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[[clipped magazine article]] [[last part of article from another page stapled to the top left corner of the full article - covers most of the top photograph]] BOOKS mere physical distress of the moment." After it was all over, the young reporter got a raise (from $20 to $25 a week), married and settled down. Paradoxically, somewhere in the eye of the storm the college boy had found what he was looking for. Now, four decades later, in his scrupulous recording of chaos, Allen has at last connected literature and life, honoring the grim truth, of dislocation on which all order must be predicated. Melvin Maddocks BOOKS [[photograph - mostly obscured by stapled part of article - photograph of buildings almost completely submerged by flood waters]] [[photo credit - horizontal text on right of photo]]WIDE WORLD PHOTO[[/photo credit]] [[caption]]RAILROAD BRIDGE AWASH IN RHODE ISLAND[[/caption]] [[photograph - three young women standing outside in the storm - one is holding onto a lamppost with both arms, one is holding onto her coattails, the third is in the background holding her coat tight]] [[photo credit - horizontal text on right of photo]]INTERNATIONAL NEWS PHOTO[[/photo credit]] [[caption]]GIRLS CLUTCHING LAMPPOSTS & EACH OTHER[[/caption]] [[photograph of storm damage, high water, and trees blown over]] [[photo credit - horizontal text on right of photo]]WIDE WORLD PHOTO[[/photo credit]] [[caption]]TREES ALONG ALONG SOUTH BOSTON'S STRANDWAY BEND TO 100-MILE-AN-HOUR WINDS A tableau of purple waves, houses falling and corpses with their clothes blown off[[/caption]] [[two-column text]] [[start column]] Blow by Blow A WIND TO SHAKE THE WORLD[ by EVERETT S. ALLEN 370 pages. Little, Brown. $10. On Sept. 21, 1938, seven years before the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, a hurricane descended with almost as little warning upon the northeast coastline of the U.S. Until then the land-lubbing public had known of "gales," "tempests, "blows," even "a bit of weather." But "hurricane" was a new and terrible escalation of apocalyptic power in the popular consciousness. During a few hours, 680 people were killed and $400 million worth of what is abstractly known as "property damage" occurred. The statistics, of course, are nothing compared with what men at war easily accomplish. But the hurricane's figures of destruction exceed those of other legendary American disasters: the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (480 dead, $350 million damage) and the Chicago fire of 1871 (200 dead, $200 million damage). Two-Story Breakers.] The point of epic enormity always lies beyond statistics in any case. For those at the heart of any violent storm, the test is that the world never looks the same afterward. The hurricane of 1938 was such a storm, as this narrative proves--stark and immediate almost 40 years later. On the day of the hurricane, Everett S. Allen, fresh out of college, began his first full day as a reporter on the New Bedford (Mass.) [[italics]]Standard-Times[[/italics]], where he now serves as chief editorial writer. He had spent the summer of '38 on his native Martha's Vineyard, rowing out in a 10-ft. skiff to play harbor patrol to the steam yachts that visited Tis- [[end column]] [[start column]] bury. That summer job held its own symbolism. Like thousands of other English majors before and since, the young Allen was waiting for somebody or something to make the connection between literature and life. As he polished off his supper on the evening of Sept. 20, 1938--meat pie, milk, apple tart, all for 25ยข--his besetting question, he recalls, was: What would he write about the following day? The hurricane that would more than solve his cub reporter's problem arrived without prehistory: no forecast, no cute nickname. Resurrecting names and places from old clippings, conducting new interviews with survivors, Allen has, in effect, retracked the storm. There is the occasionally odd and saving incident. In New Jersey, 60 colonies of beavers manned their dams in Palisades Park and, in the process of saving themselves, kept down the flooding of 42,000 acres of nearby land and highways. But mostly Allen's story is a sequence of unremitting havoc. Off Long Island, the hard-driven anemometer on the Vanderbilt yacht Vara registered a windspeed of 91 m.p.h. before it self-destructed. The bell of Sag Harbor's Old Whalers' Church tolled crazily until one last lifting gust, like a petulant child with a toy, tore the steeple completely off its base and dashed it to the ground. In New London, Conn., the element of fire joined the element of wind, raging from 4:30 that afternoon until 11 in the evening. And then there was water--"water, water everywhere," as one witness remembered. By the time the last two-story breaker had crashed over the summer colony of Misquamicut, R.I., only the skeletons of five cottages remained of the 500 houses that had stood there a few hours before. Houses Afloat. Allen accumulates the details until his account reads like one repeating tableau of purple waves, elms falling, houses collapsing, corpses in shoes and socks--all other clothes having literally blown off. Only the very sturdy and the very fragile seemed to survive, like the Sandwich glass and blue china dug up later on one New England beach. What of the human beings, shaken, dwarfed, rendered insultingly insignificant? Allen ends his story in New Bedford, speaking for himself. Owning neither a raincoat nor a hat, he fared forth bareheaded on his first and most unforgettable assignment just in time to see a wall of water rolling toward the harbor. Boats were aground, houses were afloat--it was the primal nightmare or the ultimate disaster movie. "The mind, in art and in life, feels a basic need for some kind of arrangement," another survivor summed up for Allen. "Suddenly deprived of this, it finds itself facing a horror and a loss that is far deeper than any [[end column]]
Transcription Notes:
Story storm comparison omits the Galveston hurricane, 1900, killed six to twelve thousand, wiped out the city.
