CIVILIAN DEFENSE: Dear Wife, I am O.K.

Exactly what happened out there in the water on a certain June night cannot be told. But the people of a small New England town (pop. less than 4,000) can guess. About 11 p.m., when the fog cleared and the stars came out, Frank Aresta, a policeman (by day, a grocer) on dimout duty, saw a flash followed by low, rolling thunder, then another and another. Said he to Carpenter James Thomas: “Storm, hell—that’s shootin’.” He telephoned the Coast Guard station. Soon a plane roared out to sea.

Preparations for Disaster. At 6:45 next morning the fog was in. A Coast Guard lieutenant telephoned Gift Shop Owner John Rosenthal, local chairman of the Committee on Public Safety (TIME, June 29), told him to prepare for survivors from a sea disaster. By 7 o’clock, housewives, schoolteachers, nurses, shopkeepers, artists, artists’ wives, fishermen, with arm bands designating them as first-aiders, auxiliary police, canteen workers, air-raid wardens, were running along the streets to the wharf and the Report Center.

By 7:30 Bank President and Chief Air Raid Warden Horace Hallett had arranged with Manager John Cashman of a local hotel to borrow it for the emergency.

Soon Mrs. Louise Baumgartner and 25 canteen workers moved into the kitchen, began working on food supplies with the cooperation of the Red Cross. Seven “ambulances”—hardware trucks and station wagons—with a driver and four first-aiders each, were parked behind the post office—quietly, not to alarm the public. Just in case the public did get alarmed, 50 auxiliary police ringed the hotel to keep unauthorized people out. Coast Guardsmen formed a cordon around the wharf, detoured mainstreet traffic that might interfere with operations.

Rescue Boat. Out on the wharf waited massive, balding Chairman Rosenthal and lean, nervy Chief Warden Hallett. Occasionally, when the breeze lifted the fog, they could see a medium-sized freighter at anchor a mile or so out in the harbor—the rescue ship. At about 8 o’clock, Dr. Daniel Hiebert, the Public Health Officer, went out to the ship in a Coast Guard boat, later called for Dr. Frank Cass to come out and lend a hand.

The first boat back landed 14 drenched, shuddering, shaken men, some of whom dropped to their knees to pray (in Spanish) when they felt the wharf’s solid planking underfoot. Blankets hastily pulled from village beds an hour before were wrapped around them. “Ambulances” carried them to the hotel, where they were welcomed by canteen workers with hot soup, and by 35 home nurses, a contingent of registered nurses, and four male air-raid wardens drafted as orderlies. There were dry clothes and warm beds in private rooms.

First-aiders removed temporary dressings applied on shipboard, wound on permanent ones. Only occasionally did they overlap, bandage a seaman a third time. Canteen workers sent up coffee and sandwiches. (Before they were through, canteeners served 500 meals, 1,000 cups of coffee, 250 sandwiches.) At about 11 o’clock another boatload came in, got the same treatment.

Two hospital cases, landed just before noon, were sent off to a hospital in a real ambulance from a nearby town. A first-aider went along, and an auxiliary policeman to see that no unauthorized person interviewed the men.

“Most Cheerful . . .” The 42 lucky, shipwrecked seamen left in the hotel got almost too much attention. An average of two first-aiders hovered over each; extra workers entertained them with cards and checkers, plied them with magazines, cigarets, candy. Miss Loretta Besa, formerly of Santiago, Chile, now a New Englander, was called in to interpret the sailors’ Spanish. She took down a letter from a Puerto Rican to his wife: “Dear Wife, I am O.K. Everything is about the same.” One sailor refused to eat until he found out the food was free. All his money went down with the ship. A luckier sailor was found in the kitchen drying $300 over the stove.

Said Chairman Rosenthal in his report to the Committee’s regional director: “A most cheerful atmosphere prevailed throughout the hotel.”

Well Done. Next morning, when a special bus with a State police escort came to take the merchant seamen away, first-aiders embraced them, townspeople waved, cheered them on their way. Then there was more work to do. Foot-weary village women returned to the hotel, swept, mopped, dusted, turned it back to the owner in the early afternoon, pin-clean and good as new.

It was obvious in this first real test of the town’s civilian defenses that its Committee on Public Safety could easily handle ten times as many casualties as it had received on the town wharf that day. Villagers were justly pleased with themselves. Said a village physician: “We did a good job. We didn’t lose a single survivor—or a single first-aider.” The regional director’s comment on the local report sounded like Revolutionary days: “I can add no word to this. God bless the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”