Bill Dalton
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"During the hurricane several huge pines fell across Abbot Street near where I lived as a girl. Fortunately, they fell on open space and no houses were damaged," wrote Margaret Blake in response to my column about the two summer storms of 1954. The first and more violent of the two storms was Hurricane Carol, which was the storm Margaret mentioned. It had top winds of 125 mph and was followed by the flooding rains of Hurricane Edna two weeks later.
Margaret describes how her family coped. "We were without electricity for two weeks, but we had a gas stove and were able to cook. We had ice delivered and had it in the set tubs in the basement where we could keep milk and butter. My father's family had been in the laundry business and my mother had two of the flat irons from when they closed the business in the depression. We would heat the irons on the stove and iron our clothes."
When he was 11, Michael Connolly watched Hurricane Carol from a friend's house on Stratford Road. Two years ago he described the memory in my column, saying, "There was nothing gradual about the storm's arrival; it was in full fury. Everything was in constant motion. The trees never stopped gyrating. What was amazing was how a tree could have its branches all moving in a different direction at the same time. There was a tree in the front yard that served us as an anemometer until it was split in half by the wind. It was like watching a 3-D movie as the falling half fell toward the house as if it would crash through the living room window where we were standing. It fell only inches short."
Michael wrote of conditions immediately following the storm. "A different world greeted us from the one we'd left a few hours earlier. You could hardly recognize the neighborhood. Whole trees, tree limbs, branches, leaves, and pieces of leaves were scattered everywhere. The green of displaced vegetation so dominated the scene that the homes on Stratford Road, which then were universally white, simply retreated into the background. The pavement was completely covered in a layer of wet, green leaves. It appeared that nature had reclaimed the area."
Michael continued, "On Chestnut Street was where the biggest tree fell. It was a tall elm directly across the street from my house in front of my friend John O'Conner's house at 110 Chestnut. It fell parallel to the street along the sidewalk, and since it wasn't blocking traffic it was left where it fell. We kids played in its branches all week. My mother took a black and white snapshot with her Kodak Brownie camera showing my sisters and me standing on the fallen trunk, posing like 19th-century lumberjacks."
Judy Stevens of Haggetts Pond Road remembers the hurricanes and said that the barn just up the street went over in one of them. She also mentions a bit of history heard from her dad, who lives with her. Her dad told her that he had a large rake attached to the bumper of a Model A Ford he once owned. When lots of the roads in Andover were still dirt, they would get messy, especially after a storm. The town paid drivers to rake certain roads or parts of roads, and the town installed the rakes on the bumpers of the cars. Her father couldn't remember how much he was paid for raking.
I lost my favorite tree in Hurricane Carol. It was a giant blue spruce that towered over our house and everything else around, and it was filled with bird nests. I'd built a small platform about a third of the way up where I'd climb and read or just sit and watch the cars and people on Chestnut and Whittier streets. You couldn't see it from the ground, and it was a little piece of the world that belonged to me. I was 11 years old in the summer of '54, and when Hurricane Carol hit I knew that tree was going to go down. It was just too tall to survive, and it swayed back and forth, back and forth. There was a danger it would fall on the house, so there was some relief when it fell in the other direction, but it made me sad to watch. The crash when it fell was so loud you could hear it above the wind and the rustling of the leaves, which were as loud as a freight train.
For many years I've thought of that tree and the platform where I learned to love reading. This year I planted a blue spruce, exactly my height, in our front yard and planted 18 smaller ones all over the property. I'll not live long enough to see any of those trees grow into giants but the one in the front yard is very beautiful, and it already has its first sparrow nest. Maybe some day a young boy or girl will make a little platform in the tree and find a place of peacefulness.
Bill Dalton writes a weekly column for the Andover Townsman and enjoys receiving your e-mails at billdalton@andovertownie.com.
