I lived in West Springfield…Union Street…I was born there…For the hurricane I was in the store... Carp's Variety Store…getting a cola and having an ice cream cone…my buddy and I… I was 17…and it started getting cloudy. It started raining…and then a little bit of wind started…just a little bit of a gale…and we said we’d better get home. We had to walk from Main Street to Union Street…the wind started coming up…and blowing everything around…it starting raining…I got home…I was all soaked right down to my shoes and everything…that hurricane…it was a lot of rain…ya know..? …And we went through to my front porch…and boy the rain came down….it was raining cats and dogs…I saw a lot of leaves and that…branches coming down…I was afraid some were going to come down and hit me as I ran home…A lot of trees came down and all that.

I got home…and they said there was going to be a big big flood…I took all my chickens out of the coop…I got a picture of it…and put’em into my attic…so they wouldn’t drown and that…son of a gun…the flood didn’t come…it was just a mild hurricane here…I had to get the chickens all down from the attic…and put them in the coop again…and it was an awful job believe me…the screeching and the hollerin and the roosters and all that…what else could I do with them…ya know…I was afraid the coop would be taken down…and they’d drown ya know..? 

In the 1936 flood…I had an Indian Red Fighting rooster…I used to raise them…I had them for pets…I didn’t fight’em you know…and all my chickens were in the coop…and the flood of 1936 took the whole chicken coop with all my chickens down the water…all the way to St. Anne’s church…and memorial avenue…and that’s where it stood for the flood…yeah…that’s news…

We didn’t get it back…we tore it apart in the street…too big to carry it, you know…it’s a chicken coop you know..? The water came to my second floor in the ’36 flood…high you know…oh yeah it was high…oh, it was a big flood. The National Guard came in and cleaned all the cellars…free you know..? My brother was one…he came and helped too…they cleaned all the muck, they helped us out the National Guard…after everything stopped they were called out. We were poor then…you know…it was the Depression and all that…I was a kid going to school…I didn’t go to college. That’s when I had my chicken coop…I raised all kinds..small big…roosters..etc…my friend and I raised chickens…then we got over it….and my dad decided every other week to have chicken for dinner…and we’d come over and we didn’t know anything, and he’d say “oh, your chicken’s dead”…you know [laughs]… what are you going to do…Depression days…

All my life I’ve been in West Springfield…I went into the service after that…Normandy and all that…Never seen a jet fighter before until the Germans…we bombed that place they made ‘em soon as we saw ‘em…if we didn’t bomb it, we’d a been beat, ya know. I was an army medic…I remember … there was a river there in Normandy…and they had a bridge across it…every time we’d build it…there was a church over there…and as soon as we’d finish, they’d see it from the church…and blow it up with one shot…we found out…that when we finished…there was a woman over there by the church…who would hang out clothes…and that would be the signal…so one day…we rebuilt the bridge again…she was hanging clothes out again…one of our guys got his sniper rifle, and shot her through the head…well you had to…in them days…the Germans took over France…we had to…you know..? 

Well I was young and scared in 1938…I had my own problems with my chicken coop and all that…I needed the help from the guard…I was the only chicken coop…downstairs we had a club…hideout too…but the flood was awful.

I remember the ’27 flood too…I was a kid then…but I remember being taken to the armory over there on Armory Street…you know in Springfield…and everyone and their families were spread all out in beds and all that…and teachers would come and tell us stuff…and they would feed us…it was alot of fun…we didn’t know what else was going on…we were young you know…I was 6 years old when that happened.