![]() I was wondering what would happen to our three pet chickens: Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis (whose name was changed to Betsy after she laid her first egg) and The Last of the Mochickens. As we drove away from our house, my parents were no doubt wondering whether they would ever see it again. The next morning, we drove a mile or two to my uncle’s house, which we considered to be of more solid construction. As we tried to sleep, the TV antenna screamed and howled in the night. They grabbed a stepladder and hammer and nailed down the roof in the driving wind and rain. Inside, my parents noticed that one corner of the roof was pulling away from the house. It was an injury, he joked, from which he has never fully recovered. We were driving into the teeth of it.īack at home, as we tried to unload the car, the trunk lid banged up and down so hard that it bent the edge of the trunk and smacked John in the head. By the time we hit the road for Victoria after the evening service on Sept 10, the storm was raging, and we were met by a steady stream of cars going the other way to get out of its path. My father preached in La Grange, about 75 miles away, and we drove there and back every Sunday. We knew all this, and in 1961, there was plenty of reason to worry about Hurricane Carla. But given Texans’ resistance to any infrastructure that doesn’t involve roads, they didn’t get around to building a wall before that town was all but wiped out by the “Mighty Storm” of 1900. Galveston residents got the message: They needed to build a sea wall to protect their own exposed city. The town gave up the ghost, and some of the surviving houses were moved to Victoria, where they still stand. One hurricane was OK, but two – that was a different matter. Those stalwart Texans who survived said they weren’t going to be discouraged by one little ol’ hurricane and promptly rebuilt.īut just 11 years later, in 1886, the town was hammered again. In 1875, about 5,000 people lived there, but a hurricane all but wiped out Indianola, killing at least 150 people. By 1961, only scant signs of the town were visible. Our family’s visits to the coast often included a stop at Indianola, which was once second to Galveston as Texas’ most thriving seaport. We knew that hurricanes posed a threat to South Texas. When we talked about our recollections of that storm on a conference call this week, we all said just about the same thing in almost the same words: We were too dumb at the time to know just how dangerous the situation was. Joe was a year younger, John a year-and-a-half older. Hurricane Harvey brought back memories to all three of us of the biggest storm that ever hit the city: Hurricane Carla, which pummeled Victoria with wind speeds of 150 mph in 1961. There was the mosque that burned in January in an apparent hate crime, and an overstuffed and abandoned truck in 2003 that killed 19 aliens who were being smuggled into Texas.īut hurricanes are usually required for Victoria to make the news. Still, it’s rare for Victoria to make the national news. The population is close to 70,000 now, but the city hasn’t gained any altitude or moved any farther from the Gulf of Mexico. Victoria was a town of some 16,000 people when I was born there, about 25 miles from the coast and just 97 feet above sea level. At this writing, the Guadalupe River was still rising, and while parts of the city are vulnerable to flooding, his house seems to be on solid ground. ![]() There they are staying with my brother John, who retired from his longtime teaching job in Corpus Christi just in time to miss Hurricane Harvey.Īs best Joe could tell, wind damage in our hometown wasn’t too severe – mostly signs and trees knocked down. They spent one night in the very last motel room available in Moulton, Texas, before heading on to Georgetown, north of Austin. The patients were evacuated to other hospitals around the state, and Joe and his wife, Linda, headed north.
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