Big Flats and the 1972 Flood

 by Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

1972 was going to be Big Flats’ year! It was the 150^th anniversary of the town’s founding and they had big plans. There were events scheduled throughout the year including a historic fashion show, town reunion, baking contest, art show, canoe race, antique show, and massive birthday party. The highlight of the whole thing was to be the Big Flats Diamond Jubilee three-day extravaganza from June 22^nd through the 24^th. The first night, Thursday the 22^nd, would start with an evening carnival at the Community Park. The next day would feature a firematics event, plus concerts and square dancing. Saturday was to be a massive parade featuring floats from every community organization in the town. Too bad Hurricane Agnes had to come and ruin everything.

Big Flats Jubilee button, 1972

 

The rain from Hurricane Agnes started late in the night on June 21^st and it just kept coming. By the 23^rd, the entire hamlet of Big Flats, plus large swaths of the more rural portions of the town along the Chemung River were under water. Nearly 3,000 residents were forced out of their homes into shelters at schools in neighboring Horseheads. To make matters, two ruptured oil tanks in the hamlet of Big Flats spilled a half-million gallons of gasoline into the flood waters. As the waters receded, crews from Sun Oil, Arco, and Gulf attempted to remove the fuel, but it wasn’t until June 28^th that the fire department declared that the threat of explosions had passed and allowed residents back in. Hundreds of homes were damaged. James A. Markell’s home on Olcott Road was entirely swept off it’s foundation. An additional five homes had to be razed by the town due to structural damage.  

Canal Street in the Hamlet of Big Flats, June 23, 1972

 Big Flats farmers were hit hard. Bill Smith, a State Senator with a dairy farm on Rt. 352, lost 18 of his 75 animals, plus 200 acres of corn, 20 tons of hay, and 10 tons of cow feed. The family had managed to move most of their furniture to the second floor Thursday night and had to be rescued by boat out of a third floor window Friday morning. All told, Chemung County farmers lost $3.5 million in crops and livestock. Thanks to that oil spill, some 4,016 acres of land in Big Flats, Southport, Ashland, and Chemung all showed signs of contamination, rendering them unusable for planting for years to come. Even without the spill, the flood washed away between 6 inches and, in some places near the river, three feet of once-fertile top soil, meaning even uncontaminated farms would struggle come spring. 

Smith farm in Big Flats from the air, June 23, 1972

Big Flats from the air, June 23, 1972

 The oil also polluted people’s drinking wells. In a recent interview with Big Flats resident Gloria Dick, she recalled that her family had been lucky enough to have a well fed by a spring which came down off a hill behind their house. As one of the few homes with safe drinking water, they kept their neighbors supplied. They weren’t the only ones helping. Teens from YES (Youth Emergency Services) under the auspices of Corning Glass Works cleaned flood mud from homes throughout Big Flats. 

As for Big Flats Diamond Jubilee? It was postponed until September, but folks still had a pretty good time. The real tragedy was the town’s planned history book, 150 Years: Big Flats, New York by Mrs. Samuel Farr. The first run of 2,000 copies had finished printing at 4pm on June 22^nd and was ready for sale at the Jubilee, only for the flood to destroy all but 700 copies. To make matters worse, the original manuscript, plus all the original photos, maps, and drawings used in the book were lost, meaning there could be no second edition. 

Town leaders had hoped to make 1972 a year to remember. It was. Just not the way they hoped.

Half a Century of Computing Technology

 By Monica Groth, Curator

The coming exhibit, When Waters Recede: 50 Years Since the Flood of 1972, will remind visitors how much communications and computing technology has progressed in the past fifty years. When Hurricane Agnes struck Chemung County in 1972, the first commercially available handheld cellphone was still a decade away, and families waited months to hear from loved ones whose telephone lines were down. That year, the new PDP-8F “minicomputer” (which actually weighed 57 lbs.) could process information at a rate of only 0.667 megahertz – 5000 times slower than the computer I’m writing on today.

Technological advancements since then have certainly made monitoring and warning systems more effective, equipping people with accurate tools needed to predict danger and readily communicate emergency plans. Fifteen years after the flood, a system of electronic river level gauges and rain gauges fed data directly to the county’s Emergency Operation Centers through telephone lines and radio transmitters. The data was read by computers, which also received figures from surrounding counties and the National Weather Service. In 1987,
Civil Defense coordinator Gary Angus told the Star Gazette that the communication and computer equipment made it “easier for us to detect and forecast how storms will affect the county”. Flood Warning Service Operations Director Gregory Clark was pleased to announce data was the result of “real-time reporting. Meaning the information is current when called in,” adding that you can “never have enough information”.

Or can you? The computers of 1987 were still hundreds of times slower than they are today, with only a small fraction of the memory of a modern processor. The importance of real-time reporting and enough information storage was widely recognized and over time computer scientists engineered machines with the ability to store and analyze more information faster and more efficiently.

Computers bridging the years from 1972 to 2013 have been generously donated to our collection for the upcoming exhibit. Take a peek at what will be on display. Consider the computers’ specifications to compare their memory (measured as RAM, or short-term data storage in megabytes) and speed (measured as clock-speed, or number of processor cycles/second in megahertz).

PDP-8F  1972 

(This unit, which includes a punch card system and monitor is 5.5 ft tall, 22 in wide, and 30 in. deep)

                                           Memory: 0.000512 MB   

                                             Speed: 0.667 MHz 

Timex 1000  1982

                                      Memory: 0.002 MB (0.0036 MB maximum)

                                          Speed: 3.25 MHz

Compaq LTE Lite/25  1992

                                                   Memory: 2 MB (18 MB maximum)

                                                       Speed: 25 MHz

Compaq C140  1997

                                               Memory: 4 MB (6 MB maximum)

                                                   Speed: 40 MHz

HP Pavilion N3210  2000

                                               Memory: 32 MB (256 MB maximum)

                                                   Speed: 475 MHz

HP Chromebook 14-q010dx  2013

                                                   Memory: 2000 MB

                                                      Speed: 1400 MHz

The Optimist Club

 By Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

On the evening of June 22, 1972, the Elmira Pioneers were supposed to play Three Rivers at Dunn Field. Hurricane Agnes had other plans. She rained out the game and then flooded out the stadium. By the time her floodwaters receded, Dunn Field was a mess and the Elmira Pioneers were homeless. The last time that had happened in 1946, it was well over a month before the Pioneers were able to play there again. This time, though, they made it home in record time thanks to the help of five special women.

1972 had already been a bit of a rough year for the Pioneers. Years of falling attendance had lead the Kansas City Royals to drop them as a farm team. The new owners set the ambitious goal of 100,000 fans in attendance for the season, painting “100,000 or bust” on the back fence. Agnes’s floodwaters washed away portions of the fences in left and right field leaving only “000 or bust” behind. In the aftermath, eight inches of silt covered the field and mud coated much of the stadium seating. The concession stand was filled with mud and rotted food and the clubhouse wasn’t much better.  Much of the team’s equipment was ruined too. Some 60 dozen balls were lost, along with all the team’s gloves and most of the bats. On the plus side, team manager Len Johnson and his wife Alice were able to salvage and wash the team’s uniforms. They also temporarily housed players Carl Richardson, Dennis Queen, and Harry Shaughnessy whose homes had been destroyed by the flood.

Surveying the damage, team owners Kip Horsburgh and Carl Fazio didn’t have much hope in getting back into Dunn Field before August. They hadn’t counted on Alice Johnson and her friends. As the team played away game after away game, Alice Johnson, Jan Kern, Vicki Detter, Cathy Eldridge, and Marianne Relic did everything they could to bring the team home. Johnson, Kern, Detter, and Eldridge all had husbands on the team and they wanted them back. Marianne Relic worked as a secretary for Horsburgh and Fazio, but was no less determined. The team owners dubbed them The Optimist Club. Together, the five of them hosed down the seating, scrubbed bathrooms, and cleaned just about everything. They had help from the Elmira Parks Department, which worked on clearing and replanting the field, and some prisoners from the Elmira Correctional Facility, who helped with some of the heavy lifting.  In an interview, Alice Johnson claimed that her babysitter had put in 160 hours of work minding her kids while she and the other ladies cleaned. 

The Optimists at work, courtesy of the Elmira Star-Gazette

 All their hard work paid off. On July 18, the Elmira Pioneers returned to Dunn Field for their first home game in weeks. They played a double header against the Reading Phillies before a crowd of 1,177 fans. It was the highest turn out of the season thus far. They won the first game and lost the second. In between the two, the team honored the Optimist Club with special jackets and a round of applause. 

Detter, Relic, Eldridge, & Johnson, courtesy of the Elmira Star-Gazette

 

Delivering Christmas with the Arctic League

 By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

 This year, despite the pandemic, the Arctic League will deliver Christmas to the poor children of Chemung County, just as they have done every year since 1912, come hell or (literal) high water. Interestingly, the Arctic League didn’t start out as a charity. The League began as an amateur baseball league and social club which played nearly year-round and hung out at the Lagonegro cigar shop at 157 Lake Street. The men of the League were best known around town for playing in all types of weather and holding satirical political campaigns for club president.

 All that changed around the Christmas of 1912. League member Danny Sullivan encountered a homeless young orphan on his way to the Lagonegro cigar shop and decided to bring him along. Sullivan and his friends dubbed the boy Friday (owning to the day of the week) and pooled everything they had on them to treat him to dinner, new clothes, and medical attention. They even ended up helping him find a job and place to stay. The men found helping out so satisfying that they decided to do it again the following year. While the first few Christmases were funded entirely by League members, by 1917 they were receiving $733 from the public at large to put towards presents for the needy. Young Friday, whose real name was Jimmy Loftus, donated religiously to the cause under his pseudonym until his death in 1955.

 The pandemic isn’t the first challenge the Arctic League has faced. In the wee hours of December 20, 1921, the warehouse where the League’s presents were stored burned, destroying $5,000 worth of toys, clothes, and candy. The morning papers called for aid and, by the time the Lagonegro cigar shop opened at 8am, people were lining up to donate. Within 48 hours, they received $10,608, more than twice what they’d ever raised before. After a mad scramble to buy and pack up toys, the Arctic League was able to successfully deliver Christmas while still having money left over for the following year.

 In 1941, the League’s fundraising radio broadcast was interrupted by the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Begun in 1932, the annual broadcast featured performances by local musicians interspersed with pleas for money. At 2:30 pm on December 7, 1941, master of ceremonies Frank Tripp was handed the announcement of the attack by WENY station manager Dale L. Taylor, whose brother was stationed at Pearl Harbor. Tripp halted the music to read the news to the listening audience. He read off further updates as they became available throughout the rest of the show. 

Annual Arctic League broadcast with MC Frank Tripp, ca. 1940s

World War II presented some unique challenges for the Arctic League. Normally, individual volunteers would pick up packages at the League’s Elmira headquarters and deliver them to homes all over the county. Gas rationing, however, meant that volunteers didn’t have the fuel to get from Elmira to the outlying communities. Instead, Col. Geoffrey Galwey, the commander at the Holding and Reconsignment Point in Horseheads, volunteered his officers for the job. League board members rode with the soldiers to act as native guides and navigators. None of the soldiers were familiar with the Arctic League or their mission, and some were quite skeptical about using military resources to deliver presents. One particular lieutenant protested right up until he saw the reaction of a gold star family when he delivered their package. 

 

Arctic League volunteers delivering presents, ca. 1950s

 The flood of 1972 hit the Arctic League hard. Approximately $10,000 in clothes and toys were destroyed when their 114 West Second Street headquarters were inundated by 4 feet of water. Every year, the League ordered a thousand naked dolls which would be dressed in unique outfits made by community members. That year’s dolls had arrived the Wednesday before the storm and were lost to the water. An additional $1,000 worth of equipment was destroyed as well. A collection of clothes survived the flood, but the League chose to distribute them at the relocation centers rather than hold it back until Christmas. Although the building was cleaned out fairly quickly, League gave up their headquarters for a year so the Elmira Health Department could use it as a temporary infirmary.

Despite, or perhaps because of the community-wide devastation caused by the flood, the Arctic League exceeded that year’s collecting goal by $1,501.18, bringing that year’s total to $21,009.18. The extra funds certainly came in handy. Families who had never needed help before now found themselves without jobs or homes, let alone funds for Christmas presents. In the end, 200 volunteers delivered parcels containing 2 toys, cookies, and candy to 1,450 children on Christmas morning. An additional 2,000 children received free clothing and shoes at a 2-day distribution event on December 27th and 28th at the Arctic League headquarters. 

Doll given by the Arctic League, December 1972

 This year too, there is a greater need in our community as people have lost jobs to the shutdown. Instead of waiting until their usual mid-November for the usual start of their collection campaign, the Arctic League began their annual holiday appeal in early October. That wasn’t the only changes they were forced to make. Normally, every evening in December volunteers form assembly lines to pack parcels. This year, the packing routine had to be modified so volunteers could maintain proper social distance. The annual fundraising broadcast, normally held before a live audience at the Clemens Center, was instead broadcast from an empty WETM news station and featured pre-recorded performances rather than live music. Despite the changes, the Arctic League was able to raise $133,658.28 or 107% of their goal of $125,000. They are still looking for volunteers to deliver packages, but that will be different too this year. Instead of having people line up to collect packages early Christmas morning, volunteers should arrive on Christmas Eve Day, no earlier than 9am. See their website for details: http://www.arcticleague.com 

Tales from a Flooded Hotel

by Erin Doane, Curator

On Wednesday, June 21, 1972, the rains from Hurricane Agnes began to fall on the Twin Tiers. By the next day, the Chemung River was at 15 feet in Elmira, local creeks were overflowing, and people all throughout the region had begun evacuating their homes. On June 23, the river overtopped the dikes in Elmira and surged through the city’s streets, submerging businesses and homes under feet of turbulent, muddy water. Local first responders and the National Guard rushed to evacuate hospitals and rescue as many people as possible from the raging flood waters. Through it all, the Mark Twain Hotel in downtown Elmira became a refuge, but not everyone got out alive.

Aerial view of Elmira, June 1972

The Mark Twain Hotel turned into an island as flood waters rose and was cut off from the outside world. Reports in the Star-Gazette estimated that there were 1,500 to 1,700 people who had fled to the hotel, but no one seemed to know who sent them there as it was not a designated evacuation site. The truth was that there were only 194 people at the hotel during the flooding including employees, registered guests, and people who sought shelter at the hotel as flooding intensified.

Roseanne M. Whitted and Nancy Rios were both working at the Mark Twain Hotel during the Flood of 1972. Our archive has an oral history recording of them telling about that time. Roseanne remembered working in the Connecticut Yankee Lounge in the hotel and repeatedly checking to see if the flood waters were rising. “We were basically going to the Grey Street entrance not thinking of the North Main Street entrance where the water would come in first.  Then when that appeared it was like ‘Oh, my G-d!’” When the water started coming inside, patrons helped her start moving things out of the lounge and upstairs to protect them from the rising flood.

Both Roseanne and Nancy lived at the hotel as part of their compensation for working there and so they became stranded with the rest of the guests when downtown went under water. Nancy recalled that they did not get evacuated because it wasn’t considered necessary. “We felt safe the whole time that we were there,” she said. Since the power was out, all the food in the big refrigerators and freezers in the hotel had to be cooked. Fortunately, there were gas burners in the kitchen so that could be done, and it gave guests and staff fresh food to eat on top of the supply of C-rations that were delivered to the hotel by boat. They spent a lot of time playing cards, hanging out in the lobby, and conversing with the guests because there was nothing else to do.

View down Gray Street toward the Mark Twain Hotel as the flood raged

Among the guests stranded at the Mark Twain Hotel was an Eastern League baseball team, Three Rivers, that had been schedules to play against the Elmira Pioneers on Saturday, June 23. (An amusing side-note: the game appeared with other Easter League scores in the newspaper as “Three Rivers at Elmira, rain.” Dunn Field was actually under water.) When the flood waters washed through Bern Furniture, which was across Main Street from the Hotel, the players and umpires grabbed furniture as it floated by and pulled it into the hotel to save it. One table still had a plastic floral arrangement on it as it rode the current across the street. After the waters receded, the team had to wait for a tow truck to come and pull their bus out of the three feet of mud into which it had sunk while parked beside the hotel.

Others, who weren’t already guests at the hotel, went to it to take refuge from the rising waters. 25-year-old Richard Wein of Williamsport, Pennsylvania checked into the hotel with his wife and two young children after a harrowing experience. While fleeing from their home, their car got caught in flood waters. Richard was able to get his family onto higher ground but had to abandon their car. They hitchhiked to Elmira where they found shelter at the Mark Twain Hotel.

Edward M. McNulty and his wife Edna check into the hotel at 3:30am on June 23 to escape the impending flood.  Just two and a half hours later, Edward suffered a heart attack and died in their room. Edward was a well-respected man in the community and served as executive director of the Chemung County Council of Alcoholism. He was 62 years old. At 8:00am that same morning, the dikes overtopped, and the hotel was surrounded by raging waters. Everyone became trapped inside, including Edna and her dearly departed husband. It was not until the next day when the flood waters receded that they were able to leave.  

All those who had been holed up at the Mark Twain Hotel during the flood were sent on their way as soon as possible. Even those who had been living and working there like Roseanne and Nancy were forced to leave as the devastated city went into lockdown and a curfew was put in place. Cleaning and repairs to the hotel began almost immediately as the building was to continue serving as a refuge for those affected by the flood. The Federal Housing and Urban Development Agency (HUD) leased the second and third floors of the hotel to be used as homes for displaced flood victims over the age of 60. The senior housing officially opened just one month after the flood on July 24, 1972.

Mark Twain Hotel, 1974

A Clean Sweep

by Susan Zehnder, Education Director

Spring seems to be arriving at last. Things are looking greener, and there’s new interest in tidiness sparked by recent books and television programs on organizing. I’ve been wondering about cleaning tools, take brooms for instance. 

Ladies with push broom, April 1903

The word broom comes from the Anglo-Saxon for thorny shrub, and early brooms were just that, hand-made from twigs gathered together and tied to a stick. 

Early broom examples

 As a cleaning tool, similar brooms have shown up around the world. In parts of Asia, Han Chinese recognize Tomb Sweeping Day in early April. This 2,500-year-old holiday involves ritual cleaning as a sign of ancestral respect. Another sweeping tradition comes from Africa, where various cultures continue to sweep fenced-in areas in front of their homes as a proud sign of ownership. Having a well-swept yard invites good will and neighbors to visit. Bringing this tradition with them to the United States, enslaved Africans continued the practice. It’s a tradition that fit easily into the warmer southern parts of our country. Sweeping created an inviting outdoor space for people who had very little to call their own. A swept yard also eliminated worry of weeds and eliminated the impracticality of caring for a lawn. Patterns left in the dirt by sweeping, besides looking nice, were a helpful way to see if any snakes or undesirable elements had disturbed the area. 

Inside houses, smaller versions of brooms were regularly used to sweep ash, embers and debris near fireplaces. Benjamin Franklin brought sorghum to the new colonies in 1757 intending to use it to make better brooms. Sorghum corn is now called broom corn and while technically edible, it’s really a grass not a variety of corn.

Sorghum also known as broom corn

Forty years later, a Massachusetts farmer named Levi Dickinson made changes which improved the quality of brooms. Wanting a gift for his wife, he bundled just the tops of sorghum tassels and attached them to a long-handled stick.  With her new broom, Mrs. Dickinson could sweep cleaner. Word of her cleaning tool’s success spread and created demand for bundled sorghum brooms. Understandably, these finer brooms didn’t last, falling apart easily. Dickinson addressed this by inventing the foot-treadle broom machine, a device letting him make brooms faster. In less than ten years, Dickinson and his son were selling hundreds of similar brooms around the country. 

This broom from our collection would be a similar to Dickinson's broom. The brush strands have been gathered into a bundle and tied to a stick.

 

Broom from our collection, n.d.

One of the last big changes in broom design occurred before the turn of the 19^th century. The Shakers, a religious sect known for their beautiful craftsmanship and practical design of everyday items, started adding wire to secure the bristles creating a sturdier broom. They also invented a broom vise to flatten the brush. Up to this point, all brooms had been round. Using these flat brooms look familiar to us today. Sweeping with this kind of broom, a user was able to sweep those pesky hard to reach places. This kind of broom was also easier to store because it took up less space. 

By the 1830s there were over three hundred U.S. broom manufacturers producing close to 60,000 brooms a year. Less than twenty years later over a thousand broom manufacturing businesses were thriving and located throughout the Eastern United States. By the beginning of the twentieth century, motorized vacuums began to be popular. The broom boom subsided, and by the 1960s most of the country’s broom manufacturers closed. Now most brooms are imported and made from synthetic materials. There is a new interest in heritage craft broom making and these brooms cost more. Brooms are something everyone seems to have at least one of, somewhere. 

 

Clean up after 1972 Flood

This last picture from our collection, shows how handy brooms can be. Time to find mine.