©2020 by John LaTorre
Two of the strangest two days of my life actually seemed like one long day, because from the morning of August 28, 1971 to the morning of August 30, I got no sleep at all.
It happened like this. A friend of mine and I attended the Philadelphia Folk Festival that year. Judy provided the car, and I provided the tent we’d be camping in … a pair of World War II surplus shelter halves with the necessary poles, ropes, and stakes. We arrived at Schwenksville on Friday, the 27th, in time to catch a few of the acts after driving up from Baltimore that morning. Then, after a picnic supper, we went to bed, and woke up to clear skies and some sunlight … the perfect weather for attending outdoor concerts.
The perfect weather didn’t last long, though. By noon, it was clouding over, and by late afternoon the rains came. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were caught in the tail end of Tropical Storm Doria, churning its way up the Atlantic seaboard. We got some dinner somewhere, probably from one of the food vendors there, but found that the evening’s entertainment had been cancelled because of the rain. So we went back to the tent.
And it rained, and rained, and rained. The strong wind blew the rain up the slanted side of the tent and into the gap formed by the two shelter halves, so that we were getting constant drips from the peak. And before long, the water was going over the campground in rivers. I dug a shallow trench around the tent, but it was easily defeated by the rushing water. So we huddled in the tent, in our soaked sleeping bags, trying to get even a little sleep. The water-softened ground could no longer keep the tent stakes secured in the constant wind, so I would have to get up every hour or so and re-stake the tent. There would be no rest for me that night.
By morning, I got out of the tent to find that ours, as leaky as it was, turned out to be one of the very few tents that hadn’t been knocked down by the storm. The campground looked like a disaster area. The rain had stopped, but it had turned the festival grounds into a sea of mud, and we didn’t wait around for the inevitable announcement that the festival would be cancelled for the weekend. We piled all our wet clothes and sleeping gear into her MG and headed for home, stopping first for breakfast somewhere on the road, and then at a coin-op laundry where we commandeered the biggest dryers we could find. A few hours later, the sleeping bags and most of our clothing were dry again, and we were back on the road. We probably had dinner when we got back to Baltimore, and she dropped me off at my apartment at sunset.
When I opened the door, the phone was ringing. It was my friend Bill Gross, whose father owned an appliance store in Brunswick, Maryland. Brunswick is located on the banks of the Potomac River, which can be prone to flooding. This year, with the rainwater left by Doria, the river was rising to historic levels, and it looked almost certain that it would flood at least part of the town. The appliance store was a two-story structure, with almost all of the refrigerators and washing machines and televisions on the first floor; the second floor was largely vacant.
Bill was trying to recruit as many friends as he could to help him and his father move what was on the first floor up to the second floor. Could I help? I told him I would, and gave up any hope of having that nice warm shower I was looking forward to. Bill was in front of my apartment house a half an hour later, in a post-war Chevrolet pickup truck he was restoring. The front seat was already filled, so I hopped into the cargo bed, thankful that the rain had stopped by then. We drove directly to Brunswick.
By the time we had arrived, the river had already overflown its banks and reached the edge of town. Bill’s father, known to the townspeople as “Judge Gross” or, simply, the Judge (since he was also the local magistrate), was waiting for us, and I think that Bill’s brother John Lynch was there, too. We were shown a hand-operated freight elevator, with which we would move all the stock from the first to the second floor, along with all the records of the business. The operation was painfully slow—we could only load one or two appliances at a time, and then it would be a question of somebody raising the car by means of a rope and a system of many, many pulleys. With luck, we could move one load of appliances every twenty minutes. So most of our time was spent in drinking coffee and waiting for the elevator car to return to the first floor for another load.
The store was right next to the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which had a major yard in the town at the time. So a train would rumble through every once in a while, shaking the building. The house that Bill grew up in was right next door, and I realized how it came about that he could sleep through just about anything. (Earlier that year, he told me to wake him by phone so that he could drive us into Washington to get tickets for a Vladimir Horowitz concert, and he swore that he would put the phone under his pillow. I let the phone ring for over ten minutes without effect. Now I understood why.)
And I remember that, on the first floor, the Judge had set up a service area for the televisions and radios he sold, with storage racks for more electronic tubes than I’d ever seen in one place before (except, possibly, in the electronics wholesaler’s shop where I worked two years earlier). We debated whether to add the tubes to the load in the elevator car, or just carry them up the stairs, but either Bill or the Judge had decided that they weren’t going to be damaged by the floodwaters, so it wouldn’t be worth the effort to move them.
And that was how I spent that night: wrestling appliances and televisions into the elevator, taking my turn at hauling the rope to lift the car, and keeping the coffee pot filled. From time to time, we’d go out and check on the progress of the river, which was slowly inching toward the store. By sunrise, the entire contents of the first floor (except for the tubes) had been moved to the second floor, including all the test equipment in the service area. We had done all we could, so Bill drove us back to Baltimore. On the way home, I was able to ride in the front seat, where I could look out the window and, in the light of the dawn, see acres and acres of flooded fields. It could have been mistaken for a huge lake, had it not been for the occasional church steeple or a house or barn cupola poking up from the surface of the water. It was then that I realized the extent of the destruction of the storm.
I phoned Paul Morris, my boss at the Baltimore City Health Department, and told him that I’d be late that morning, as I needed to shower and eat breakfast. When I told him about what I’d been doing for the past forty-eight hours, he said, “Forget about coming in. We’ll cover for you. Just get some rest, and we’ll see you tomorrow.” By that time, what was left of the caffeine in my body was starting to wear off, and his words were music to my ears. I took that nice warm shower I promised myself the previous day and then hit the sack.
As it turned out, that night’s work proved to be unnecessary. The river rose to the level of the top of the store’s front steps, Bill told me later, but the first floor itself stayed dry. After a week or two, all the stock had been returned to its proper place and the store was back in business. His dad was one of the lucky ones, though. Dorian proved to be the one of the costliest storms of that year’s hurricane season, breaking countless records for rainfall and causing seven deaths and an estimated $147.6 million in damages throughout the east coast, from North Carolina to Vermont.
And it only cost me a couple of night’s sleep, and I had a story to tell now. So I was one of the lucky ones, too.
