Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever

by Geoff Williams

  TUESDAY,

  MARCH 25, 1913

  Chapter Three

  Some of the People in the Way

  Monday, March 24

  Cincinnati, late afternoon

  Standing in the rain after school, several boys found themselves on an embankment near a sewer tunnel. They could as easily have been exploring some of the nearby factories or following the nearby railroad and daydreaming about riding the boxcars. But the sewer tunnel was far more interesting, for below them was a pond that hadn’t been there a couple of days before. Boys being boys, ten-year-old Ralph Korengel and his friends felt compelled to check it out.

  That having been done, the boys started tossing pieces of wood into the pond, watching each piece swiftly sail into the open sewer tunnel and disappear into the darkness. Then Ralph picked up a railroad tie, or, in layman’s terms, a wooden plank that the steel part of railroad tracks rest on. Thinking the wooden plank might float nicely, Ralph pushed it over the edge of the dirt cliff. Unfortunately for him, he also went tumbling down the side of the embankment and into the pond.

  Even if Ralph could have swum, it wouldn’t have mattered: he was sucked right into the sewer tunnel. Screaming for help, the remaining boys raced to the factories, one of them being a rubber factory where Ralph’s father worked as a foreman. At least two men, Edward Miller and Mike Cassidy, came running to help.

  Quickly surveying the situation, Miller and Cassidy decided that they needed to rush to the other side of the sewer, three blocks away, where Ralph would come out and, with any luck, still be alive.

  Inside the tunnel, Ralph was fighting to keep his head above water and losing badly, until he suddenly saw his railroad tie floating past him. He lunged for it and hung on.

  Above ground, the boys and men reached the end of the tunnel, where water spilled into Duck Creek. There was no sign of Ralph. The boys or men would later report that another ten minutes would pass. If that’s true—it may have just seemed like ten minutes—it makes one wonder what Ralph was doing all that time. Maybe he was able to stop himself from shooting down the tunnel for a while and attempt to crawl back the way he came. In any case, Ralph shot out of the tunnel and into Duck Creek, and, while he didn’t look well, he was alive. Before being carried down Duck Creek, Ralph managed to grab a hanging tree branch, which quickly snapped, and he was swept away again. The boys and men gave chase.

  Ralph grabbed another branch, but that broke too, and Duck Creek, which wanted him badly, carried him further until he crashed into the side of a tree. Screaming for help, Ralph then sank out of sight. Miller and Cassidy dropped into the creek, the water coming up to their necks, and fished him out. Ralph didn’t appear to be breathing.

  Miller and Cassidy carried Ralph to a nearby barrel, draping his body over it so that water easily spilled out of his lungs. It took a few minutes, but Ralph eventually came to.

  A doctor was called, and just before Ralph was taken home, he weakly offered instructions to everyone. “Don’t tell Mother I nearly was drowned,” Ralph pleaded. “Just say I got wet.”

  Ralph Korengel, who would live a good long life and pass away in 1980, lived in a world in which swimming was not yet much of a sport, and as a pastime was only now starting to become mainstream. In 1909, the YMCA—which was still off-limits to anyone without a Y chromosome—began a campaign to teach every man and boy in the country to swim. But in May of 1913, Syracuse, New York’s park commission let it be known that girls were going to be given swimming lessons, and three months later, forty-eight girls in Janesville, Wisconsin, participated in the town’s first swimming lessons. Some universities were even making swimming lessons a required part of the curriculum, a trend that really caught on for a while. At its peak, in 1977, forty-two percent of colleges had a swimming requirement. Just five years later, the number of colleges that mandated swimming before handing out a diploma had plummeted to only eight percent. Today, there are just several universities and colleges across the country that enforce swimming. Some high schools require students to swim, but many don’t, and as budgets shrink and public swimming pools close, arguably, large swaths of the population aren’t learning to swim. There are some understandable arguments for not forcing students to swim—not everyone is physically adept enough to swim well enough to pass a test, some people don’t feel comfortable being in a bathing suit in public—and yet, anyone who goes throughout life not knowing how to swim is putting their life at risk. That’s underscored every time there is a drowning in the news, of course, but during the summer of 2010, when six teenagers in the Red River drowned in Shreveport, Louisiana, it put a spotlight on how many African-Americans don’t know how to swim: seventy percent of black youth, according to many of the reports that came out shortly after the tragedy. Children at a family get-together waded into the Red River, and one of the teenagers stepped off a ledge, falling into water almost twenty-five feet deep. A cousin tried to rescue him but also slipped over the ledge. More teenaged relatives and friends attempted to help the two, but they didn’t know how to swim and drowned. The grownups watched, horror-stricken, but none of them knew how to swim either.

  It wasn’t a tough call for many communities to include the female persuasion in swimming lessons. Women and girls drowned just as easily as men and boys, although it did seem to usually be the latter who did drown. In a culture in which girls were considered nonathletic, dainty, and pure, the boys took more risks. One syndicated article that ran in May 1913, around the country in papers like Frederick, Maryland’s Daily News, observed: “Every mother of a boy who is near enough a swimming pool is haunted during the summer by the fear that her child will meet his death.… Every boy likes to show his prowess by going out farther than the others and oftentimes this venturesome spirit is the cause of drowning.”

  In fact, since at least the 1880s, the term “drowning season” has been employed to describe the summertime. As Washington Post noted in a July 15, 1913 editorial, two days earlier, eight people in Boston had drowned and four more near Philadelphia, “and every large city reported one or more similar accidents on the same day.” The editorial pointed out that boys who grew up near the wharves of a big city, “the kind we call street urchins, rarely die from drowning. They learn to swim when they are 7 or 8 years old, and they never forget how to take care of themselves in the water.”

  The editorial concluded with a chilling suggestion that was clearly influenced by the March and April floods in the country just a few months before: “Both boys and girls should be taught to swim, not only in bathing suits, but with heavy clothes on their bodies.”

  Nobody could argue that. In fact, the phrase “don’t rock the boat” appears to have started because so many people didn’t know how to swim, and the last thing you wanted, when you were climbing into a tiny vessel floating in a muddy, fast-moving current, was for the boat to rock.

  March 24, Dayton, Ohio

  John H. Patterson wasn’t preparing for a flood. He was preparing to go to jail.

  Several weeks earlier, on February 13, Patterson, the founder of Dayton’s famed National Cash Register Company, and his right-hand man, sales manager Thomas J. Watson, who would someday create a little company known as IBM, were found guilty in an anti-trust suit, accused of creating a monopoly.

  This was not, at least not for Patterson’s competition, simply about trying to get a piece of the pie of the lucrative cash register market in an ethical and legal way. If the charges against Patterson were true, and there is ample evidence that they were, Patterson’s salesmen literally threatened their competitors’ salesmen. They bribed freight agents to hold up shipments of the other guy’s products and then poured sand in their competitors’ machines to put them out of order. Patterson’s men then opened offices next door to new companies selling cash registers with super cheap prices that would knock them out of business. They hired salesmen at rival companies and paid them to spy on their employer and report back to NCR. Patterson’s tactics were ugly
but effective. By 1905, when Patterson was sixty-one, it was believed that NCR had about ninety-five percent of the domestic cash register market.

  In 1913, there had been a lengthy court case, after which a judge sentenced Patterson to a year in prison. His attorneys were appealing the conviction, but the 69-year-old was facing the very real possibility that on top of a $5,000 fine, negligible for a man like Patterson, he might soon be sitting in a cell at the nearby Miami County Jail in Troy, Ohio for a full year, with common criminals as bunkmates. This was not a luxury hotel for white-collar criminals—the term white-collar criminal wouldn’t even be coined until 1939—but a jail with dirt floors. (In October 1913, Wilbur Ballard, a sixteen-year-old in jail for stealing a horse, would tunnel his way out with a spoon.) In the 1920s, one criminal attorney-turned-bootlegger, George Remus, would spend some time in the Miami County jail and call it a “dirty hell hole,” and one presumes it wasn’t any better and may just have been even worse when Patterson was facing the prospects of living there. But if he was worried, he didn’t show it. When he was convicted in court, he was very calm, much more so than the agitated spectators, and after receiving his sentence, Patterson thanked the court for their service, and when the judge asked if he wanted to speak further, he replied, “I have nothing to say, your Honor,” and he sat down.

  A jail sentence would be the period on what had so far been a spectacularly interesting life. Patterson was born on a family farm near Dayton in 1844, and although he grew up with money, he understood the value of a dollar and what it took to earn it. As a young man, Patterson spent time working as a toll collector on the Miami and Erie Canal, and in 1864, as was common then for many youth who didn’t enlist to fight, he spent a hundred days as a Northern soldier in the Civil War, taking on duties away from combat, which allowed more veteran soldiers to stay on the front lines. He was a school teacher around 1870, and then in his mid-thirties he joined his brother to develop coal and iron mines in Jackson County, Ohio.

  From there, he went to Coalton, Ohio, to become the general manager for the company store at the Southern Coal and Iron Company. In running the shop, the future business magnate recognized the need for something like a cash register machine. The store was losing money despite doing brisk business, and Patterson read that manufacturers John and James S. Ritty had invented a machine that would tabulate sales as they were made, and that it also had a receptacle for money. Patterson ordered two machines, loved what he saw, and, with his brother, immediately bought stock of the National Manufacturing Company. Two years later, in 1884, they bought enough that they were given control. They weren’t thrilled with the plant, however, and decided to build a better factory on better land. They selected a site near the family farm, on land where they had played, worked, and grown up.

  Ultimately, their company became one of the world’s most successful enterprises, a company still thriving today as a global technology firm that focuses on ATMs and software and other technological marvels that are light-years away from the simple cash register. Patterson would have approved the changes. He was all about following the money.

  In 1913, Patterson’s business, long since renamed the National Cash Register Company, which everyone referred to by its initials, NCR, employed 5,500 and, aside from the main factory in Dayton, had branches in Toronto and Berlin. But it was Dayton where NCR’s success was impossible not to notice. Its headquarters covered thirty-six acres of floor space in fifteen buildings on a manufacturing property occupying 140 acres of ground. Fortunately, for Patterson and everyone in Dayton, the headquarters was on the highest ground of those 140 acres.

  Patterson was a tough competitor, but he was a good boss and became better as the years progressed—especially if you compare him to other employers of the age like George Pullman, inventor of the Pullman Sleeper Car, which allowed people to sleep in trains. Pullman’s claim to evil-boss fame stems from the company town that he had built just south of Chicago for the employees of his railroad car business. The town really was a town. There were churches, a library, and places to shop; but as landlords go, Pullman was the worst. In 1894, when he cut employees’ wages by twenty-five percent, he didn’t lower his employees’ rent; there was a strike and violence that ended after President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to restore order. After Pullman died on October 19, 1897, he was interred in a pit eight feet deep with floors and walls of steel-reinforced concrete. Why? People were afraid his former employees would try to desecrate his corpse. Patterson also acquits himself quite well if you compare him to Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the owners and operators of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, where the men employed immigrant women, paying them next to nothing and keeping them in a building that was locked from the outside; on March 25, 1911, two years to the day before the start of the Great Flood of 1913, there was a fire in the building that killed 146 people, 17 men and 129 women, ranging from forty-eight down to eleven years old.

  Around the time Pullman was dealing with his strike, Patterson had a major epiphany after a $50,000 shipment of cash registers was returned from England because the mechanics were faulty; acid had been poured into them, apparently by a disgruntled employee or perhaps several workers.

  Patterson went to the floor of the factory to see how it had happened that his employees would turn in such shoddy machinery; and in looking at their work environment, he had to admit that if he were his own employee, he wouldn’t care about what he was producing. Patterson raised wages, cleaned the factory, added ventilation, and made dangerous manufacturing equipment safer. He soon went further: dressing rooms and showers, available for employees to use on company time, were introduced, and he opened a factory cafeteria that served subsidized hot lunches. Eventually he went even further: long before corporate retreats became part of the lexicon, NCR employees occasionally went on morale-boosting field trips, like to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The National Cash Register Company started a lending library and started offering free medical care. If those “Best Boss Ever” mugs had been around, Patterson would have had a few hundred in his cabinets.

  He was a visionary in other ways as well. It was once estimated that from 1910 until 1930, one-sixth of the business executives in the United States had once worked for Patterson’s company. Patterson was a pioneer in sales, giving salespeople scripts and urging his staff to look at the sales cycle as a four-stage process: the initial approach, the proposition, the product demonstration, and closing the deal.

  But Patterson wasn’t perfect. He could be petty and vindictive, and just plain odd, taking the eccentric-millionaire-boss stereotype to new heights, or depths. When some of his executives weren’t around, and Patterson found their desks to be too messy, he’d dump the contents of the drawers into the trash, so they could start work fresh. When he got the idea that everyone should learn to ride a horse properly, which he believed would help his executives master other facets of life, Patterson started making them come to the factory before 6 A.M., for an early morning ride. Company lore has it that Patterson even fired an employee for not being able to ride a horse properly; another employee, he is said to have terminated for not knowing why a flag was flying a certain way.

  One of Patterson’s righthand men, Charles Palmer, a personal trainer in England before they met, enabled his quirks. Palmer claimed he could read faces, and; so the story goes, Patterson asked Palmer to read the faces of his executives, and then, based on some of those “readings,” fired several stunned men.

  Patterson, who became something of a health nut later in life, had his employees weighed and measured every six months. Those who were underweight were given free malted milk. Combs and brushes, sterilized every day, were available for grooming, and whenever it rained, company umbrellas were given to female workers going home. Palmer also, with Patterson’s blessings, banned bread and butter, tea and coffee and salt and pepper from sales meetings (and replaced them with what?), which didn’t go over well with the sales f
olk. Hugh Chalmers, an NCR vice president who had worked his way up through the company from an office boy, overruled that decision. When Patterson got wind of this, he canned Chalmers and several other top sales coffee-loving executives. Chalmers, who was pulling in $72,000 in salary every year, a fortune at the time, was infuriated and vowed to bring Patterson down.

  This was all started over, remember, drinks and condiments.

  Five years later, Chalmers, now making automobiles at the Chalmers Motor Company in Detroit, got his chance to exact revenge. When Patterson was taken to court for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, Chalmers was a convincing key government witness during the fiftyday court case, in which a grand jury took just ten hours to declare Patterson and his executives corrupt. Patterson and most of the executives on trial were sentenced to a year in jail.

  In previous years Patterson had dined with heads of state, but now people across the country were reading the headline INDICTED CASH REGISTER HEAD. Below the awkwardly worded headline was Patterson’s photo, showing a somber-looking man with bifocals, a receding hairline, and a neatly trimmed white mustache. The headline, photo, and brief caption explaining his conviction had been syndicated, appearing across the country almost every week. Even as late as March 20, the Atchison Daily Globe, in Kansas, had run the news item, which was by now over a month old. Word was gradually getting out. John H. Patterson was a sleazy white-collar crook.

  There was a downpour of rain in Dayton on Monday; it had been raining since around midnight, in fact, but most people weren’t thinking at all about any serious flooding. But if Patterson had been privy to a flood coming his way, it would have seemed appropriate. He was drowning, all right.

  Sometime in the evening, Fort Wayne, Indiana

  The St. Marys River finally reached the first floor of the Allen County Orphans Home; once it did, the teachers hurried the children upstairs. It was about this time when two men and a boat arrived, sent by Henry E. Branning, one of the city’s trustees whose title was Overseer of the Poor. The boat was small, though, and it could only fit six people, including the two men. Mrs. Ida Overmeyer, the headmistress, did her quick calculations, figuring for sixty-two children and about a dozen adults. Just for the children, assuming the two men were in the boat with four children, fifteen trips would be required. With darkness falling, and the water only grazing the first floor of a sturdy brick building, it didn’t seem necessary to go to all that trouble for a little flooding, and it seemed the children would be safer remaining where they were.