The wife of Manager Bergman of the Houston Opera House saw more of the storm than fell to the lot of most women who live to tell of it. She had been spending the heated term at a Rosenberg avenue cottage only a short distance from the beach.
On Saturday morning the water had risen there three feet. Putting on a bathing suit, Mrs. Bergman went to the Olympia to talk over the long distance telephone with her husband in Houston. This was about 10 a. m. At the Olympia she had to wade waist deep in the water. At 2 o’clock Mrs. Bergman became alarmed, and with her sister she left the summer cottage and started toward the more thickly settled part of the city. Neighbors laughed at the fear of the women. Out of a family of fifteen in the next house only three were saved.
Mrs. Bergman and her sister waded and swam alternately several blocks until they reached the higher streets. Then they hired a negro with a dray and told him to take them to the telephone exchange. Within two blocks from where the start was made in this way the mule got into deep water and was drowned. The women reached the telephone building, but when the firemen began to bring in the dead bodies they left and went to Balton’s livery stable. This was only 600 yards away, but Mrs. Bergman says it was the hardest part of the trip, with the air full of flying bits of glass, slate, and wood. In the stable they remained until morning.
When the sun had risen the water had so far receded that they went out to the site of their cottage. A hitching post was all that served to locate the place. No houses were left standing for many blocks around. A dead baby lay in the yard. The two women returned down-town. Passing a store with plate glass windows and doors blown out, they went in and helped themselves to the black cloth from which they made the gowns they still wore when they reached Houston three days later. During the storm they wore their bathing suits.
STRANGE INCIDENTS OF THE FLOOD.
Many instances of devotion of husband to wife, of wife to husband, of child to parent and parent to child could be mentioned. One poor woman with her child and her father was cast out into the raging waters. They were separated. Both were in drift and both believed they went out in the gulf and returned. The mother was finally cast upon the drift and there she was pounded by the waves and debris until she was pulled into a house against which the drift had lodged, and during all that frightful ride she held to her eight months’ old boy and when she was on the drift pile she lay upon the infant and covered it with her body that it might escape the blows of the planks. She came out of the ordeal cut and maimed, but the infant had not a scratch.
STATUES ON ALTAR NOT HARMED.
St. Joseph’s Catholic Church presents a strange contrast, with the roof and rear wall back of the altar being carried away. The wall collapsed, but the altar was not damaged and the frail lifesize statues of St. Joseph and the Virgin on the altar were not harmed or moved.
When their home went to pieces the members of the Stubbs family—husband, wife, and two children—climbed upon the roof of a house floating by. They felt tolerably secure. Without warning the roof parted in two pieces. Mr. and Mrs. Stubbs were separated. Each had a child. The parts of the raft went different ways in the darkness. One of the children fell off and disappeared. Not until some time Sunday was the family reunited. Even the child was saved, having caught a table and clung to it until it reached a place of safety.
Another man took his wife from one house to another by swimming until he had occupied three. Each fell in its turn and then he took to the waves and they were separated and each, as the persons above mentioned, believed they were carried to sea. After three hours in the water he heard her call and finally rescued her.