Boca Grande and Hurricanes: October 10, 1944 Hurricane

At the History Byte program, Margaret Fugate now took over for Doris. She explained that because of World War II, the Coast Guard was on the island as well as navy crash boats due to the number of planes that crashed in the Gulf. So, these military personnel helped round up islanders who had not left on the afternoon train and transported them to the Boca Grande Hotel. Pansy Cost added, “they come around actually through the houses and if you were in the houses, they just practically bodily picked you up and put them in their jeeps and cars and trucks and carried you out there and said we were not having anybody left in houses on the island because they could not get around to see if everyone was OK because they knew what was coming.”

Margaret described the Boca Grande Hotel. “In the center of the hotel, they had this rotonda which was three stories high so there was glass on each one of these floors and this is a tile floor – people were in rooms – all night long you could hear the glass falling on these tile floors and they had one radio from the ship and everybody would go down and listen to see what the latest weather report was. So, this was very scary hearing the tile floors receiving all this broken glass.” Margaret asks who else was at the Hotel and Sarah Peach says she was just a little girl and “I thought it was just an adventure. I slept on a pallet on that bottom floor back underneath. But I thought all of the glass out of the top of the rotonda came down.”

Margaret continues, “We had ships that docked, ships out waiting and they said that on one of the ships the wind meter registered 150, and then it couldn’t get any higher than that because it went out of commission. But people stayed there (at the Boca Grande Hotel) all night and I remember that Mr. and Mrs. Dunn, who were managers at that time of the Gasparilla Inn had just come in on the train that day, not knowing – so they were at the Boca Grande Hotel that night and we all were playing bridge and so whoever was dummy would go downstairs and see what the latest news on that one little radio was.”

Sarah remembers that “the wind was blowing so hard people came in and they were carrying Mrs. Holloway. She was a little frail lady, and she owned the Anchor Inn, and everybody said, ‘Oh my god if Mrs. Holloway has agreed to leave her house, this is a bad storm!’ Uncle Gene wouldn’t go, he stayed in his house, but Aunt Nellie said there was a point there in the night that if somebody had come to get him he would have gone. He was really scared. But all of our houses were safe.” And Sarah recalls that the men in her family left the Hotel in the middle of the night to check on their boats and the ferry that was run by her grandfather and to make sure everything was secure.

Margaret notes that the major damage was to trees. “We had lots of Australian pines all over the island and they were just blasted. I remember that the next morning after the storm was over, we went in one of the Coast Guard jeeps downtown and we could hardly get down the street for the trees.”

“My house was where the Silver King is now and the guides were bringing their boats down to secure them in the mangroves, because there weren’t houses…it was very exciting because we had army crash boats and then the Coast Guard and then we had the guides bringing their boats and putting them in (the mangroves) for security reasons.”

Penny Hanson, who was in the audience, told that “she and her husband went to the Boca Grande Hotel and stayed there and there was a bowling alley made mostly of tin on the corner of Fifth Street where Park Place is, and her husband, to protect their car, put it inside the bowling alley. When the storm was over, the bowling alley was now down on top of his car.” Pansy remembered that building first as the island theater and the place “where her mother and father first met.”