1936 Flood

I was 12-years old during the 1936 flood…we lived on George Street in the lower part of town…and we were flooded out…But I gotta tell you the story from the beginning…We knew the floodwaters were rising. I went down behind the old Immaculate Conception School on Main Street …and there was a police officer there…George McCarthy…and he had a put a set of sticks in the ground, one…two…three…four…like that…and he said…when the water gets up to this stick here…we’re going to evacuate…I ran home, I didn’t take any chances after that, because I knew were going to have a flood. I went home, and told my mother that they were going to evacuate us. I had three sisters, my mother, and we took all the furniture we could, and moved it to the second floor. This was the second flood my mother had been in…there was another flood in 1927 in the same area…So we put everything we could handle on the second floor. My father had a barber shop, on Elm Street next to the Magestic Theatre…we had a greyhound dog that he had acquired…and we didn’t have a suitcase…my mother took some suit boxes, and we packed some stuff into them, and we walked…in the rain…to the barber shop. My father says…’what are you doing here’…my mother says ‘there’s going to be a flood, they’re evacuating people…we’re not going to be there with four children…’ My father says ‘There’s not going to be a flood.’ Because see he went through the 1927 flood, and after that flood they built a dike down in the meadows…and he figured that she was over-reacting. So, he said we’ll take you over to the American Legion, which was over on Park Street…still is…and see if they’ll put is up for the night…and winked a little bit.

So anyway…we went down to the American Legion, and my father said he had to go…he had to walk to work. He walked down to Union Street…he went that way because there was some spots there where he could refresh himself when he came home from work on the way back…he went down to George Street…gave water to his chickens…he had them in a barn…it was our garage and our barn. He was going to go back the same way, because he was getting a little thirsty, but he decided to go by Main Street, because he wanted to see the river, and see if it was going to come over, and how far. So he walked over main street, and back over to the American Legion, and he ran into another woman there, who was just upset, screaming “ooooh … isn’t it awful!”…my father says, “what’s awful?”…she says, “the flood!”…and he says “there’s not going to be a flood!” she says “there is”…she says “I live on Union Street and our cellars are full of water”. The water was coming through the sewers, and not over the banks of the rivers…so Union Street flooded long before Main Street. So we were all at the American Legion, and I had an uncle that lived in another part of town…so we said we’d go over to my Uncle Larry’s house.

By the next morning, the water was over Main Street…and was all the way to where the old Methodist Church used to be...My father says, "Oh my god…there’s a lot of water here.” So he got permission to get in a rowboat with another person, and they rowed down to George Street…and they tied the rowboat to the eave trough of the second floor. My father entered the house from the porch roof. He saw that everything on the second floor was okay…but everything on the first floor was completely flooded.  The water kept rising…then finally subsiding…The rest of us were at my uncle Larry’s house, oblivious to the whole thing. The barn where my father kept his chickens and his homing pidgeons…he could only see the peak of the roof of the barn. He lost all his chickens…and all of his pidgeons…just like he had in the 1927 flood.

We went back to the house after the floodwaters had receded, and we found about the 25% of the foundation of the house was gone. I’ll tell you what happened…my guesswork, but I think it was pretty accurate. We used to get oil/kerosene for the kitchen stove, and my father had two 55-gallon drums in the cellar…and our oilman used to come with his oil truck, and he’d fill a 30-gallon can, and they’d have a funnel and get it down into the cellar. My father wanted only one barrel filled…because he could only afford one. So they filled one barrel...and the barrel that was empty floated to the basement rafters, and the barrel that was full, stayed…and with the currents rushing through…it was like a battering ram. We never found the barrel afterwards. But, we ended up losing the house. My father inherited the house from my grandfather…big 12-room house. Winding stair-case. We didn’t have the money to repair the foundation. We didn’t qualify for aid, because was in business for himself…Same thing happened to him with the Salvation Army…Even though he only took home $15 /week they said ‘you own a business, you didn’t qualify’.

One of the stories I like to tell about the flood…was there was a “Ragman” who lived across the street. He was a older gentlemen, and he used to have a horse and a cart, and he’d go around and he rang a bell…’rags rags rags’…and he used to go up and down the street collecting rages…because he used to sell them to the paper company…beautiful horse…chestnut horse. They claim…I didn’t see it…they said the horse swam out of his stall when the water came up…and he got caught at the fence at Gilbert Barker’s…and drowned. I always remembered that because it was so heartbreaking

1938 Hurricane

So we moved up onto Kelso avenue after that…Higher ground…And that was where we were when the ’38 hurricane came…The flood that came as a result as a hurricane…we sustained no damage, and there was no flooding where we were…Kelso Avenue was off of Park Street, down near where the underpass is, down in that area. We lived there for a few years.

There was some talk about there being a storm coming. I was shoe-shine boy at the barbershop. They used to let me in on the theatre…I took the first seat at the last row when there was nothing going on at the barber shop. If my father needed me, he’d just tap me on the shoulder and I’d go. So I was at the theatre all the time. That day, we had gotten out of school…and I went, instead of going home, I went to the theatre. And at the theatre, they had these great big ventilating fans on the roof…and boy were they turning…they went ‘rumble rumble rumble…’ everyone left the theatre quietly…about the only indication there was going to be a hurricane.

By that time, my father had a car…we had a 1931 Ford…and he used to park it around the corner…he didn’t want to take a parking spot in front of the barber shop. Why I mention that…was because when we got in the car, the wind was blowing exactly against us. You know the old Ford had a flat windshield. And it shuttered, believe it or not, it shuttered quite a bit to get moving. So my father took me home, but he had an employee that lived way down on the other end of town. My father took Mario home, and he came back by way of Main Street again, and he couldn’t believe it…I mean, talk about miracles happening…I have to use that phrasing…because when my father got home, they reported that on Main Street and on the town common over 200 trees were down. They must have fell behind my father the whole way. My father…I guess he didn’t see it…he did say there was one tree down in front of him where he had to take a side street…It had to be a small miracle that it happened that way. It was quite an experience.

The town of West Springfield had the forestry department…and they had no chainsaws. It was all 2-man bucksaws…or by the ax. I went up to the town common…and they axmen, they were taking chips out of the trees that were (6” wide)…and throwing them. I never saw any woodsman that were cutting trees and logs up as efficiently as them. They did a fabulous job. And of course they had to cut them up small, because they didn’t have any mechanical means of loading them on the trucks to haul away. Some of the bigger pieces…I don’t know how they got them out. They had no mechanical stuff. The forestry department was not much up to date…they got chainsaws after that.

I lived it. I lived it. I remember it because I was at a very impressive age. During the 1938 flood, which I didn’t experience at my house, the Agawam river—we called it the ‘Agawam River’ but it was really the part of the Westfield River that ran through Agawam, was very high, and the water had seeped into the underpass…couldn’t go through. I was familiar with the place because I used to go up to the river all the time. There were some foundations near there that had been 2 or 3 houses…the foundations were about 1’-2’ high off the ground, and I was directing cars to go around where they can get to go around the flooded underpass, so they wouldn’t get hung up on the foundations. Some of the people probably thought: ‘this kid is looking for trouble’…And they didn’t listen to my instructions…Gee, they got hung-up. They got stuck! I had fun directing traffic…I said go this way, that way…some went straight instead…they got hung up. The water in the underpass would have been up to the windshields, and the town had boarded it up anyway. I was born and brought up in this town…84 years ago.