October came and it proved to be the driest month for the country as a whole since weather records began. All the rainmakers were in trouble and the “hail-busters” were out of work. Gordon sat at home, listening to the radio and working on his formula. He and Olive talked about many things but neither mentioned hurricanes or yellow kitchens. Then on Tuesday, October 21, Gordon left for Plainview. The next day he heard a news report from Lubbock that there was a hurricane in Cuba, moving toward the United States. On Wednesday he left for Florida in a Luscombe plane, saying nothing to anybody except Bill and Pauline Seirp. Bill was not a pilot but Gordon had been teaching him to fly.
Knowing nothing about the trip to Miami, Olive was having the kitchen painted yellow and wondering what Gordon would say when he came home from Plainview. That was on Thursday. On Sunday, the twenty-sixth, she and the children had a late breakfast but managed to get to Sunday School and remained for church service. During the hymn at the beginning of the service, there was a long-distance call for Olive from Plainview. Gordon was lost at sea. Later in the day, she heard the story in full.
Gordon was not satisfied with the plane. When he reached Florida he tried to get one better suited for storm work. He had plans for building a special plane for the purpose but now he was anxious to get into the hurricane. It might be the last one of the season, he thought. It had done a great deal of damage in Cuba. He went to the Weather Bureau Office in Miami and got the latest information on the position, strength and movement of the storm. At 3:45 P.M. (October 25) the center of the hurricane was about seventy-five or eighty miles east of Miami when Gordon took off in his Luscombe plane. At 8:56 P.M., a radio station in Miami picked up a message from him, saying that he was fifty or sixty miles east-southeast of Miami, still in the edge of the storm. The radio station talked with him for twenty-six minutes as he flew toward Miami, making poor headway against the winds. The last message was, “Out of fuel—descending—give my love to my wife and family.”
The Civil Air Patrol and the ships and planes of the Coast Guard searched the area for forty-eight hours without finding any trace of the missing man. Olive went to Miami and did her best to keep the planes looking for him. Whether or not he had any effect on the storm will never be known for sure. The weather forecasters in Miami did not think so. But the hurricane soon afterward took an erratic course. It was destructive early on the twenty-sixth as it turned into the Bahamas, then lost force, and turned northward. The official report of the Weather Bureau said that “it moved northeastward thereafter as a disturbance of no great violence.”
The uncertainties and the tragedy in this case brought to mind the Savannah storm of 1947, which Gordon may have studied. It began far to the southward, near the Isthmus of Panama, early on the ninth of October. On the eleventh, it crossed the extreme western end of Cuba, and on the twelfth passed over southern Florida. From this time on, its course was very unusual. Reconnaissance planes followed it going northeastward over the Atlantic until the night of the thirteenth, when it was east of Wilmington, North Carolina. Early on the fourteenth, a plane got into the storm area and found it moving southwestward. With considerable force it struck Savannah, Georgia, early on the fifteenth, causing about two million dollars’ worth of damage. Citizens of Savannah and some of the city officials complained to the government for causing the hurricane to strike the city.
At about the time, or just before the hurricane changed its course abruptly to the southwest, military planes had carried out an experiment in dropping dry ice into its upper levels. There was a great deal of discussion in the press. At first it was said that the dry ice had caused the storm to take a new course, but after the Savannah complaints were heard, little more was said by the military about the experiment and it remains something of a mystery. Few scientists believe that dry ice could have such an effect on so large a storm. Actually, there were few observations in the storm area during the night of the thirteenth to fourteenth and precise information about the time and nature of the change of course was not available for an investigation. It belongs in the same class as the Clouser storm.
16. CAROL, EDNA, HAZEL OR SAXBY!
“But I know ladies by the score
Whose hair, like seaweed, scents the storm;
Long, long before it starts to pour