Celia

I came across a blog post on the web this morning that brought back memories from August of 1970.  

A young man who was 14 at the time, wrote of spending the summer with relatives from Oklahoma, and taking a trip to the Texas Gulf Coast.  They were originally headed for Galveston, but knew there was a hurricane in the gulf, and by the time they got just north of Houston, it was predicted to make turn to the right and make landfall along the upper Texas coast. So, instead of Galveston, they headed for Corpus Christi.

Of course, the predicted right turn never happened.  Celia scored a direct hit on the Corpus Christi area.

His story was eerily similar to ours. 

Honey and I lived in Corpus Christi at the time - she ran the Nueces County Blood Bank, and I was program director of KTOD, a radio station with studios in the Driscoll Hotel.  

We were in Houston to visit my father-in-law, who was in the hospital following a heart attack.   Since the storm was expected to hit the Galveston/Houston area, I left the hospital and boarded up all the windows on my in-laws' house.  

By the time we left Houston, it was becoming apparent that the turn to the north wasn't going to happen.  I called the station, and told the kid who worked weekends to stay on the air until I could get there.  

When we got home, we both went directly to work.

When Celia came ashore, the devastation was immense. Celia produced sustained winds of 110 to 130 mph, but gusts in some areas reached 180 mph. In Corpus Christi, 70 percent of residences were damaged. In Port Aransas, the number was closer to 75 percent. And in Portland, 90 percent of the homes and businesses sustained damage. All told, there were 15 deaths and about $500 million in damage.

The only damage to our house was the loss of an ugly screen door I had been threatening to replace, but just over a block away there was a bare strip where several homes had been.  It looked like it had been bulldozed.