Then in 1928, Grady went on a motor trip and arrived in southern Florida just after the Palm Beach hurricane had struck Lake Okeechobee, killing more than two thousand people. He saw the devastation, the mass burials, the suffering, and determined to do something about it. By 1930 he was at New Orleans, getting experience in forecasting Gulf hurricanes. After five years, the hurricane teletype and the centers at Jacksonville and New Orleans were established and Grady was put in charge of hurricane forecasting at Jacksonville. There, and later at Miami, his name, Grady Norton, coming over the radio, became familiar and reassuring to almost every householder in the region. For twenty hurricane seasons he took the brunt of it in almost countless emergencies. In some instances, he made broadcasts steadily and continuously every two hours, or oftener, for two days or more without rest, his microphone having direct connections to more than twenty Florida radio stations, and by powerful short-wave hook-ups to small towns all over the state. As the hurricane threatened areas beyond Florida, he continued the issue of bulletins, warnings, and advices. In the last ten years of this service, he was warned by his physicians to turn a good deal of the responsibility over to his assistants, but the public wanted to know his personal decisions. In 1954, after Hurricanes Carol and Edna had devastated sections of the northeast with resultant serious criticism of the Bureau in regard to the former, a fast-moving blow that allowed very limited time for precautions, Norton died on the job while tracking Hurricane Hazel through the Caribbean. A tall, thin, sandy-haired Southerner, Norton had a slow, calm way of talking that put him, in the public mind, at the top of the list of hurricane hunters of his generation. And it was generally conceded that to his efforts were to be credited in a large degree the advances in hurricane forecasting in the years after 1935. But the outstanding progress was gained from the use of aircraft to reconnoiter hurricanes, in which Norton played a very important part. In Grady Norton’s place, the Bureau put Gordon Dunn, who was an associate of Norton’s at Jacksonville when the service began and who had more recently been in charge of the forecast center at Chicago.