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Killer in the Keys

Photo -- Times files
HURRICANE DESTRUCTION: Frame structures were leveled in the path of the Labor Day 1935 hurricane.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times staff writer
©St. Petersburg Times, published August 14, 1991

ISLAMORADA -- The Big Wind.

That's what Bernard Russell tells Florida Keys newcomers about. When they tell him they think it might be fun to experience a hurricane, he educates the pilgrims about big wind:

"You don't want to be here when a big hurricane hits. You want to listen to the experts who tell you to get out a long time before the storm gets here. If you're caught here, you're sunk. It's too late. You can't get out. You can't go out in the yard to secure your house. You have to sit there, and listen to a wind you can't believe. The wind howls and carries on and there's nothing you can do. Nothing. . . ."

In 1935, when Bernard Russell was 17, the most powerful hurricane in United States history swept through the Upper Keys. On Labor Day night, the unnamed storm, with its 250-mph winds and a 17-foot tidal surge, killed more than 500 people. The dead included 50 members of the Russell clan. Bernard Russell saw his mother and sister blown away into the night. A nephew was torn from his grasp. Only 11 Russells lived to see morning.

"There's nothing you can do if you're caught in a major storm," Bernard Russell, 74, says again. He sits in a chair in his Islamorada living room a block from the Atlantic Ocean, where balmy breezes rustle the coconut palms and fill the spinnakers of vacationing sailboarders.

"People don't know now what a major storm is like. And there are so many people here." There are too many, according to some folks. About 78,000 people live along the 150-mile chain of islands, which includes Matecumbe Key and its town of Islamorada. Add to that about a million annual tourists. Their lifeline to the mainland, for the most part, is a two-lane blacktop just a few feet above sea level. Civil Defense authorities figure it would take 30 hours to evacuate the Keys -- if all went well, if there were no major road-blocking accidents or stalled vehicles on the 42 bridges or acts of stupidity or acts of God.

Gone with the wind

The Keys of 1991 are so different from the Keys Bernard Russell knew as a boy. Russell, a retired cabinet maker, prefers the old Keys. They were unique. Today's Keys, in his opinion, are on their way to becoming just like cities everywhere.

"We even have a Burger King now," he says. "Everybody has Burger Kings. What we used to have is Mister Pete's. Sweetest hamburgers in the world. People used to get together there and talk. It was just a little neighborhood place. We didn't need a Burger King. Mister Pete's is gone."

He is uncomfortable talking against the progress that has brought so much prosperity to the Keys. But as a native, as the grandson of the man who founded in the last century what became known as Islamorada, he is protective of his Keys. He saw his island leveled in 1935 and helped rebuild it into a booming tourist area. Now a storm of people threatens the Keys as surely as nature's fury.

"When I was a boy, my dad would say, 'We need six lobster for supper,' and I'd walk to the water and reach down and pick them up. Didn't need a boat. If I brought back seven lobster, dad would tear up my rear end. We didn't take what we didn't need.

"Now the lobster are on their last legs. Too many people taking them. Conchs -- I cut my teeth eating conchs -- now they're fished out. There used to be acres and acres of key lime groves. People bulldozed them down and sold the property. Lot of the new people have no sense of what the Keys were like."

There are condominiums and $400-a-night hotels. There are huge marinas and outdoor "tiki bars" and gourmet restaurants galore. Offshore, the nation's only living coral reef is threatened by pollution and the anchors of thousands of vessels. Inshore, water scooters roar over the shallows and rout roseate spoonbills, great white heron and the bonefish that President George Bush tries to catch when he vacations here in the winter. The Keys boast a $450-million tourist industry.

"We're in danger of losing all the things that made the Keys unique."

Simple life in the Conch kingdom

Bernard Russell's grandfather, John Henry Russell, sailed to Key West from the Bahamas almost 150 years ago. By 1854, he had worked his way north to the key known as Matecumbe, a corruption of the Spanish expression "mata hombre" or "kill man," a prophecy fulfilled later by the big wind.

John Henry Russell, like most of the original Conchs, as early Key settlers were called, was more a farmer than a fisher. He grew pineapples for a living. So did his son, John A. Russell, Bernard's father, an ambitious man who also fished, raised chickens, grew limes commercially, operated a filling station, owned a grocery and was the island's first postmaster.

"Dad was an energetic man."

So was Bernard's mother, Catherine Louise. In addition to raising four children, she worked a garden and canned produce that would last a year. She made clothes and did some practical doctoring. During the Depression, the Russells never missed a meal. Neither did many of the other growing pioneer families, the Pinders and the Alburys and the Parkers.

"It was a magic place when I was growing up, a paradise," Bernard Russell says now. He's tan and stocky and talks in a country person's simple but lyrical way. Children worked to help their families, and attended a two-room school, but they also fished and played and developed a taste for homemade ice cream and candy.

And twice a day, Henry Flagler's famous train chugged through the Keys and provided free entertainment and brought the mail. Flagler, who helped develop Miami Beach and Palm Beach, completed the Miami-Key West railroad in 1912. In the morning, Bernard Russell and his family and friends met at the railroad station to gossip and to wave to the train. They did the same at night. Everybody flocked to the waterfront when the ferry from Key West arrived bringing people and their cars. And after the cars passed, boys sometimes napped in the road.

There were hardships, but the Conchs were hard people.

"The mosquitoes were so thick you could catch them in your hands. Dad at night would set up smudge pots on the lee side of the house to smoke 'em away. If you needed doctoring, you had to get on the train to Key West, though my mother's herbs helped cure some sickness, too."

Revving up for a rescue

The Keys, a string of islands, some no more than a hundred yards wide, have always been vulnerable to big winds. Forty-three tropical storms have battered the Keys, killing and destroying, during the last century.

In August 1935, weather experts say, a storm formed off Africa and headed west across the Atlantic. By month's end, it was somewhere off Cuba and heading north. Miami started getting word of it from passing ships.

Within a 48-hour period, it grew from a minimal hurricane with 74 mph winds into the most powerful to hit the United States. It took a bead on the Upper Keys.

Matecumbe Key, the town of Islamorada and adjacent islands were almost bustling in 1935. President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had given 650 World War I veterans both homes and temporary work: They were building the highway that would eventually link Miami with Key West.

Hurricane forecasting was in its infancy on Sept. 2 when winds and seas began picking up higher than anyone expected. Worried federal officials supervising road construction called Miami. At 2:35 p.m., an evacuation of the Upper Keys was ordered.

In Miami, it took two hours to steam up the locomotive and assemble 10 cars for the emergency run. Meanwhile, the storm drew closer. The train left Miami and chugged through Homestead and into the Keys. At 6:50 p.m., in hurricane force winds, the train picked up a few evacuees about 20 miles north of Islamorada. As the train stopped, a loose cable, swinging violently from a pole, snagged the locomotive.

It took 80 minutes to clear.

The train headed toward oblivion.

In the teeth of the storm

When the train pulled into Islamorada at 8:10 p.m., winds were blowing 200 mph with gusts even higher, according to experts who later reconstructed the storm by examining the damage and what remained of weather instruments. The barometer plunged past normal 30.00 to 26.35 millibars, the lowest in U.S. history.

"We didn't want to ride out the storm in our house," Bernard Russell says now in a strong voice. He has told this story before because he thinks it's worth hearing. "Our house was right on the ocean where the storm was coming in. We decided to spend the storm on the lee side of the island in the house where we packed limes."

Bernard, his parents, three sisters, an uncle and his five children braced themselves.

"The wind, it was tremendous. You couldn't hear. And the pressure inside the packing house was so much greater than what was outside that the windows blew out."

At 8 p.m., Bernard noticed brown water oozing under the door.

"I didn't say anything because I didn't want to scare anybody. I knelt and tasted it. It wasn't rain. It was salt. I told my dad. He said we'd have to get out of there and go toward the train station, where it was higher. He said to grab a hold of somebody and not let go."

The Russells walked outside.

"My nephew was pulled right out of my arms. My mother went, too. I never saw them again. I managed to grab hold of the doorway. I felt the house start to rise up, like it was going to blow away, so I went into the storm."

It was so black he could see no more than a few inches.

"The wind and the water pushed me into the lime groves. I had no control. Something blowing in the wind stuck in my back and knocked me down face first into the water. I couldn't get up. I thought "This is it.' Then the wind blew whatever was in my back out of my back and I could get up.

"I didn't know where I was. I just went with the wind and the water. The water got deeper. I crawled up on a trash heap and my foot caught. I couldn't get it out. I was stuck. The water kept coming. I stood as tall as I could and cupped my hands around my face to get air. The water was up to my face."

The water suddenly receded a few feet. Russell believes the tide broke through the fill on which the railroad was built. The bottled up water was allowed to gush across the island.

"I heard yelling. I shouted to whoever it was to keep yelling. I worked to free my leg and listened for the yelling. Finally I got my leg free and bumped into somebody. It was my dad. He'd only been a few feet away and couldn't get to me."

Russell's father was injured. A storm-driven projectile had sheared away one of his buttocks.

"We kept on going. Everything but the locomotive was blown off the track. Some of the cars were blown 100 feet away. We crawled into a car right next to the track and stayed 'till morning.

"When it got light, it was still blowing hard, and we crawled into the locomotive. We stayed there until the wind died down."

The leveled landscape

Survivors were greeted by a hellish scene.

It was like the world's most powerful bomb had exploded in the middle of the island. All but one of Matecumbe's 61 buildings were gone. The surviving building looked as if a giant sledge hammer had caved in the roof. Trees were broken off just above the ground. Russell could stand in one spot and view both the ocean and Florida Bay. Most train track was gone. Remaining rails were twisted into grotesque shapes. Flagler's $27-million railroad died at sea, too.

Bodies were everywhere.

Some people had drowned. Some were crushed by trees. Some were impaled by limbs or lumber. Some were tangled in the tops of fallen trees. They had tried to climb to safety. Others were decapitated by tin roofs flying at 200 mph. Some bodies were unrecognizable: The sand-driven wind had blasted away their faces.

"We were too in shock to even grieve," Bernard Russell says. He stops, takes a deep breath and continues. "I went over to where our house had been and there was nothing I could recognize. It was just a space.

"If you saw somebody you knew, alive, you were so happy."

Thirty members of the Russell family were never found. They blew away to sea. The body of a niece was recovered 40 miles away on a mainland beach. She was clutching her dead baby.

For months afterwards, bodies were discovered miles away on offshore islands. Thirty years after the storm, a developer dredged up an automobile with 1935 license plates. Inside the vehicle were five skeletons.

Two days after the storm, emergency crews arrived from Miami and Key West. One helper was author Ernest Hemingway, who took a look around and vowed never to write about what he saw. He kept his promise.

The remains of some of Russell's family were shipped to Miami and buried in mass graves. Most of the deceased, however, were cremated in pyres. Four mass fires were needed to burn the bodies.

"I said, "Dad, what are we going to do?' " Bernard Russell remembers 56 years later. "Dad said, "All we have left in the world is our property. What do you want to do?'

"I said, "I guess we have to start over. We're going to start over. We're going to dig in and start over.' "

A legacy born of disaster

The 11 remaining Russells started rebuilding. So did other survivors. Bernard joined the Coast Guard and then the Army. He married one of the Pinder daughters, Laurette. She had somehow survived the hurricane, too. They have been married 52 years. Unlike her husband, she dislikes even the thought of recalling her memories about the big wind. She lets him do the talking.

Bernard Russell became a talented carpenter. He could build anything, including boats, but his specialty was cabinets. As the Keys grew, as Islamorada's population surpassed 1,000, so did his business.

But he felt he owed something to the Keys. He became involved in public service and Civil Defense.

When Hurricane Donna roared through the Upper Keys with 150 mph winds in 1960, Bernard Russell and his family rode it out. As a foot of water lapped at his home's foundation, Russell helped protect lives and property against the second-worst hurricane to strike the Keys.

Russell founded the island's first fire department.

For more than 20 years he was in charge. When somebody needed an ambulance, the phone rang in his home. When he retired, his legacy included a fine building, 26 firefighters, three trucks and two ambulances. He is proud of his fire department.

He and his wife travel frequently in their retirement. Their only daughter lives in Central Florida. They also visit the Ocala area, where so many ex-Conchs have moved in recent years to escape tropical storms and the storm of people that progress has delivered into the Keys.

Bulwark in the storm

Bernard Russell has refused to move, though. During summer, during hurricane season, he can be found in his home in the Keys, less than a block from the U.S. 1 memorial to the 1935 storm and its victims.

"When we have a storm now, I take my wife to the mainland and I come back," he says, sitting on the memorial's steps. "I can't blame her for wanting to go. When she hears that wind whistling and roaring outside, it blows her mind."

After he drops Laurette off, he turns around and returns to the Keys.

"I have to," he says. Traffic is inching by on the highway behind him. "I may be needed. The thing I have always asked myself is this: Why was I spared? Why am I still here? I saw great big robust he-men dead on the ground. I saw little skinny children who survived. How do you put that together in your mind?

"I have to think the Lord has a purpose for me. I might be needed."