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Storm-battered teen drifts to safety
Published August 17, 2009
Even though she was finally on the shore after so many hours floating from Surfside during the fury of the 1915 storm, Minnie Florea’s ordeal was not over.
As she fought her way through the drift, she began talking for the first time since spotting two friends in the water just after the Surfside lifesaving station went down.
Now, as she began walking toward a house she could see in the distance, she was talking constantly. “I was not unconscious and not exactly delirious,” she said. “I knew every word that I was saying and knew that some of it had absolutely no sense to it.”
Still babbling uncontrollably, she walked 2 miles toward the house, finding the door closed.
“I didn’t want to go in talking that way, so I sat down on the doorstep and argued with myself,” she said, telling herself as she sat there that she could not go inside until she hushed.
When she was finally able to quiet herself, she knocked and “the people came and carried me in the house.”
Clad in her “poor bedraggled bathing suit” and her shoes, she had lost her cap much earlier, leaving her hair matted and standing out in all directions.
“My stockings, except the feet inside my shoes, were but a memory,” she said. “I was certainly a sorry looking object, but I was all there!”
She had realized how thirsty she was while struggling through the drift to get to shore. The people in the house also were storm survivors and had lost almost everything. Even so, they brought her water, coffee and food, which they insisted she eat, even though she said she wasn’t hungry.
Minnie went to sleep, and slept all night and all the following day, even though her resting place was “wharfing.”
Because she had a high fever, her benefactors took her to the hospital in Galveston for treatment. While she was eating supper there Tuesday, someone walked in and said, “Hello, Miss Minnie.”
“I looked up, and it was one of the lifesavers,” she said. When she asked about the rest of her party, he said he did not know because he had not seen any of them except Minnie since the station fell.
He and another of the lifesaving crew had drifted in just as she had, and like Minnie, they had landed on the shore of Galveston Island within two hours and 2 miles of each other.
She learned both crew members had been badly bruised, and the foot of one of them was almost crushed, while Minnie was sunburned, blistered and bruised a little, but soon recovered.
After she had been in the hospital for a short time, she “thought repeatedly and almost constantly of Mr. Andrews, my cousin, and when he did come from Houston on hearing … (about) a girl who was washed up … I knew his footstep in the hall before I saw him,” she said.
She also told Bess Whitehead, the reporter who wrote her story, that Follett Shannon, a lifesaving crew member who had “made a brave effort” to save her as the building went down, was one of the lifesaving crew members who came out alive.
He later went to Richmond to visit Minnie, bringing her some items he had found loose on the stand beneath where the station had once stood.
Among the items were the purses belonging to her mother and her sister, Nell, as well as Minnie’s watch.
In the purses were her mother’s glasses, her sister’s rings, bracelets, watch and diamond lavaliere, Minnie said.
“I think it is worth mentioning that the family represented in our party got back one body,” Minnie said.
One of the surviving crew members told her he was in the water near Nell, and that she had strangled when a sheet of oil covered the water after two huge nearby oil tanks collapsed.
In her interview, she attempted to set the record straight about what had happened both before and during the storm. She insisted those who had blamed her father for their staying at the beach were mistaken.
“Nothing could be more unreasonable and unjust,” she said. “He was sick the whole time after he came (to Surfside, arriving after the rest of the party) Saturday night, and really had very little to do with any decisions and arrangements that were made.”
She also disputed reports of offers to bring the family off Surfside, calling these stories and those claiming other reasons why the family did not leave, the “results of overwrought imagination!”
“I can’t talk about the loss of our family yet,” she said. “Nothing can be said; it seemed to me for a while that there was no word in the world but ‘nothing.’ And Mr. and Mrs. Dunlop’s loss is as great, in that they have lost all they had.”
Minnie said she had learned that “I’ve no right to indulge in grief; I have the memory of the sweetest mother and sisters, the dearest and best brothers and the kindest, most optimistic, most lovable father a girl ever had.”
She also rejoiced in still having one sister, who was not at Surfside when the storm struck, as well as many kind relatives and friends, “and my own life to make it count.”
When Minnie was asked by a reporter in 1975 to recount her memories of the 1915 storm, she refused to “open Pandora’s box.” Even then, she sometimes had occasional nightmares about her experiences, she explained.
The January 2000 issue of Texas Highways magazine also reprinted much of her story as she told it to Bess Whitehead soon after her ordeal.
That magazine noted that Minnie attended Rice University, married a U.S. Army officer, had children and died in South Carolina in 1998, a few weeks prior to her 100th birthday.
She “enjoyed, by her own account, a ‘normal, fortunate and happy’ life, Texas Highways reported.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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