The natives living in the island village of Islamorada about 80 miles south of Miami didn’t know what to make of the troubled men. They tried to remember their Methodist teachings of tolerance and compassion, but sometimes it was a stretch—especially when the vets turned to boozing to drown their misery.
“I often thought that it was almost a crime to allow so much drinking in the camps,” said John Russell, then a Postmaster and a community leader in Islamorada, where the work program was headquartered in a hotel. “When they got paid, they would drink until it was all gone. Then they would wait until their allowances came again to get more.”
And when they drank, they brawled. “We always had boom days then, suturing their wounds,” said Dr. Lassiter Alexander, a physician at a small hospital that cared for the vets.
Russell and other natives did what they could for the men. But the sea-savvy islanders worried about the vets’ flimsy shacks on the beach, only a foot or two above sea level. Hurricanes were a fact of life in the Keys, and the natives knew that even a minimal hurricane would swamp the camps with seawater and shred the shacks.
Fred Ghent knew hurricanes were a threat, but in the early summer of 1935, he thought he’d solved that problem. He’d discussed sending a special Florida East Coast Railway train from Miami to evacuate the vets should a storm come their way.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/irma-most-intense-hurricane-florida-keys-1935-history/
“I often thought that it was almost a crime to allow so much drinking in the camps,” said John Russell, then a Postmaster and a community leader in Islamorada, where the work program was headquartered in a hotel. “When they got paid, they would drink until it was all gone. Then they would wait until their allowances came again to get more.”
And when they drank, they brawled. “We always had boom days then, suturing their wounds,” said Dr. Lassiter Alexander, a physician at a small hospital that cared for the vets.
Russell and other natives did what they could for the men. But the sea-savvy islanders worried about the vets’ flimsy shacks on the beach, only a foot or two above sea level. Hurricanes were a fact of life in the Keys, and the natives knew that even a minimal hurricane would swamp the camps with seawater and shred the shacks.
Fred Ghent knew hurricanes were a threat, but in the early summer of 1935, he thought he’d solved that problem. He’d discussed sending a special Florida East Coast Railway train from Miami to evacuate the vets should a storm come their way.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/irma-most-intense-hurricane-florida-keys-1935-history/
