After my October hurricane Carol article, I heard from or called a few people regarding their stories about the Sept. 1, 1954 storm. Bob Jacobson's story appeared a few weeks ago. The storm reminiscences of Bob Goodspeed, Jan Reit, Gregg Wilson, Nat Wilson, and Terry Brewer follow this week.

Bob Goodspeed

During 1954, Bob Goodspeed of Hodgdons Island was engineer on an 85-foot steel-hulled yacht out of Marion, Massachusetts called Dragon Lady, captained by Emery Howard of the Harbor. Bob and Emery ran into Groton, Connecticut and put three anchors out. As the surges came, they let out the scope on the anchor lines and did manage to weather the storm. At one point the huge roof of the Gorton fish factory sailed clear across the harbor as well as over the yacht, smashing into a hotel's porches and rooms on the other side. Just a little more than a week later during hurricane Edna, Bob and Emery were taking the owner and the Dragon Lady on a cruise to Maine with the New York Yacht Club. They ducked into Gloucester, Massachusetts to ride out that hurricane, which they did successfully again. When they got back to their vehicles at the Marion Yacht Club, they found they'd been under 18 feet of water in the yacht club's parking lot.

After Bob left that job, he had a lobster boat built and used it lobstering for about 10 years. Coincidentally, he later sold that boat in the 1960s to Charlie Pinkham, mentioned below, who lived on Fisherman's Island.

Fisherman's Island

When Carol hit Boothbay's Fisherman's Island, school hadn't yet started, so Jack and Marcia Wilson of Littleton, Massachusetts and their children, Gregg, Jan (Reit), and Nat, were still summering there with Jack's parents, the island owners. They, John and Lucile Wilson, summered in Greystones, the big house on the island. All three children remembered the hurricane carried away the island's float and ramp from the landing. Gregg wrote, "l saw them adrift, being battered against the top of the beach below the cape." And Jan recalled her grandmother placing pots and pans to catch the leaks through the roof which was just pelted with rain.

Jan suggested I call Terry Brewer for more details. In the 1950s he lived with his mother and stepfather, Charlie Pinkham, on the island in the cape. Terry, who'd just graduated from high school, worked on the island with Charlie, fishing, lobstering, and caretaking with him. As the hurricane approached, Terry helped Charlie put his boat on a mooring and they rowed bowlines ashore to tie it off in three or four places, working all night to save it and watching it from the shore. The waves were rolling into the island from the east. Terry said he could see their spray fly right over the big house which sits on a knoll 60 feet above the ocean and 200 feet from the east shore. He too saw the float and ramp destroyed near the cape on the beach of the tiny harbor.

Carol a Surprise

Gregg said they had no idea a storm was coming, with no power or phone out there. The children treated it like a big adventure, Jan and Gregg recalling going out with Jack and leaning against the wind, just as I had on the mainland. Jan said, "I remember the spray too—the weather was fierce, like a giant standing in the cove and heaving buckets of water at us." Gregg also said the waves were breaking over the island, and they could hear and see the spray hitting the kitchen windows on the east side of the house.

When the weather cleared on the following days the family was taken off the island by the Coast Guard in a boat from near the site of the float rather than from the beach, which was further away from the big house. Gregg remembers Coast Guard personnel coming ashore to discuss evacuating them in advance of doing so. Neither Jan, nor Nat, nor Gregg remembered exactly how the Coast Guard on Damariscove were alerted to their need to leave, but Gregg and Nat assumed lightkeeper Harold Cummings on nearby Ram Island might have realized the float was gone and called Damariscove for help since Ram did have a phone. Also, given all the emergencies the Coast Guard reacted to during hurricane Carol, they may have checked the local inhabited islands as a matter of course.

Carol, which caused so much damage to boats and shore structures, is still, 62 years later, the last category 3 storm to strike New England.