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‘My husband … had to swim across the street’
By Emmy Lou Harris
Published July 27, 2003
My memory of the storm is the electricity went out and my mother went to Saltz Grocery Store on 29th Avenue P and bought canned salmon, jelly and peanut butter and anything that didn’t need cooking.
The house did a little shaking but the only thing that was destroyed was our backyard fence.
My sister worked at the post office building on 25th Street when the storm hit Galveston in the daytime and at 5 p.m. the car she drove was blown across the street into an oleander bush.
It would not start and she waded home down 25th Street to 30th Street and Avenue P. I was 13 at that time and went back with her down 25th Street esplanade in knee high water — to no avail. We could not budge that 1941 Buick.
It took two days after that the water subsided and it was towed home.
The downtown area was deluged on all their first floors as the storm surge brought all flooding in Galveston from the bayside.
My husband, John Harris, worked at John Gray’s Storage Garage at 20th and Strand and had to swim across the street to a bakery where his mother worked.
Ironically she, Marie Harris, was one of three people who died in Galveston in Carla in 1961 when the tornado razed her home on 22nd Street and Avenue N. She never left in any storm and she loved Galveston very much.
We in Galveston County have been very blessed to be spared for many years by these ravaging storms.
Emmy Lou Harris Santa Fe
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