He remembered asking one of the men what it would be like in the hurricane, and the fellow laughed and said, “Like going over Niagara Falls in a telephone booth.” He recalled the burly fellow who pointed to the map and told them where the center of the hurricane was located and how to get to it. In answer to his last question, one of the men had told him that all he had to do was hold on for dear life with both hands until the weather officer handed him a message for the forecast office and then he should send it as quickly as possible, without being thrown on his ear. Now the plane was bumping along in the overcast and the rain had become torrential. The wind was on the port quarter and water was coming through the nose and flooding the crawlway. It was pouring on him from above somewhere. Rivers were running down his back. He asked the weather officer what he thought about it, and he replied, “Oh, this is the usual thing. Sometimes it gets a good deal worse.” Well, he thought it was getting a lot worse. Maybe the pilot and co-pilot could see but he could see nothing outside the plane. He hit his head on something, a hard crack, and he started to feel sick. Finally, he put his head down on the edge of the table and began to lose his breakfast. Up and down the coast the Air Force bases were deserted. All planes but one had been flown inland and the last one, a B-17, was poised on Morrison Field for the final hop into the big winds, to return before nightfall. In Miami, one of the senior men in the Weather Bureau office was called to the telephone. Somebody insisted on talking to him and nobody else. It was long distance. A woman said in a frightened voice that her son had gone out to look after a neighbor’s boat and she wanted to know whether she should try to go out to find him and bring him in. He was only twelve years old. “Yes, by all means,” was the answer. The forecaster didn’t know how she was going to reach the boy or how far she had to go, but he recalled that other men and boys had lost their lives doing the same thing. They were having hundreds of calls and they were unable to go into details. He paused just a moment, his mind running regretfully over this poor woman and her problem. Then he started a radio broadcast. Down the street, a merchant was pacing up and down on the sidewalk, bossing three men who were nailing frames over his plate glass windows. He went into the store to his telephone and, after dialing for about ten minutes, finally got the forecaster on the line. “What’s the latest on the storm?” he asked in a strained voice. “Nothing new,” came the tired voice of the forecaster. “A Navy plane went out half an hour ago. We’ll have a report pretty soon now. But the hurricane’s going to hit us, that’s sure. Be a bad night.”