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Tuesday, September 30, 2008
The Tragic Hurricane of 1928
As Florida counts down the days until hurricane season ends
we remember that this year marks the 80th anniversary of the tragic 1928 hurricane that was perhaps best memorialized in Zora
Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston's characters, black migrant workers, travel from
northern Florida to Lake Okeechobee to supplement their meager incomes, only to meet their deaths when the hurricane strikes.
Nonfiction accounts of the storm include Disasters and Heroic Rescues: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival Florida
by E. Lynne Wright which summarizes the events of the storm. "...Radio reports about a storm doing extensive damage in
Puerto Rico" reached the Southeast coast Florida. "Some took half-hearted precautions, but mostly people simply
remained alert...in the midst of a [radio] announcement that there was no longer a danger to Florida [a radio announcer] broke
off in mid-sentence, saying the storm had hit Palm Beach and it was devastating." Wright explains that an already saturated
Lake Okeechobee poured into surrounding communities when "dikes being banks of muck from five feet to nine feet high"
were no match for the storm. Entire families were lost as they struggled to survive the winds and rains on their rooftops.
Wright estimates the death toll between 1800 and 3000.
Two books chronicle the storm in detail. Black Cloud by Eliot Kleinberg includes a first hand account from Carmen
Salvatore, a former soldier and survivor of the storm whose house was ripped up from the foundation during the storm. Robert
Mykle's Killer Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928 reveals photos of downtown Palm Beach, which was reduced to
rubble. All of the books explain that the storm showed the disparity between blacks and whites at the time. While bodies
of the whites were buried in a local graveyard, the blacks were thrown into a mass grave. Black workers were instrumental
in the clean up. Wright explains that a temporary lift of Prohibition was permitted in the area because "no one, including
officers of the law, would deny workers a drink of whiskey if would help them" cope with "the hard physical labor,
the heat, the fatigue, the sleeplessness, the stench and sight of decomposed bodies and body parts, the occasional heartbreak
of identifying those bodies or body parts of those as belonging to someone they loved..."
--Susan Parsons
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Hello, Tampa!
FBR’s Esther Martinez is in Ybor City today attending Deep Carnivale: A Festival of Words. The summer doldrums are over, and we’re happy to be entering Florida’s season of writer’s conferences,
book festivals, and book fairs. We have many listed on our Literary Links page, but I'm sure there are others we don't yet know about. We ask organizers to send us their notices and materials.
(See the About Us page for contact info.) —Lynne Barrett
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Weblinks to follow the weather:
www.nhc.noaa.gov - This is the official site of the National Hurricane Center. It's probably the most "official" site on the web,
so if you have trust issues, go here. They've improved over time, most notably with better maps and a new small news feed
at the top. In the past, their maps have been less definitive, with a huge cone, especially for slow-moving storms. Their
text descriptions are also very technical and dense. Plus, the site's not as colorful, and we all like colors, don't we?
www.wunderground.com/tropical/ - This is Weather Underground's tropical weather site. They are good if you want easy access to a wide range of information,
including things like the "historical" diagram which shows how similar past storms have moved. They have a good
variety of computer models (which are lacking on the NHC), and they're very easy to navigate. They're also the best source
I know of for hurricane blogging - Dr. Jeff Masters blogs about tropical activity pretty consistently, although if you're
a complete beginner he may seem a bit jargonish. Plus, they're the best location for hurricane news if you're trying to "one-stop
shop" for weather info at your mansion on Fisher Island, your home in the Hamptons, the Manhattan apartment, the London
flat and the Chateau on the Loire. On the con side, they are a commercial entity, so there are ads around the site.
www.skeetobiteweather.com - These guys have very clear diagrams that show not just where the storm will go, but how strong it will be in different
locations. They're also good for more minor systems, as they show details "investigation areas" that may develop
into depressions, which neither the NHC nor Weather Underground does. Their historical records, previously the least complete,
have been updated to include all storms since 2008, bringing them up to par with the others on that front. They have a slightly
wider variety of computer models than Weather Underground, though you need to visit both sites to see all of them. They can
be a bit slow in updating (they normally have a 45-minute to an hour lag in updating after the NHC, as compared to Weather
Underground's 5-minute lag), but that's because they end up presenting much more information with their diagrams. They come
across as no-frills, with their relatively plain layout and lack of things like "wind history" that the other two
throw in. --James Barrett-Morison
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Winners of the 2009 Florida Book Awards Children's Literature Gold
Medal: Joan Hiatt Harlow, Secret of the Night Ponies
Florida Nonfiction Gold Medal: Jack E. Davis, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century
Silver
Medal: Carlton Ward, Jr., Florida Cowboys Bronze Medal: Todd
T. Turrell, Naples Waterfront—Changes in Time General Fiction Gold Medal: N.M. Kelby, A
Travel Guide for Reckless Heart.
Silver Medal: Janet Burroway, Bridge of
Sand
Bronze Medal: Ana Menendez, The Last War A. Manette
Ansay, Good Things I Wish You
Michael Lister, Double
Exposure
Popular Fiction Gold Medal:
Glynn Marsh Alam, Moon Water Madness
Silver Medal: Diane A.S. Stuckart,
Portrait of a Lady: A Leonardo DaVinci Mystery
Bronze Medal: Jonthon
King, The Styx
Chris Kuznecki, The Lost Throne
Tim Dorsey, Nuclear Jellyfish
Poetry Gold Medal: Campbell McGrath, Shannon
Silver
Medal: Denise Duhamel, Ka-Ching!
Bronze Medal: Jesse Millner,
Neighborhoods of My Past Sorrow
Peter Meinke, Lines
from Neuchatel
Spanish
Language Book Gold Medal: Juan Cueto-Roig, Veintiún cuentos concisos
Silver Medal: José Álvarez, País y la revolución cubana Young Adult Literature
Gold Medal: Alex Sanchez, Bait
Silver Medal: Rick Yancey, The Monstrumentologist
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