Donna looms large in storm memories
As Hurricane Ian stirs memories of storms past, including Hurricane Charley and the three more that battered Florida in 2004, longtime Central Floridians look back, too, to September 1960. Just weeks before President Kennedy’s election on Nov. 8 that year, Hurricane Donna was a big deal.
The storm even inspired a poem, by poet and engineer W.R. “Plumb-Bob” Wilson of Naples, that begins: “Donna was a husky lass, A lusty dame was she, She kicked her heels and swirled her skirts, And shrieked in fiendish glee. She ripped at our buildings, Uprooted trees galore. She took the Gulf of Mexico, And flung it on the shore.”
Every square block
There’s more, but you get the idea. When Donna came along in 1960, by the way, hurricanes had only been named officially for a few years. In 1953, the United States ended a plan to name storms by a phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie), according to the National Hurricane Center, and turned to women’s names (a practice that ended in 1978).
The 1950s brought some significant storms, but none was as consequential for Orange County as Donna in 1960. Every square block of the city of Orlando was affected, an OUC spokesman said at the time. (No fatalities were reported in Central Florida, although Donna was responsible for 12 deaths in Florida, according to the National Weather Service.)
On Saturday night, Sept.
10, “the electricity went off in the middle of the Miss America pageant telecast, and stayed off for five days,” a Sentinel reader, Mary Ann Campbell, recalled in 1978.
“Rain-jittery, waterweary Orange County had it yesterday,” the Sentinel reported Sunday, Sept. 11. “Hurricane Donna was too much. Eleven hundred
and six persons fled their homes, went into 24 shelters the American Red Cross’ county chapter set up in public and private buildings.”
Many of the residents in shelters came from Westside Manor neighborhood, which had already been underwater during heavy rains in the spring and summer. Homeowners
dubbed the district “Wetside Manor.”
Residents cope
About 8 miles to the east, longtime Orlandoan Beth Ruis Hilton had just started fifth grade at Orlando’s Kaley Elementary School, just across the street from her family’s home on Fern Creek Avenue.
“We lost power for a couple of weeks,” Hilton recalled in a recent email. “But the house was not air-conditioned anyway (as most were not back then), so the loss of power wasn’t that big a deal.”
Hilton’s family relied on a gas-powered refrigerator, plus candles and flashlights — “and we went to bed early,” she writes. The family also used their charcoal grill to cook food in pots and pans as well as for grilling. “Getting meals together was an adventure, but we were fine,” Hilton recalls.
“Kaley School also lacked power,” Hilton writes, “and was closed until power was restored, and the flood waters had receded . ... We had barely started the school year at that point.”
In Winter Park, as the storm approached, Sam Roper, of Roper’s Grill on U.S. Highway 17-92, was trying to take down the grill’s awning when winds knocked the ladder out from under him, he told a reporter later. Roper wisely decided his life was worth more than the $4,000 awning and left it to Donna to rip it up.
In Hilton’s memory, the biggest problem her family faced was flooding on Fern Creek Avenue. “Near the street, the water was easily up to my 9-year old knees,” she writes. “Fortunately, our home was somewhat back from the street, and on a bit of a rise in the lot. ... Our house was not really damaged (as so many in Orlando were), but we certainly learned where exactly to place buckets, pots and pans to catch the leaks inside the house until the roof was replaced.”
More than 35,000 Orlando families lost electricity for days, and almost all phone service was temporarily knocked out, historian Rick Brunson wrote in 1999. Lake Lorna Doone overflowed and flooded homes. School was canceled for at least three days. The roof was blown off the J.M. Fields store on Colonial Drive.
Despite the damage, “Orlando’s reputation for hospitality came to the fore during the storm,” Brunson noted. “W. Carden Meers, the Winter Park owner of the Shamrock Oil Co., gave away 1,000 flashlights. Burrell Chastain, owner of Chastain’s restaurant on North Orange Blossom Trail, fired up his gas grill after the electricity went off and served free food to about 1,500 of his hungry neighbors.”
The area near Kaley school “was hardly the only area and Orlando neighborhood affected,” Hilton recalls, “but in my child’s mind at the time, it was the universe, of course.”