During the 1938 hurricane, I lived at 270 East Main Street Chicopee Falls…The Friday before the hurricane…my mother and I were walking on Front Street to St. Stanislaw Bingo…and…On the horizon…I never saw clouds that black…and I said, ‘well…I guess it’s going to rain’…And well it did rain…Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday…I mean it poured…at that time we didn’t have any weathermen…So Wednesday I’m coming home from school…on Taylor Street…it was about quarter-of-four in the afternoon…and I had an umbrella…Well, you can kiss that umbrella good-bye…because it just took it…and that was it…right up in the air, and that was it…but you know when I got home in the afternoon we still didn’t know what was going on…We knew there was high winds and we knew there was rain…but my Father…had to get picked up by my brother in law…to be taken home…it was awful…he didn’t get home until 6 oclock…every street he went down had a fallen tree…this was from Bernie Avenue to East Main Street Chicopee Falls…

My father had a garage in the back…it ripped all the shingles off…about half of the roof…As far as the wind…we didn’t realize what was going on…and you waited for it to end…I never saw so much destruction in all my life…We had a house across the street on Main Street… and in the Summer in 1935 my father had put up a cement wall and that wall was at least 25’ tall…in [the flood of]1936 the water just went over it…In 1938 the water was all the way to the house…which …you have to see it…believe it…that means the water was at least 2’ over the wall…we were watching it…we thought the house was going to go into the river…you couldn’t believe what the river did to properties on the river…it really gouged them…and then the bridge between Chicopee Falls and North Chicopee went and that was it…you couldn’t move after that…there was a guy there that was talking people across the river.