Category 5: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane

This book contains many maps that show the southern end of Florida breaking up and drizzling into the sea in long arcs of sand spits and islands known as the Florida Keys. The southern-most islands rest on the skeletons of coral reefs. The people who live or work in the lower Keys are barely above sea level, even on placid, sunny days. When a hurricane churns through these islands, the difference between land and sea blurs. Sand burns through the chaotic air, stripping the skin off of anyone unfortunate enough to be out in the storm. Islands are overwhelmed by the hurricane's storm surge, and entire buildings are washed into the sea. People drown in their own bedrooms. In 1935, the out-of-work World War I veterans who signed up for the labor camps in the Keys didn't comprehend the way wind and water could overwhelm low-lying islands and those edifices that were built upon them. In the end, they forfeited their lives through ignorance of what this author calls the wrath of the Mayan storm god, Hurakan. Perhaps because the category five hurricane that swept through the Florida Keys on Labor Day, 1935 came only a few years before World War II, this natural disaster has not been as thoroughly documented as, say, the Galveston hurricane of 1900. Yet it was the first of only three category 5 Atlantic hurricanes to devastate our coastlines through the whole of the 20th Century. This book and William Drye's Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 go a long way toward increasing our knowledge of this devastating storm. Thomas Knowles' "Category Five: the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane" is part natural history and part political history. Readers will learn why the WW I veterans were in the Florida Keys in the first place, and also why our Government had originally encouraged settlement on these low-lying islands during the Spanish-American conflict. Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt faced the same problem as our current Commander-in-Chief, i.e. how to put veterans back to work in the midst of a bad economy. In August, 1935, 696 veterans were working in Southern Florida, the majority on a highway that would connect the various Keys. After the Labor Day Hurricane had passed through the Keys, only 435 of those veterans could be found among the living, and three out of every five of the civilian residents and tourists had also perished. At times, this book becomes a bit tedious as it rambles through the pre-hurricane history of the Keys settlers and their families. The vicissitudes of a weather bureau that had to forecast the path of a hurricane without modern tools such as radar and satellite images are also detailed. Thomas Knowles, a retired college administrator and Navy veteran who was born and raised in Key West, really comes into stride when he draws from eye-witness accounts to describe the horrors that survivors had to endure, both during and after the Labor Day Hurricane. He also reminds us that a simil

I have only read a chapter in the book so far as I'm finishing up a few others. It started good and seemed interesting. I cant wait to start reading further!!!!

My husband read this book with great interest. He was born and raised in Miami, Fl, and remembers the 1935 Labor Day hurricane as a small child. His father, the manager of a Miami piano store, related a memory to us of that hurricane shortly before his death at 90 years in 1988. . He was in his warehouse, which backed up on the Florida East Coast (FEC)railroad tracks on the afternoon of September 2, 1935, when the train that was hastily made up to go rescue the 400 WW II veterans from the Matacumbe Keys arrived at the Miami station. He recalled that the train was held at the Miami station for quite a while before finally being released in the late afternoon to rescue the veterans...too late in the afternoon as it turns out. Just as the train finally arrived at the Islamarada station, it was blown off the tracks by the core of the hurricane as it swept over the Key. His neighbor, J. E. Gamble, the conductor on the would be rescue train, told him several days later, that the fireman of the train, Will Walker, a black man, saved his life by penning him against the bars in the corner of the engine cab as the tidal wave pushed across the key by the eye of the storm swept over them. The fireman's heroic act has gone unrecognized and unrewarded to this day. This book provided the invaluable background as to why the veterans were in the Keys in the first place. It explained how identifiable individuals' indecision, rather than an "act of God" caused the deaths of so many of our nation's blameless heroes.

This book meant a lot to me as my grandparents, great grandfather, and other family members died in the Labor Day Hurricane that destroyed Matecumbe in 1935. Other surviving family members and friends were also documented. The account of the military veterans who were living in tents in Matecumbe was fascinating as well as the personal stories about the people who lived or were visiting Matecumbe on that fateful day, and were reminiscent of the stories my mother recounted to me over the years. This storm forever changed the fabric of the lives of ones left behind. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the history of the Florida Keys.