Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [97]
Among the contributions that moved her most was $61 from workers at the Cambria Steel Company, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They made no mention of the ordeal they had gone through eleven years earlier after the failure of a dam at a rich-man’s club high above town.
Observers within the Weather Bureau contributed to a fund for the relief of their Galveston colleagues, earmarking $200.76 for Isaac, $150 for Joseph, and $50 for John Blagden. Isaac sent his deepest thanks. A rather unctuous letter went to Willis Moore from an observer in the West Indies Service, William H. Alexander. Alexander did not contribute to the Galveston relief fund, but professed to feel deeply for the station and for the state of Texas. “So, feeling thus and fearing lest my silence be attributed to indifference, I felt that in justice to myself I should state that I sent to Galveston to a needy friend as soon after the storm as possible the sum of $11.00 which was every cent that I felt able to contribute.”
There is no record of any contribution from his Indies superiors, William Stockman and Col. H. H. C. Dunwoody.
ISAAC RETURNED TO work on Monday, September 17. What he had done during his eight days away from the office is unclear. One local historian believed he was in the hospital recovering from his injuries, but this seems unlikely. Isaac was not seriously injured, at least not physically. He continued to file telegrams to Washington. Most likely he spent this time struggling with the hunt for his wife, the care of his children, and his own grief. There was much for him to do. He needed to find a permanent home for his children and a woman to care for them. He put Joseph in charge of the office, although it must have pained him to do so. Joseph reveled in his new command, and in his brother’s absence. Telegrams from the bureau became more dramatic. At 11:30 A.M., Tuesday, September 11, Joseph fired off a breathless telegram to Moore, in which he reported that Bornkessell was still missing, Isaac had been injured but “not seriously,” and “nearly half the city” had been washed away. “I am badly injured. Two thousand dead found burying at sea.”
Exactly three minutes later, a more businesslike telegram entered the wires, this composed by Isaac. “All mail communication cut off since noon Saturday. Can get no material on which to base crop reports. All messages sent by boat to Houston. Instruments erected temporarily by Blagden. J. L. Cline still on duty but unable to do much.”
These were hard days for Isaac. He believed in work and in filling his day to the limit with productive effort, but in so doing, he had put love and family in a box that he had allowed himself to open only rarely. A mistake, he saw now. He had lost his wife and nearly lost a daughter. How completely Cora had held his world together now became apparent to him. His children needed food, warmth, a dry place, and most of all they needed him. As the city had fallen, so had the neat compartments of his life.
His house had disappeared, along with everything that described his past—all his photographs, letters, his beloved Bible, and the manuscript of his nearly finished book on climate and health, the second time the book had been destroyed. His station was in disarray. Kuhnel had deserted. Baldwin, on mandatory furlough, had gotten safely away just a week before the storm.
And Bornkessell was surely dead. He had just built a home in the city’s West End, but searchers found only empty ground. Neighbors apparently had sought shelter in his house, placing in him the same faith others had placed in Isaac. On the morning Isaac returned to work, he read in the Galveston News a query from a Houston man named Harry M. Perry. “I wish to report to you as among the missing and undoubtedly lost my wife and son Clayton, aged 7. They were visiting Mr. and Mrs. Theodore C. Bornkessell, who resided in their new cottage on the north