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| Issue #24, September 8, 2006 |
September 20, 1938
A Memoir of the Hurricane of ‘38 at Montauk’s Wine and Dandy
The great hurricane of 1938 approached the coast of Long Island without the slightest advance warning. That summer, people were mostly worried about France and Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s ascendancy in Europe, and the possible U.S. involvement in a new World War. An approaching weather system was far down the list. As for the Depression, the major cities of the Northeast were rebounding slowly. Indeed, self-sustainable farming and fishing communities like Montauk welcomed a surge of late summer business.
September 20th, 1938 was born to a misty morning across the Northeast. But within hours, the day would grow into an unexpectedly destructive tantrum of wind, rain and high surf.
“It was a nice day and everybody was doing their thing,” Mary Fullerton recalled as we spoke over the phone. During the time of the storm, Ms. Fullerton of Montauk was just 23 and worked at her family’s inn, the Wine and Dandy, waiting tables and balancing the books. Business during breakfast and dinner was steady, considering the season. Three guests were vacationing at the time; a pleasant couple from New Jersey and a young man who enjoyed walking to the Lighthouse in the morning. Mary’s father and his mason worked on the east end of the Inn’s Annex while the couple from New Jersey sat on the front porch of the Wine and Dandy watching the heavy seas roll in. At the time, sea gazing was a popular activity for Montauk vacationers, but the rain and wind persisted so Mr. Fullerton, the mason and the couple from New Jersey decided to head back inside the Inn. Little did the Fullertons know that their humble Inn, built of stone, would soon become a safe haven from the ferocious rain and wind that would, before the day was out, reach over 155 miles per hour. “The storm came up, the wind started to blow and then the heavy rains came.”
The hurricane of ‘38 began on September 4th in the waters off the Cape Verde Islands in a section of the Atlantic Ocean called The Doldrums, about 400 miles off the coast of Senegal. The average temperature of the water in that area during the fall, 81 degrees, is an ideal condition for the formation of a tropical cyclone system. And the slightest disturbance in the weather system could cause a patch of warm air to rise and pull in cooler air from below. This would become the core of the hurricane, which would ride a North Atlantic High pressure system known as The Bermuda High toward the American coast, then turn northwards toward Long Island and New England at a speed of 67 miles per hour. It was 200 miles wide.
Mrs. Fullerton looked at the storm in astonishment. She exclaimed, “Oh, my goodness, this is really a bad storm. All those shingles are standing up like a turkey’s tail!”
There were five people besides the Fullertons at the Wine and Dandy to help protect the guests from the storm. In the three oceanside bedrooms, the chef tried constantly to stop the leaking floorboards by throwing blankets on them. Her brawny husband, Raymond, sealed the windows and began boarding up the doors. At the eastern end of the Inn, Mr. Fullerton watched as one of their two gazebos sprang up from the ground and landed in a nearby driveway. Hysterical from the developing scene, Mrs. Fullerton was led down to the basement by the chef so she could calm herself down.
“So then this man comes knocking on the door and it was Colonel Minell who lived in the back of us and he had a suitcase. I said ‘What happened to you Colonel Minell?’ and he said, ‘I was trying to brace the roof up on the porch post and I got hit by a plank!”
The Fullertons grabbed Minell out of the storm and brought him into the Wine and Dandy. Raymond, the chef’s husband, was about to board up the front door again when Mary remembered seeing one of their guests, the young man staying upstairs, leave for the lighthouse that morning. But he had never come back. She ran upstairs, knocked on the man’s door, then went inside and there he was, acting as if what was going on outside was just a normal occurrence for Montauk. With everybody now gathered in the Wine and Dandy, Raymond secured the last door.
Then in the distance Mary saw Miss Demili and her friend, Molly Lockman, crawling on all fours towards the Inn. They pleaded for Raymond to let them in, but he had just secured the door and was afraid of it blowing open and causing more damage.
“So I said, ‘You have to! They’re down there and they have to get in!’”
Raymond finally got the door open and Miss Demili and Molly crawled inside. “Molly had her English bulldog secured under her arm. They looked like two drowned rats. They were soaking wet.”
Mrs. Fullerton gathered everybody into the cellar of the Inn, then instructed Mary to give shots of whiskey and clean clothes to everyone, including the dog.
“I went upstairs to get some clothes for them and Ms. Demili says ‘I don’t wear this kind of underwear’ so I said ‘Ms. Demili you have to put them on while we get your clothes dry!’”
Ms. Demili compared the storm to her time as an ambulance driver during World War One. Apparently, lethal explosions of shrapnel seemed like child’s play when compared to the sheer power of the storm outside. Secured in the cellar, Mary Fullerton and the others drank whiskey as the storm finally subsided.
There were few warnings of the hurricane’s arrival in the Northeast. Over 700 people died.
I read Cherie Burns’ novel, The Great Hurricane of 1938. This was fiction. But eyewitnesses described unusual and mythical happenings like a large pond that disappeared with one gust of wind and a mother who held onto her son’s hand after he was lifted off the ground. As I talked with Ms. Fullerton, I began to understand the force of these storms, and how they can live in the mind forever.
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