Don't blow off hurricane warnings

Memoir tells of the 1928 hurricane

Well, we're back in another hurricane season. Not something to be taken lightly. 

Early settlers had their share of storms and the results could be frightening. Like today, it depended on the severity of the storm and its path. Two pioneer memoirs illustrate that in a vivid way.

The lighter remembrance was viewed through childhood eyes. Maria Davidson Pope wrote Remembrances of an Early Daytona Childhood fairly late in life - in her 60s or older. She was born in Daytona in 1874 and died at age 94 in 1969. 

She recounts with great detail the people and times of her youth. That includes periods of bad weather. As a child, she looked "forward to the fall gales with delight." These storms may or may not have been hurricanes. They were fierce enough to rattle windowpanes and blow boats loose from the wharves.

Flooding was a given on the low riverfront land. To lively children in a safe haven, that was an adventure. When the kitchen flooded, they played in the water, she wrote. "I remember paddling around on a small wooden table, turned upside down. Our great delight was to walk on stilts through the water. I so well remember the Puckett boys making me those stilts." 

Adults have different perspectives. In Memoirs of an Everglades Pioneer, Gertrude Petersen Winne shared dramatic memories of the horrible 1928 hurricane that tore through South Florida and killed thousands of people. 

There's a world of difference between a fall gale and that vicious 1928 storm, known as the Okeechobee Hurricane. An excellent fictional account is in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. I'd long thought the underprivileged bore the brunt of that storm. Winne's memoir tells me otherwise. Rich and poor alike suffered. One difference is that more well-off residents may have had better access to weather forecasts. 

Winne and her family lived near the edge of Lake Okeechobee. Her husband was a fisherman in tune with the ways of wind and water. They heard the storm forecasts and watched conditions closely. "When the water in the creek rose 6 inches in 15 minutes, Ross [her husband] said, 'It's time to go.' "

They grabbed a few belongings and set out for West Palm Beach. They encouraged neighbors to do the same. Most declined. All - or almost all - who stayed behind died. The Winne family's three-story house was washed off its foundation and destroyed. 

The family almost didn't make it, themselves. The storm lashed into them before they reached West Palm. The car stalled out. When her husband opened the car door, the wind tore it back and bent the hinges. He shielded himself until a short break in the wind allowed him to get the door back on and get inside the vehicle. He'd also pushed the car into deep sand for stability and put rocks in front of the wheels. 

The couple and their children huddled inside the vehicle. They watched pine trees bend to the ground under the wind, saw roofs peel off buildings, and prayed that debris flying all around them wouldn't smash into the car. "During all this, the car surged and swayed like a mad ship but did not break loose from its mire of sand," Gertrude wrote.

During the eye of the storm, they got out and found that the paint on the car's exterior had been scoured off by flying sand. And heavy timbers had been forced into the asphalt pavement only a few feet behind the car. The family got the car started and managed to limp to safety in town, sometimes first getting out of the car and clearing the roadway of debris.

As soon as the storm ended, rescuers including Gertrude's husband headed out to the Everglades, she wrote. "The first truck to return from the Glades came in about 10 o'clock that night loaded with men, women, and children. Ross said if he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the look on those people's faces - utter hopelessness and despair; some of the people looked so blank and bewildered they had to be led by hand."  

Gertrude wasn't able to return home for over a month. Her husband helped nonstop with rescue efforts and with burying the dead. It was gruesome. "Death. Death and destruction lay everywhere," she wrote. "Some 2,000 or 3,000 people lay dead, scattered over the countryside..." 

If you live in a hurricane zone and a warning is issued, heed it. Please. We're a century past these pioneer experiences, but some things don't change. The destructive powers of hurricanes are one of them. 

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To learn more about the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, see the National Weather Service's memorial page at https://www.weather.gov/mfl/okeechobee

Food, culture contrast in 'Cross Creek Cookery'

Cross Creek Cookery was published 75 years ago.

This year (2017) marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Cross Creek and Cross Creek Cookery, both by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. First editions of both books have a place of honor on my bookshelves.

Rawlings moved to Florida in the 1920s and homesteaded in pioneer fashion on a citrus grove in Cross Creek. Even today, the Creek remains a hamlet. It's a strip of land sandwiched between Lochloosa and Orange lakes, an easy drive from Gainesville or Ocala but a century away in ambience.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Cross Creek was remote. Many local customs and behaviors were country holdovers from the turn of the 20th century and earlier. Rawlings captured the essence and lifestyles of the people, and brought them to life in fiction and nonfiction. Readers met many of the locals in Rawlings' popular memoir, Cross Creek.

Although Rawlings lived her version of a Florida Cracker lifestyle at Cross Creek, she was from a privileged background. She moved seamlessly between her rural haven and the urban Northeast. Nowhere is that contrast more evident than in Cross Creek Cookery. 

The cookbook features a mix of local country cuisine and family recipes from Rawlings' cultured upbringing. The instructions for "Mother's Almond Cake," with its "Almond Paste Filling" and "Boiled Frosting for Almond Cake," require three pages of text. "Cassava Pudding" - a backwoods treat - needs only a paragraph. The recipe was shared with Rawlings by a homesteader in the Ocala National Forest. The woman and her family had settled in the Florida scrub before it became a national forest.

The book's commentary is as revealing as the juxtaposition of recipes. Rawlings was aware. She knew that although she had lived in Cross Creek for years, she never truly could be of Cross Creek. In her preface to the recipe for "Sweet Potato Pone," she tells of the time she invited a local friend to Christmas dinner at Cross Creek. She spent days preparing an elaborate meal.

Afterwards, she told her guest the meal was an example of a typical Yankee Christmas dinner. She asked what his family would eat for a typical Florida Cracker Christmas dinner. Her friend's reply? "Whatever we can git, Ma'am. Whatever we can git." (Page 183)

Be sure you get the chance to spend some time with one or both of these classic books. Happy 75th Anniversary to a piece of Florida's past.

Learn more about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her life and works from the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society: https://rawlingssociety.org

Florida as mission territory

This image of Fr. Patrick Bresnahan
is from his memoir of mission work,
Seeing Florida With a Priest

While researching an early 1880s Catholic colony near Sanford, I found a fascinating book by Father Patrick J. Bresnahan on the excellent Central Florida Memory website. The 1937 Seeing Florida With a Priest recounts his journeys through Florida mission territory in the first decade of the 1900s. What's doubly interesting is that Fr. Bresnahan afterward became the first resident priest at All Souls Catholic Church in Sanford. That church's roots are in the early colony, whose history I'm exploring. Nice circle.

The dichotomy between ecumenism and religious prejudice in frontier Florida continues to intrigue me, and is found aplenty in the 97-page book and elsewhere. At the Sanford church and elsewhere in Florida, local non-Catholics often supported the building of Catholic churches. That seemed especially true in the 1880s. 

Meanwhile, Fr. Bresnahan writes of his first mission in Madison, Fla., in 1904, that "bigotry and prejudice were then rampant in that pretty town" (page 14).  One man who secretly attended mission services was regularly accused of being Catholic by his neighbors, because he tried to dispel misconceptions.

By the time a church building was under construction in Madison in 1907, "all the Catholics contributed generously, and some non-Catholics" (page 15). But all was not completely well. On the same page, Fr. Bresnahan tells how the sheriff threatened to arrest the Catholic church ladies for selling tickets for a giveaway of a patchwork quilt.

The raffle was part of a fundraising bazaar and supper. The town marshal came to the rescue, the publicity generated attention and the gala raised $400. My go-to inflation calculator website doesn't go back to 1907, but were that $400 raised in 1913, it would be the equivalent of $9,483 in 2015 dollars.

Once the church was built, non-Catholics converged to help form a robust choir for a two-week mission. "I left Madison with a feeling that I had done something to remove prejudice" (page 16), writes Fr. Bresnahan humbly. Soon after, he was in Tallahassee, where he found little bigotry despite the occasional "vomitings  of 'cheap' politicians" (page 18).

The above is just a sampling of what can be found in this valuable memoir, which was published by Economy Print Shop in Zephyrhills. I've not yet finished reading the book, but can't end this blog post without mentioning Fr. Bresnahan's encounters with Florida Crackers in Sopchoppy, "which is real country and 'cracker' village" (page 23). His experience bears quoting, because it corrects cultural history that, at times, still depicts pioneer Florida Crackers as backwoods bigots.

"The great interest exhibited during the mission was remarkable; it was conducted in the public school building. The natives, all 'crackers', vied with one another, unlike any other place, in giving me hospitality; and, they went so far as to get up parties for my entertainment, even though many had never seen a priest before. Moreover, they all seemed glad to find out what they had heard concerning priests hitherto were 'lies'." (page 23)

Ignorant backwoods folk? Hardly. The Crackers exhibited a genuine human dignity that contrasts starkly to the antics of some of the era's movers and shakers. There's a lesson in that.