Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series on the Hurricane of 1938. Read part 1 here.

It didn’t matter who you were: rich, poor, famous, or just one of the folks; if you happened to be in Long Island or southern New England the day of the 1938 hurricane, you were affected by the storm. You could have been Katharine Hepburn, an up-and-coming actress, barely escaping as she and her family witnessed their shoreline home in Old Saybrook as it suddenly disintegrated and “sailed away — easy as pie”; or perhaps a teenage farm girl traveling home on the school bus; or even a young mother experiencing the most traumatic event of her life while traveling by train to meet up with her husband in Boston.

The Bostonian

That young mother, Mary Fortier (who later would become my mother-in-law), was aboard that train. Not only has she retold her horrific experience to us many times over the years, but she was interviewed in 1997 as part of a PBS documentary called “When Disaster Struck Connecticut.”

That program dealt with four extreme weather events that affected Connecticut and talked with a number of survivors from two major floods as well as the ‘38 hurricane. Mary recalled her experience that day almost 60 years earlier, traveling from her home in New London with her firstborn, 15-month-old son Harrison, aboard “The Bostonian,” a train progressing along its normal route north from New Haven to Boston.

She was looking forward to meeting up with her husband Lionel, who was already in Boston preparing for a new job there.

Traveling along the Connecticut shoreline, Mary and young Harrison were not aboard the train very long before it crossed a narrow causeway in Stonington, only about 12 miles from New London. The water was coming up fast, while strong winds and dangerously high surf sent all manner of debris — from small boats to broken houses — smashing into the side of the train.

They did make it to some higher ground, but all cars except the engine and the first passenger compartment were derailed. The engineer, Harry Easton, had to think fast to save the train and all who were in it.

All the passengers were quickly herded from the rear cars up to the front compartment so the engineers could disconnect that front section from the derailed portions and proceed to safer ground. The plan worked, but in the chaos of transferring the passengers through the rough chest high water, Mary lost hold of her son.

You can imagine the sheer panic she must have felt in that instant, followed by extreme relief, when a fast-acting young man searched around and plucked young Harrison out of the water and to safety.

All the passengers were sheltered that long night in Stonington, at the home of a good samaritan. From there, Mary Fortier endured more anxiety and uncertainty as they could see, in the distant skyline, the glow of a huge fire from her hometown of New London; a fire that ignited when a five masted school ship was driven into a warehouse complex along the docks, setting off a short circuit and fire.

Before long, firemen were fighting not only the huge wind driven blaze which engulfed most of the downtown waterfront but also the deep water swirling all around them.

Mary, of course, had no way of knowing exactly what was burning or the status of her family there.

The trauma of that hurricane for Mary Fortier’s entire family — her husband in Boston, and her parents in New London, with neither of the parties having any knowledge of the others’ fate

for a couple of days — resulted in their decision to not relocate to Boston.

Back on the farm

Meadowbrook Farm, home of my grandparents, Hyrenko and Mary Sawicky and their four children, was a 200-acre dairy farm located about 7 miles inland from Long Island Sound; its 200 acres straddling (what is now called) Mostowy Road and Chesterfield Road in East Lyme, approximately mid-way between Flanders and Chesterfield.

Mother Nature was raising all kinds of hell there also. My Aunt Julia, their younger daughter, recounted her experiences that day.

“I’ll never forget the big ‘38 hurricane. In those days, we never had weather forecasts, or warnings of coming storms. I was coming home on the school bus. I was 13 then. It was raining and very windy. We were driving up Drabik’s Hill when a big tree fell across our path.

“George Sawicky, our bus driver, got out of our bus and chopped the large branches away, so we could get by. It took quite a while. (In those days George carried an ax under his seat for such emergencies. We could NEVER do that now!) By the time we drove to the big bridge and got off the bus, it was so windy; it was hard to walk up the hill to the house. I was immediately put to work with my mother, father and kid brother to catch our chickens, about two dozen, and put them into the henhouse. They were wet and almost naked, and the awful wind was blowing them all over the yard.

“After we got them into the henhouse my father had to hammer the door shut, for the wind would blow it open again. Then it was time to get into the house ourselves.

“The wind was getting worse, leaves and tree branches were flying around, and the east wind would hit the house with them, it blew a few window panes and the front door open. I remember that front door being blown open three times.

“It took my father and mother and Mike to lean against the door to shut it, the third time my father hammered nails in deep to keep it shut. The storm kept up till after dark. But….the morning was strange. The sun shone into the house, for there were no more shade trees around the house, the one by the well was lying across the cellar door, the big sugar maple by the driveway was picked up like a big mushroom and thrown 15 feet into the yard. Luckily, as far as I can remember, the house wasn’t hurt by any fallen trees, but all the front rooms facing east had yellow dirty salt ocean water plastered all over the walls. What a mess!

“We also lost 3 or 4 very tall and beautiful elm trees which grew in front of the cow barn. Across the road, in the pie shaped meadow, were three Macintosh apple and three other good apple trees which were broken right down to the roots...

“Up in the fields, in back of Barry’s farm were two more orchards of all kinds of apple trees which we lost. All that was left was a small crab apple tree, which supplied us with my mother’s delicious apple jelly. We had no more apple sauce in jars my mother would put up. Before the hurricane we (my mother and father and my kid brother, Willy and I would spend a couple of days in the orchards picking and bagging all the apples we could so my father could take them to New London or somewhere and bring home a barrel of sweet cider. We drank all we wanted until it got nippy, then we left the rest to the old folks (today you have beer to serve).”

For the record, George, the bus driver, was Julia’s cousin; his family’s farm was about a half mile up the road from Meadowbrook Farm, where St. Mathias Catholic Church is now located. The “big bridge” which Julia refers to stood at what is now the entrance of Rocco Drive, an upscale residential community, which in 1938 contained the fields and apple orchards of Meadowbrook Farm.

And the farmhouse itself is still there on Mostowy Road. An old maple tree that today stands next to it is a replacement for one that was blown down in the hurricane.

Julia Sawicky was only a week away from her 91st birthday in 2016 when she died; Mary Fortier passed away just short of turning 93 in 2006, and her toddler Harrison just celebrated his 83rd birthday this year. According to Wikipedia, Katharine Hepburn lived to the ripe old age of 96. Maybe that old saying “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” is true after all.

Ellen Fortier lives in East Lyme.

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