The story of a deadly Newfoundland hurricane in 1935 that’s on a collision course with a writer’s ?family storm… and how it turns out.
The foghorn echoed in the woods outside as my father shared a story I hadn’t heard before; a story of a killer gale, of my sea-faring ancestors and the grandfather I never knew. He had abandoned my dad, uncle and Nana not once, but twice.
Earlier in the evening, I had told my father I wanted to write books. After working for newspapers for 25 years, I desired a new challenge.
“What kind of book do you want to write?” he asked.
“A book sort of like The Perfect Storm.”
“You have a story like that in your family,” my dad said.
He then recounted what he knew about the gale in August 1935 that devastated the small outport of Marystown, NL, the village where my grandfather, Ambrose Walsh, was born. Several of our family members and other fishermen had been sailing on the bays of St. Mary’s, Placentia and Trepassey when a “devil danced on the water.”
“A lot of our ancestors died in the storm,” my dad said, surprising me by continuing to talk about the father he had long refused to speak about.
On august 27, 1935, my grandfather sat on a Brooklyn, NY, wharf eating his lunch. He had immigrated to the Boston States from Newfoundland in the mid 1920s, eventually settling on Staten Island with his older brother Leo. On this late summer afternoon, a gust of wind carried a newspaper to his feet. The breeze rattled the paper as if it were calling, demanding his attention. A headline caught Ambrose’s eye: “40 Estimated Dead Off Newfoundland.”
A betting man, fond of gambling and playing the horses, Ambrose knows the odds of losing family in this storm are great. Most of his brothers, uncles, and cousins still earn their living from the sea off southeast Newfoundland. Surely his oldest brother, Paddy, was out in his schooner, hoping to make his final catches for the long winter months ahead.
…Though the August sun warms his face, Ambrose is bone cold, as if he himself had fallen into icy waters. His dark eyes scan the report of sunken schooners and scores of missing men. He finds the words that cause him to cry out.
During the 1935 August Gale, Newfoundland fishermen were lost from Ramea, Fox Island, Fox Cove, Kingwell and The Tickles. But Marystown was the hardest hit, with as many as 15 deaths. The storm was the worst tragedy to strike the community of 500 since fishermen began populating the Burin Peninsula outport in the mid 1800s. My dad and I were related to more than half of the Marystown fishermen who died—including my great uncle Paddy, and three of his sons. Every home lost a dad, an uncle or a brother.
I was intrigued by the details of the gale, and by my grandfather’s story. As we sat in my Maine home on that February night in 2001, I told my father that the gale would make for a good book. He nodded and offered: “Maybe we can get in touch with family to learn more.”
Family? I thought. Ambrose’s family? The family you never wanted to talk about?
That conversation launched a nine-year journey for my father and me. The end result would be a memoir—August Gale: A Father and Daughter’s Journey into the Storm.
I had written many difficult articles and won many awards—even a Pulitzer Prize, the highest honour in journalism. I had interviewed corrupt cops, bad politicians, killers and rapists, mothers who had lost their children to cancer and car accidents. But writing August Gale tested me more than any other story in my career.
Although I loved the ocean and lived on a lake in Maine, I had no clue about schooners, dory fishing and the “iron men who sailed wooden ships.”
I began researching material online; I read several books about the Atlantic Canadian fishery; I interviewed dozens of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia men who had fished in the early 1900s. I spoke with Con Fitzpatrick, a Marystown Heritage Museum volunteer who helped me recreate the sights, smells and sounds of the community.
I interviewed several people who lost their fathers in the 1935 storm, and I drove a handful of Nova Scotians—including Ralph Getson, curator of education at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, in Lunenburg—crazy with my questions.
And I asked Chris Fogarty, with the Canadian Hurricane Centre, in Dartmouth, NS, for assistance. I wanted to recreate the gale that roared up the North Atlantic fishing lanes on a warm summer day; to have an understanding of how the devil descended.
Chris told me the storm should have missed Newfoundland.
Had it kept on its northeasterly course, it would have barely brushed the Grand Banks before extinguishing over the Labrador Current. But on the morning of August 24, the hurricane’s warm air mass collided with a massive trough of low pressure that blanketed much of America’s East Coast, and Nova Scotia. The contrast in temperatures fuelled the storm—its ferocity and size became magnified, generating violent gusts that blew continuously on the ocean, pushing waves higher and higher.
The low pressure front also pulled the gale in a new direction. Hundreds of miles east of Cape Cod, the hurricane dramatically changed course: Instead of continuing on a northeasterly path, it veered directly north, heading straight for Newfoundland.
Of course, this is where the story intersects with my family, and here there were more challenges—I had never written about family. Writing about my father’s childhood pain overwhelmed me.
I asked my dad, uncle and scores of relatives about my grandfather who abandoned his two sons and wife in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 1946. My father was 11, my uncle nearly two when Ambrose deserted them the first time. Two years later, Ambrose asked them to come join him in San Francisco—only to abandon them again after his mistress got pregnant with their second child.
It is remembering the San Francisco trip that prompts my father’s voice to rise in anger; what happened there he cannot forgive or forget.
“After he left us in Red Hook, it was bad, but I cannot understand why he called us out to California. How the hell did he think that was going to work? I can never forgive him for that.
“Jesus,” he says, his head shaking with the memory. “What my mother went through.”
Though I found the story about Ambrose and the foreboding newspaper that ended up blowing around his feet eerie and omniscient, I initially did not want to include him in the book. I preferred to tell the story of his brother, Captain Paddy Walsh, and his three sons who were out to sea during the gale. But my grandfather kept pushing his way into the story. Even though he had been dead 10 years, I felt his pull, his desire for his story to be shared, too. Finally, I relented.
“I have to include Ambrose’s story,” I told my father on the phone.
“It’s okay,” my dad said. “I trust you.”
I cried when I hung up. Despite my dad’s words, I would fret for the next nine years. What would he think about how I recaptured his past; the past he had buried for 65 years?
“You can’t read the Ambrose chapters until the book is done,” I said to him.
Told in alternating time periods, 1935 and present, the book switches between the real storm and the family storm—the tempest that Ambrose created. Before August Gale went to the printers, all of my “experts” each read the book to ensure its accuracy. And on a March afternoon last year, I mailed my dad the entire manuscript, so he could finally read “the Ambrose chapters.”
Given he is an avid reader, I knew Dad would not leave his living room couch until he read the book from cover to cover. I pictured him there by the window light, reading, reliving his past through his daughter’s eyes.
I cried when my dad phoned that evening.
“I’m so proud of you,” he told me. “I love it. But you have to include Aunt Ruth; she’d be rolling over in her grave if you didn’t.”
Aunt Ruth was my Nana’s sister, who took Nana, my dad and my uncle into her Massachusetts home after they had been deserted a second time by Ambrose, stuck in San Francisco with no money, and my grandmother so sad, so broken.
I wiped tears from my eyes as I told my dad: “I worried for nine years and that’s it? That’s all you want me to change?”
Ironically, my book and the storm that wrought so much destruction and death brought my family closer together. I now know and love my Newfoundland relatives and Ambrose’s daughters, the second family he had in California.
I now know about my sea-faring history and the grandfather I never had the chance or desire to meet; and the memories, the stormy past that my father battled and buried for most of his life is now shared, its fury eased.
August Gale also resonated with my Newfoundland relatives and the families of the fishermen who died in the storm. They had heard countless stories about the hurricane, but the book seemed to pull the threads of their legacy together, preserving their history forever.
“I have no tears left,” wrote Paddy’s granddaughter Brenda Meneghetti in an e-mail after reading the book. “I cried at nearly every page.”
Brenda’s father, William Patrick, or Paddy Junior, was four years old when his father and three brothers died in the gale. The story of their deaths had been an emotional tale that had been passed on down through Paddy Jr.’s children and grandchildren.
Brenda thanked me for memorializing her family’s history and for giving them a gift that they will treasure. She concluded her e-mail message with the framed quote that hangs on her children’s bedroom wall: “The only thing you own, and are sure of never losing, is your history.”