm anywhere to be found. Traffic was heavy as all the cars moved along the highway together. A couple of hours later Dad stopped to use a pay phone to call the number Mr. Hartzog had given him.
When he got back in the car, it was decided, we were going to Grandmother Hartzog’s house. Mom read the directions, as Dad followed them out into the countryside on a long winding road, finally arriving at a white farm house that had been described as Grandmother Hartzog’s. It was sunny and nice. I hoped maybe the storm had gone away, but I could tell by the way my parents acted that things were still serious.
The house was big, with a screened porch all the way around. We could hear lots of people talking so we walked in the back door without a knock. No one would have heard us knock anyway, there were people everywhere. I hadn’t seen that many people in a house since a family reunion.
Everyone there was just like us, Mr. Hartzog had invited them to wait out the storm. All of us were refugees. Mom and several other ladies got together and went to the grocery store. When they got back, the cooking began. As it turned out six extra families had landed at Grandmother Hartzog’s house with us. The one thing we had in common was that all of us had some connection to Mr. Hartzog. Several of the men worked together and of course the Hartzogs were our neighbors. Each family had several kids. That night we slept on sleeping bags on the floor, every family grouped together. Grandmother Hartzog had a cat with six kittens. Each family had brought their dogs. So in the mix of families sleeping on the floor was a mother cat, 6 kittens, 4 or 5 dogs, lots of snoring, crying babies and people wandering around trying to find the bathroom without stepping on anyone....and occasionally someone did get stepped on.
About the time everyone had settled down, a long loud crack of thunder stirred the place up again. The rain started to pour, which moved those sleeping on the screened porch into the house. I lost track of what time we went to bed, but each of the next two nights seemed to last forever.
The next morning as everyone was getting their breakfast, there was a meeting of all the families. The kids sat silently as one of the dads told everyone what was about to happen. Parts of Texas City and La Marque had been destroyed and flooded. There was no electricity, you couldn’t drink the water and there was little phone service. Only a limited number of people were being let in to the area. No one knew what they were all going back to.
I looked around and every kid looked as scared as I felt. The dads were going to go back together in three cars. They were going to buy water and supplies when they could find it along the way. They would check out the situation and send for us when they thought it was safe and had a place for all of us to stay. Those without damage had agreed to help those whose houses were flooded. Mom and I stood with all the other mothers and kids watching as all the fathers drove away. I felt like I might never see Dad again. Mom told me I was just being silly, we were all going home in a couple of days
By the afternoon of the next day we had gotten a call. Four of the families who lived close to the seawall had lost everything, three with flooding to the ceiling, one family’s house had actually been washed off the foundation. Our house and the Hartzog’s had almost no damage. Those whose houses had such terrible damage had found places to stay.
We started packing the few things we had brought with us. Three of the cars had gone back with the dads. Mom and I were going back in another family's station wagon. In the car we were riding in, there were 6 adults and 5 kids. Grandmother Hartzog had generously given away a couple of of the kittens, one to me.
In the front seat were the lady driving, another lady with a baby and one teenager, three adults in the back seat, one holding a baby, and me and two other kids were in the very back, with stuff everyone had packed, two dogs and two kittens. We followed two other cars that were as full as ours.
The drive was longer than usual, with stopping for diaper changes and bathroom breaks for people and animals. Me and the other two kids were having a great time playing with the animals. I had never ridden in the back of a station wagon and thought it was a great adventure. Every so often Mom would call to me, “Everything okay back there?”
As we drove into town, by Bostick’s there was a roadblock. The adults had to show their identification. Dad and Mr. Hartzog were waiting at the roadblock for us. Mrs. Hartzog, her teenage daughter, Mom, me and my tabby kitten were the only ones in our car that got to go back to our house, everyone else was directed to refugee centers. It felt so good to be home, I was so relieved to find everything just as we had left it when we walked in the door.
The next morning the work started. Since we had electricity and everything intact, the families we had been with, started bringing things that could be washed to our house. Mom washed clothes non-stop. They dropped off the wet piles of clothes on the driveway. In the garage, it was my job to put them in piles by family. We didn’t have a dryer, so when a load finished washing, I put the laundry basket in my wagon and took it next door to the Hartzog’s to be dried. The next wet load Mom and I would take and hang on the clothesline, in our backyard. Wet, muddy, salty clothes were in piles all the way on to the driveway. It was the same in the Hartzog’s house. As soon as we cleared a load out another one appeared. As things dried we folded and stacked them according to whose family they belonged to.
By the third day most of the clothes had been washed and dried. Dad came home with rubber boots and gloves for Mom and me.
As we drove through town, I could not believe what the storm had done to everything. The store windows once dressed fashionably with clothes and shoes were now in muddy piles of rubble ....if you could even see it through the stains of muddy water left on the glass. Windows were broken and stuff, all kinds of stuff was strewn all over the streets. Some streets were completely blocked by fallen power lines and trees. And the smell, the horrible smell, like salt water, sewer and dead fish all mixed in a disgusting stew.
We went to the Clement’s house on 18th Street. They were an older couple. All Mrs. Clement could do was wring her hands and cry. Their house had been flooded to the ceiling, everything they had was ruined. One of the men started organizing everyone, giving us all assignments. All of the kids were to take the water hoses and wash off the driveway. Then we were to hand the hose to the person standing in the window. We all had on long rubber gloves and were told not to take them off for any reason and not to touch the mud, ground or our faces with our hands. Then the person in the house would wash the mud out of the house. When that was done, the men would start tearing out a few slats of wood floor in every room. Then our whole group went to the next house and repeated the process again. I don’t remember how many days we did that, but we pretty much covered 4 or 5 blocks of 18th Street. I was tired and complained, Dad said, “ Too bad, everyone is tired, and most don't have their comfortable houses to go home to like you do.” Dad’s thought process was, if our friends homes had damage, it was ours as well.
There was no safe water, the water that we had brought from Palestine was long gone, so we had to buy water from the Red Cross. Dad saw some people he knew from the plant who were in line in front of us. They asked Dad where we lived. He told them, “Oak Park,”
“Your house wasn’t damaged so YOU don’t know what it is like to have to clean up after a storm.” They looked at us angrily. Dad stoically ignored them. I was tired. I was furious. That someone would say that to us made me ready to fight! After all the work we had done? I was so angry my dad didn’t stand up to them, I was yanking at his arm saying, “Tell them we are working too!!". He just silently turned and walked away pushing me in front of him.
Dad told me it was okay for them to say that, they had lost everything and were hurting. He told me we really didn’t know what it was like since it wasn’t our stuff that had been ruined and lost. That night from the comfort of my cozy little bedroom with the red carpet, white drapes with red polka dots, books, stuffed toys, and cherished dolls surrounding me, it hit me how blessed I really was....I thought about all the things I had seen thrown into piles in front of houses, dolls, toys...things other kids had loved. I couldn’t stop crying. Mom came in to talk to me. She suggested that we go through my stuff and find some things to give to kids who had lost all their things.
The next day Mom and I picked out stuffed toys, books and dolls that I no longer played with. We took them to some of the girls who had stayed with us at Grandmother Hartzogs...who had lost everything. They were all so sad, I knew my toys would never be as special to them as the things they had lost. I never saw the girls again. One family had just moved to Texas City from New Jersey, and had only been there one week when the storm hit. They lost everything except their car. They drove by their house, saw nothing was left and headed back to New Jersey. Hurricane Carla affected everyone who lived through it.
In the 1990s, while we were living in Beaumont, we had a 13 inch rain, one of bayous backed up flooding homes in Sour Lake, a friend asked me to help her deliver meals to some of those affected. I told her I would be glad to help her. I found myself feeling like that little kid again....helping my parents....helping friends...and yet never knowing what it was like to lose everything.
