Hurricane Donna -- CHS Alumni Message Board

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Date Posted: 22:16:17 06/20/02 Thu
Author: Paul DeGaeta
Author Host/IP: 68.56.226.40
Subject: Hurricane Donna

I was out of town so missed the chat about Hurricane Donna. (Norm, if you read this help me out here. Wasn't it that girl that came down from Ohio that one summer?) Anyway, My dad knew this old Black man named Pearly who worked with him at Harbour Heights. Pearly was on Dad's crew, so he usually drove him home. He asked dad to run him by the liquor store the day before the storm. When he came back, dad asked him why he had such a big bag. Because, Pearly said, he knew this was going to be a two bottle storm. With that, dad figured since since we lived on the river there was going to be a big flood. We put everything up as high as we could, put tape on the windows and left for the Sunnybrook Hotel in Harbor Heights. My folks were friends with John and Millie Stanks, who owned it back then. The best thing, and I didn't realize it at the time, is I got to sleep in the same bed as Janet Stanks who was two years older than me. John and my Dad went out on the Barron Collier bridge and took some home movies for the first part of Donna, then the cops ran them off. I remember it coming to blow, and how the water was coming in the seem between the glass doors. We mopped, then bailed up the water from the front doors, and had a bucket brigade out to the back door where we emptied it. Just the opposite after the eye passed. I remember we all went out when the eye came on us. Anybody remember how strange that felt, a little electric like. Nobody had much to say. The sun was out, but there was this dark wall of water on all the horizon and these incrdible fierce looking clouds. My dad had a '58 station wagon, and gravel from the driveway had knocked out one side of the windows and sand blasted off some of the finish to bright metal. After the storm, our screen lani out back was gone, the aluminum pieces looked like pretzels. We were lucky and just got some broken windows, and enough water on the Terazzo floor for a couple of water bugs to be zipping around. The roof of the house next to ours got blown down the block. My Dad always said they called the National Guard out in Port Charlotte, not because of looting, but because General Devlopment didn't want people to know how many of their houses lost a roof. There were dangeling wires everywhere and it looked like a war zone. No electricity, and a good thing, because people were driving around looking at the devestation. But we got along - it was fun swimming in the ditches with all that water. The Health Dept. had other priorities back then, or they'd prevented us from running after those damn mosquito trucks till we almost blacked out. But, you had to watch out for the snakes. They said a bunch of animals got away from Johnny Jack's Wildlife Park on Tamiami Trail on the south side of Punta Gorda - I remember going in to PC with my mom and seeing a big Boa slither across a road off Kings Highway a couple of years later, so he must have made it across the river. Remember those cards that the Herald Put out? I still got one, it reads: "The Herald Hurricane Veteran's Club. This is to certify that (name) experienced all the horrors of 1960's Hurricane Donna as the eye passed through Charlotte County, Florida and is always entitled to relate as many stories about Donna as desired. September 10, 1960 J H Jesse Publisher" Wonder if Ole' Mr. Jesse figured people would still be talking about it after all these years!

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Replies:

Re: Hurricane Donna -- Jenny, 08:14:23 06/21/02 Fri
- Re: Hurricane Donna -- brian, 01:57:31 08/13/04 Fri
  - Re: Hurricane Donna -- Donna Bryant, 21:50:01 03/15/06 Wed