The family went through the back yard, the nearest route to higher ground. The boy’s mother put the dinner in a large paper sack and held it above her head as she struggled through the water. The father carried the seven-year-old on his back and brought up the rear, swimming a little as the water continued to rise. The grandmother, an invalid strapped in a wheel-chair, was pushed and floated ahead by the uncle. The boy worried as his mother got tired and let the paper sack hang lower and lower. Finally it hit the water and the chicken and doughnuts sank or floated away. That scene was etched in Robert’s memory, along with the battering of the winds and the tremendous rise of the waters over the stricken city. The family survived. Looking out of the windows of the courthouse on the edge of the bluff above the business section, the boy watched others struggling toward higher ground. Afterward the family returned to their house, smeared with oil and tar and by dirty water, floors covered with sand, mud, and debris. Robert saw death on every hand—dead dogs, birds, cats, rodents, and one neighbor who failed to get out. In 1933, when one of the hurricanes of that year crossed the Gulf and threatened the lower Texas Coast, much like the big one in 1919, a young fellow drove all the way from Dallas to have a look at it. He was Robert Simpson. He never got it out of his mind. Finally, he joined the Weather Bureau, worked at hurricane forecasting offices and in 1945 “thumbed” his first ride into a hurricane. After that his enthusiasm and persistence annoyed some of the older weathermen and bothered members of the air crews who flew the big storms both in the Atlantic and Pacific. Simpson made up his mind that he would use every opportunity to find out how the big storms were organized and what they were geared to in their movements, regular and irregular—the gears and guts of the THING. When Milt Sosin lurched into the center of the big storm in 1947 in a B-17 and looked up to see a B-29 high in the eye of the same hurricane, Simpson was up there with the men from Bermuda, trying to find out what steered the monster. And on this flight, with a B-29, they expected to come out on top at twenty-eight to thirty thousand feet, according to the theorists and the textbooks, but they broke out just below forty thousand, still one hundred miles from the center. From there the high cloud sheet should have sloped downward to the center, if they were to believe the accepted doctrine of circulation in the top of the hurricane. But they were shocked and chagrined to find that the high cloud sheet—the cirrostratus—sloped sharply upward in front of them, rising far above the extreme upper operational ceiling of the B-29. And so the superfortress turned toward the center and rocketed into the high cloud deck with misgivings on the part of Pilot Eastburn and Simpson. The latter reported: