Well…I was about 8 years old during the 1936 flood…and I remember vividly-- I remember living on Abbey Avenue…and my father had a grocery store which was right across from the Brightwood School playground. I remember walking down to the dike, and seeing how high the water was…on Abbey avenue. We weren’t supposed to go there…we went out to see how high the water was…and it was pretty high…and it was coming up the cellar sewers. We were the last ones to leave the street…and as we leaving the street, the water was following us. We had some relatives that live over on Douglas Street…so we figured we’d go over the bridge and stop at Douglas street, and stay there for the night…when we got over to the bridge, we saw that they had more water than we did…because it was coming up through the sewers…so we ended up with relatives on Amory Street. My father’s grocery store—we lost everything…we had a big order come in that day…everything was gone. We were a ground floor store. And our house was kinda high…but we had water inside the house, oh, say, over the baseboards…and we owned the house across the street, and the water there was to the ceiling. It was scary. Brightwood school was all flooded…there was no school for a while…It was high…The water was right to the top of the first floor. School was off about 3-4 weeks, I think. It was a mess when the water started to recede, because the water was coming up the sewers…The water was dirty…really dirty…you know, coming up from the sewers and all that…but those men did such a great job of removing it all and cleaning up. They worked days cleaning those cellars…it wasn’t sanitary. People couldn’t go into the houses until the cleanup was done. We never thought it would go over the dam…never. We stayed at our uncle’s house on Armory Street for about 3 weeks until my father came and got us…Our neighbor was going around from house to house in a boat, getting things for people.

We were some of the first people who came back to start cleaning up the place…and there were some renters nearby, and they used to come over…and we’d have dinner by candelight…trying to be happy. The cleaning though...the day-laborers that would come…they did a fabulous job. I can remember bringing up all the rugs and beating the devil out of them…but in the grocery store, my father lost everything… everything… everything… Imagine all that dirty water getting into bath tissues and all that. It was really heartbreaking…because it was so much work. It was really funny..because after that…you could just throw it all out (of the store)…and people would come up and take stuff…but you didn’t know what you were getting because all the labels washed off the cans…off of everything.

I was just a kid then…it was kind of exciting for me…I mean, we didn’t want to leave the house, and my father was worried about the store…but there wasn’t nothing you could do about that. Somebody had told him that maybe he should move things over to the school, but he said ‘Oh, it won’t come over, it won’t come over the dam.’…well…it did. And they lost it. He never really recovered from that.

My brother was rescuing dogs…and bringing them all to the house. There was one dog, and my sister came into the room…and he jumped at her…and my mother said ‘no more rescuing dogs’…so we called the SPCA and they came and got the dogs…but the guy wouldn’t handle that German Shepherd. I wouldn’t want to go through it again.

It brought a lot of people together though…there were renters on the second floor of a house up the street…and they came over after helping others clean out…and we had them over with candles and things…trying to make light in the situation.

And a couple years later…during the hurricane…they said there was going to be another flood…so then we brought everything (in the store) up to the second floor of the Brightwood School…but it never flooded…so we had to bring everything back. But it was it was devastating to so many. We worked so hard…all us kids bringing everything up to the second story of the school… and nothing happened. I helped, put them in boxes, and there were a lot of stairs…We were glad it didn’t happen, but we had to bring everything back…It was better than losing it all though.