Floods I have known

For a long time I wanted to write about the Johnstown Flood of 1889. I was born and raised in Johnstown so I had been hearing a lot about it. But to be honest, before I really learned about the Great Johnstown Flood, I encountered two other major floods in my hometown — in 1936 and 1977.

My mother told a pretty interesting story about the ’36 flood. She says she was eating a can of tuna fish, in the kitchen behind the family grocery store, and she was home alone, when soldiers came to the door and insisted she leave. She resisted. They won. They took her in a truck to Brownstown.

She feared never seeing her mother, her father or her siblings again. But they were immigrants, hard-working, all of them, and they hadn’t been home because they all had jobs.

Her father was a hard man. Her mother was a remote and unemotional woman. But still my mother was devastated at the thought of losing them and her fear was great. That was one thing I took away from her story of the ’36 flood.

She told me she did find her family after a day of misery and worrying. When they were allowed to go home, they found their piano was hanging out the window, furniture was upside down. And, of course, everything was ruined. But a picture of Jesus attached to the wall with a straight pin still hung there. Straight.

Stories of water

I thought my mother was a pretty good storyteller. She gave me my first glimpses of what water could do, how it could be both healer and destroyer.

However, I didn’t worry about encountering a flood myself. We had learned in school that ours was now the “flood-free city.” Franklin Roosevelt had come in and widened the rivers and streams, and this engineering was supposed to save the city from any future harm.

However, a generation later, the flood of 1977 happened. My sisters and I were in Pittsburgh. I owned a house by then and she and her family were visiting me and we were eating. My phone rang. A former student told me to put on the TV. She said my hometown was flooded.

I put on the television to learn that Johnstown was cordoned off. The anchors said there were no working phone lines and that the Red Cross was assembling lists of the dead.

We were terrified. Of course we didn’t want to believe what we heard on the TV, so we tried the phones in case one of the numbers worked. But there was no answer anywhere. Not at my mother’s home. Not at George’s Grill, the bar that my father had owned and run and that, after his death, my mother ran. Not at the homes of any neighbors.

The phone rang a second time. The fellow who had been my high school boyfriend said he had ignored the warnings and gone in on a motorcycle, and he told me it was possible to get into town to check on family, that determined people could talk their way in. “Just do it,” he said. He was a rebel. This is what I had liked about him.

My sisters and I got into a little VW bug. We drove over trees and debris. We slid in mud on Route 56. We saw tractors in trees. We saw jagged wreckage where buildings had once stood.

After a long series of detours, more nervous with each minute, we got to the street that held George’s Grill. And what did we see but my mother, like a pioneer woman, hauling buckets of clean water from an Army truck into the bar. We made her look up at the nasal sound of the VW horn. She put down the buckets. Her arms went up in elation as if we were the ones who had been lost. It was an emotional scene.

Writing my own story

I took those stories of the two other floods and remade them for my purposes in “The Johnstown Girls.”

But the focus of the book was still the great flood of 1889. For that, I had to do some reading.

I was struck by the idea of the amazing South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, by the idea that wealthy Pittsburghers went to Johnstown to vacation. Everybody I knew had been leaving Johnstown for Pittsburgh, so it was a surprise to learn that, to get away from the city and its industrial grime, people of means went to a gorgeous man-made lake near my hometown.

I learned that the lake was basically a hole in the earth that had been dammed up at one end. Looking skyward, you could see a lake on a mountain top — with little sailboats moving in the breeze.

It was a wonderful life for those who could afford it. There were musicians. There were amateur theatricals. There was company and good food and sunshine and no doubt love.

The club members did not want to heed the warnings that the dam was not safe. They certainly did not want to drain the lake and lose all the gorgeous fish they’d put in.

Richard Burkert of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association drove me along the path of the flood from the mountaintop down to the old stone bridge. It took hours. He was patient. He explained how the water had rolled, like an ever-enlarging ball, digging up earth and everything in its path as it moved, stopped, reversed, went forward again.

Mr. Burkert made it very real.

Riding a mattress 

Of course, I read David McCullough’s book about the great disaster, “The Johnstown Flood.” I was struck by instances of heroism. John Parke, an engineer for the South Fork club, on horseback, riding through the mud to warn the people. There was John Hess, a train engineer who rode ahead of the water for as long as possible, blowing the whistle. There was a young man who saved 6-year-old Gertrude Quinn.

Gertrude Quinn was one of two people I knew I would be influenced by as I wrote my novel. Elsie Frum was the other. Both had been 6 at the time of the flood.

Elsie Frum lived to be 108 years old. She was interviewed when she was 106, and she remained a wonder of a woman, able to talk, able to remember.

Gertrude Quinn had only an ordinary life span. But her story is unforgettable. She rode on a mattress that acted as a raft. She saw death all around her. She was underwater and above water and somehow she held on and lived.

I knew these stories, these women, would be a part of my book.

And so I invented sisters who would be my main characters — children riding a mattress through the flood. And I knew one thing. I knew the children would be separated.

At first, I thought one would be 6 years old and the other 2 years old. I thought this because one of them, to my mind, remembered everything and the other remembered nothing.

But my favorite consultant, a wonderful storyteller and retired detective, Ron Freeman, told me, “They’re twins.”

At first, I resisted. But I began doing research into twins and memory. Four years old is the magic age, it turns out. Memory kicks in then but it’s different for each person. I learned that highly verbal people, those who put words to a memory, keep that memory, and that those who don’t have words are more likely to forget.

And so the girls became sisters, aged 4.

I don’t think May 31 will ever come and go without my remembering the disaster that made Johnstown world news for months in 1889. But I will always think next about survival, and about heroism and bravery and humility. My hometown has plenty of that.

Kathleen George is a professor of theater at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of the novel, “The Johnstown Girls” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014).