Weathering the Flood of 1936

“Dearest Mother,” the letter begins.

“Well, a lot of water has certainly passed under, over and around the bridge since I wrote you last.”

With those words Mary Jane Hayes, then a young staffer at the Osterhout Free Library in Wilkes-Barre, began an 11-page description of the Flood of March 1936, which she mailed to her mother, Jenny Hayes, in Williamsport.

“I like how she’d run out of room and then start writing up the side of the paper,” said Gregory Kosicki of Plymouth, who regularly searches eBay for items of local historical interest.

Kosicki purchased the vintage letter a few years ago — he thinks he paid $20 to $30 — and he recently decided to share it with the current staff at the Osterhout Free Library, thinking they would be interested.

“It was just so fascinating,” librarian Rose Cichy said. “We passed it around and made copies.”

Through Mary Jane Hayes’ first-hand account, modern readers can learn of water inching up cellar steps, and flooding the streets of downtown Wilkes-Barre. Hayes lived about three blocks from the library in a boarding house in the 300 block of South Franklin, between Ross and Academy streets. As the river rose, she went to help move books off the lower shelves,

But most of the letter details how she and her neighbors weathered the storm — a time she compared to being “marooned” or “shipwrecked.”

“She’s in her 20s,” librarian Cichy said, noting Kosicki’s research revealed Hayes was born in 1912. “But sometimes she writes like a teenager. She’s very literate and educated, but you could feel the emotion.”

In the letter Hayes described what she was wearing (a green wool dress) and what she took along (a pink satin nightgown, her diary and some crackers) when she moved across the street from her boarding house to live with a friend because “Frances and I had decided to stay together and that we could cook better at her house.”

Hayes felt “panic-striken” as her landlady, Mrs. Deeble, shouted “You won’t get out at all if you don’t hurry up,” but apparently the water never rose high enough in Mrs. Deeble’s house, nor the house across the street where Hayes went to stay with Frances, for residents to evacuate.

Rising water did extinguish the fire in the furnace, and Hayes and other boarders burned paper in a fireplace as they huddled by a shortwave radio to listen to flood reports. When one man, whose job involved driving a truck for a liquor store, brought “some shelves, etc., from the store” — presumably to burn as fuel — “he became a hero in our eyes,” Hayes wrote.

“Cars still kept driving in our street, splashing way up,” Hayes wrote, “and men in hip boots kept going by. The radio giving locations of people to be rescued in boats, giving numbers to call to get relatives together, telling of raising water in Binghamton, etc., drove us nearly crazy but we couldn’t listen to anything else.”

“We weren’t really very concerned as a boat could have got us out at any time, or if necessary we could have waded, and yet we didn’t know for sure. The house is three stories high, but water on the first floor meant moving up the furniture and ourselves. There was quite a scare when two houses above Deebles’, a house got on fire. Fire engine came tearing down through the water, and then the firemen left while smoke was still coming out. The fire was out, we found later.

“That row of houses would go just like tinder, so I was scared.”

Hayes’ reports of meals included one lunch of “baked beans and bacon, done in the skillet, milk and toast and bananas and peanut butter. For dinner we had noodle soup, fried eggs and canned tomates with apples and crackers and cheese and coffee.”

Another meal consisted of soup for which various people contributed vegetables. “The turnips could have been doner,” Hayes remarked.

Undercooked turnips aside, Kosicki said, “I do admire the way the neighbors pooled their resources.”

At one point Mrs. Deeble waded across the street with a green flannel bathrobe, slippers and other clothes for Hayes. And Hayes and Frances later saw the landlady wearing galoshes and “picking her way across back lots … from the store.” The sight of the landlady making an effort to get out and tend to business inspired the young women. Although they apparently had been tempted to extend their “vacation,” they got dressed and went to work.

“I have to go from 4 to 5 to answer the phone and tell people it will be open tomorrow,” Hayes wrote, explaining she’d be returning to the “prosaic task of stamping books.”

“It’s been a marvelous vacation and I needed it,” Hayes noted, finishing the letter with the comment “Life’s so unpredictable, isn’t it?”

Kosicki’s historical finds also include a hardcover book that was published about the flood of 1936. It describes individual acts of heroism, such as volunteer George Ohm, credited with rescuing 200 people in his rowboat, and mentions the birth of a baby boy, at 3 a.m., on the third day of the flood, in a third grade classroom in a Hanover Township school. The doctor who tended to the mother was wearing hip boots, the book reported, after he had waded to the school to help.

The book also suggests reasons for the flood, among them the cutting down over the years of many trees that would have absorbed the rainfall and an unusually cold winter in 1935-1936, which delayed the melting of the snow pack. The river was reportedly covered with 12 to 24 inches of ice, which magnified the effect of an inch of rainfall.

Kosicki, who grew up in Plymouth and remembers, as a boy of 9 or 10, helping to clean up after the Flood of 1972, found Mary Jane Hayes’ first-hand account of the Flood of 1936an invaluable history lesson.

He urges people not to discard old letters they might find tucked into a book or housed in a box in the attic but to examine them.

“You don’t know what treasures you might find,” he said.

“It’s sad that a whole new generation is growing up without learning cursive hand-writing,” Cichy said. “Because they won’t be able to read historical accounts like this for themselves.”

It’s possible the letter may eventually become part of a library exhibit, Cichy said. Kosicki said he’d like that.

“I’d like to thank the Lycoming County Historical Society,” Kosicki said, noting that group shared with him information from Mary Jane Hayes’ high school yearbook, which listed her as an academic student who took part in student council, the staff of La Memoire, which seems to be the name of the yearbook, and the staff of the Cherry & White, which might have been the school newspaper. It also mentioned she had recently learned to drive a Packard.