Comment on "Surviving Landfall"

Comment on Lou Young's web story on covering a hurricane landfall in Florida posted at WCBS-TV in New York City where he is an investigative reporter. Lou Young Blog: "Surviving Landfall".

Great eyewitness story. I could feel the storm and the terror it would produce. I was once a few times in a different terror in NYC. A storm surge came up and flooded the FDR and my companion and I had just driven through it about 30 minutes before and surely a little later been stuck in it.

My brother Tom once got a follow-up letter from a motel he and the ex stayed in once, the "Attache" next to the "Diplomat" somewhere in Florida. They were celebrating that all the old TV's had been taken out offshore and made into a fish reef so come on down we have new sets! Odd what you recall about Florida, I once traveled down there with our classmate John for spring break in an old VW in 1971. He got a ticket in Daytona for doing 20 in a 10mph. We hung with some Vietnam Vet bikers for awhile in the sticks.

It was shortly after the time him and Chris and Marty rented that "Tea Room" in Coram, NY that you visited I believe in 1976, when I won a 32 hour part-time job lottery for Brookhaven Parks to show they weren't Republican nepotists. That now has a sign attesting to its antiquity and is where Eleanor Roosevelt stopped during the Depression. It was a known solace for those in dire straights, a place one could starving still get a free cup of tea, next to the small brick post office and courtroom barely visible then and now like the "Tea Room" gone from flooding, disrepair and volunteer fire fighting drill. I recall one on the corner of "Old Homestead Lane" and Route 25, abandoned in Lake Grove that was burned one night by the FD.

The brick place in Coram was made from clay dug out of the ground just across Middle Country (25) in the former grass airfield which I sometimes wonder if Mrs. Roosevelt hadn't flown in, she was in the press having flown around at Tuskegee Airmen airfield once with a African-American pilot. They flew later out of North Africa for Italy as bomber escorts. Place is now an archaeology site I guess, I recall your visit. I think I heard the airmen's awards was put off another year? Gee I hope not.

Nancy and I are off to Tuftonboro Neck on Lake Winnipesaukee (like the Martin Scorcese American Express television ad) for the week to a small slab wood cabin a WWII nurse vet had built and left to her father, a former WWII Captain in the Marine Corps in the Pacific. We have to drop some chlorine into the 30' (Ed. - actually 23' deep the tides on Grand Manan are more) hand dug well, it didn't test very well. Interestingly, the Neck, once belonged to one of the first Chief justices of Canada, appointed after he went after (with other mysterious anonymous press help in London) the Governor Wentworth legacy of apparent prior extended family "nepotism".

Nearby Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, is billed as "America's Oldest Summer Resort", due to it's where royal Governor Wentworth had a place on the smaller now Lake Wentworth, with "Stamp Act Island" at its center. He survived the American Revolution the only former royal governor to as a governor, but appointed Governor of Nova Scotia. There's quite a bit of history there and the developer of the D.C. Holocaust Museum had a hand in the Wright Museum of WWII there in Wolfeboro Falls. I've heard Bob and Libby Dole bought a judge's place there a friend of theirs. I've read Wolfeboro is where Coretta King was hidden after the assassination of her husband Martin Luther King, Jr. There's an "ivy league" prep school there and quite a bit of arts organizing concerts and craft fairs etc. The airport's to become a gated community. Lakes Region it's called and not too far from the Science Center (live cougars, bears, raptors, deer, etc.) and Squam Lake where "On Golden Pond" was filmed. (Holderness, New Hampshire)