Young Love Cut Short by America's Fiercest Hurricane






Bascom Grooms and his sister, Rosalind

(NOTE: This story was first posted on Drye Goods for the Labor Day weekend of 2007)

On this date 77 years ago, Rosalind Grooms Palmer sat down at her typewriter in Key West, Florida and banged out a teasing, affectionate note to her 12-year-old kid brother, Bascom Grooms, who was visiting friends up the islands in the village of Tavernier.

She apologized for the brevity of the note and, perhaps to ease the guilt she felt at not writing more, enclosed 50 cents so Bascom could buy an ice cream sundae for himself and a young friend named Elizabeth. She told her brother that she’d like to be with him on Key Largo “enjoying the ‘squitoes and other varmints such as sand fleas,” but added that she wouldn’t be taking any trips for a while.

That wasn’t entirely true, but her travel plans weren’t exactly the kind she wanted to reveal to her little brother or to the family he was visiting. She would be joining her boyfriend, 19-year-old George Pepper, at the Matecumbe Hotel in Islamorada for the upcoming Labor Day weekend.

That note from Rosalind was the last communication Bascom would ever have from his sister. Five days later, she and George were killed when the most powerful hurricane in U.S. history came ashore in the Upper Keys.

Rosalind's note to her brother a few days before her death

I interviewed Bascom at his home in Key West in December 2002, when he allowed me to copy photos of him, his sister and George Pepper. The old sepia-toned photos tell a tragic story of young love that was cut short by the fiercest hurricane to ever make landfall in the U.S.

Rosalind was only 21 in August 1935, but she had already been through a brief, unhappy marriage to George Palmer, a U.S. Navy officer she’d met when Palmer’s ship docked in Key West. Rosalind – young, impulsive, fun-loving and beautiful – had fallen for the Navy officer, and they were married in Key West in 1933. They moved to San Diego, where Palmer’s ship, the destroyer USS Perry, was based.

But less than two years later, Rosalind suddenly appeared in Key West and said her marriage was over. Bascom recalled that she didn’t say much about her reasons for leaving her husband and filing for divorce.

Rosalind got her old job back as a court clerk. She was considered one of Key West’s most beautiful young women, and as soon as word got out that she was no longer married, lots of eager young men sought her attention.

Rosalind didn’t take her looks too seriously, however. She thought her legs were too skinny for her to be really attractive. She loved to dress well, and white high-heel pumps became a trademark of her wardrobe.

In early 1935, she met George Pepper, and soon she was again in love. Her new boyfriend was the nephew of Claude Pepper, who was just beginning his legendary career in Florida politics.

George had gotten a job as a mess hall steward at one of the work camps that housed World War I veterans working on a New Deal construction project in the Keys. The vets were building a highway from Miami to Key West.

Rosalind and George were gaa-gaa over each other. In July 1935 they went to a photographer’s studio in Miami and posed with various props for charmingly cheesy photos.

Rosalind Grooms Palmer and George Pepper, 1935

A day or so after Rosalind wrote the note to her brother she went up to Islamorada to meet George. They shot more pictures of each other on a pier, Rosalind in a knit dress and her ubiquitous white high-heel pumps, George in a white shirt and tie and summer slacks.

Rosalind Grooms Palmer and her white
high-heel pumps

But while George and Rosalind were enjoying each other's company on that long-ago Labor Day weekend of 1935, a tropical storm crossed the Bahamas into the Florida Straits. As it crawled slowly across the bathtub-warm water of the Straits, it began rapidly intensifying. By September 2 – Labor Day Monday – it had mushroomed into a seagoing monster with sustained winds of about 185 mph and gusts that may have exceeded 200 mph. By late Monday afternoon, the worst of the storm’s winds were starting to claw at the Upper Keys.

At a veterans’ labor camp at the foot of Lower Matecumbe Key, George Pepper was instructed to use his boss’s car – a big, heavy 1934 Dodge – to take some of the veterans’ wives to safety in Miami. Sometime around 5 p.m., George and Rosalind climbed into the big automobile and set out for the short drive to the Matecumbe Hotel to pick up the women.

They never reached the hotel. For weeks, survivors and rescue workers wondered what had become of them.

They finally got a clue to the grim fates of Rosalind and George on September 18, when rescue workers found the 1934 Dodge submerged in Florida Bay, about 100 feet from shore. The storm's rising winds may have literally blown the car off the causeway. After the storm, another man who'd been driving the same road at the same time as George said a gust of wind had shoved his car into a ditch.

That same powerful gust may have pushed the Dodge into the bay.

A diver found a pair of white high-heel pumps in the submerged car, but no other sign of the young couple.On September 19, rescue workers found Rosalind's body. The storm had hurled her onto Raccoon Key, one of the small, soggy islands that dot Florida Bay.

George’s body was found several weeks later. The storm’s ferocious winds had carried him across Florida Bay to Cape Sable at the tip of the Florida peninsula. The body was about 30 miles away from the car he'd been driving.

March 24-25, 1935: Washington Post Story Portrays Vets as Living in Island Paradise

NOTE: This post is the second in a series observing the 75th anniversary of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, which struck the Florida Keys on September 2, 1935.

By late March 1935, the Roosevelt Administration had for months been quietly sending hundreds of jobless World War I veterans to oceanfront work camps in the remote Florida Keys to work on a New Deal construction project. The vets were building a highway from Miami to Key West.

The work program had been out of the national spotlight but that changed on March 24 and 25, when the Washington Post published a two-part series about the down-and-out vets' presence in the Keys. The Post headline for the story of March 24 said the vets were partying in their island paradise.

Post reporter Edward T. Folliard's stories had a decidedly sarcastic and patronizing tone. His story of March 24 said the vets were "encamped on a pretty little coral island as working guests of Uncle Sam." The men had recently gone on a "booze rampage," Folliard wrote.

The 600 or so men in the Keys camps were casualties of the Great Depression. Many of them also had been psychologically scarred by combat in World War I. Today, their condition is known as post-traumatic stress disorder. In 1935, it was called shellshock.

For many of the vets in the Keys camps, life had been a constant struggle since they'd been discharged from military service after World War I ended in 1918. Even during the booming economy of the 1920s, they were troubled. They'd been plagued by depression and a sense of alienation. They'd had trouble holding down jobs, staying married, and raising families. Many of them drank far too much.

The economic catastrophe of the Great Depression had made their troubled lives even more chaotic. In 1932, about 40,000 desperate veterans gathered in Washington, D.C. seeking help from the federal government. The vets had been promised a $1,000 bonus -- about $15,500 in 2009 dollars -- for their wartime service, but payment wasn't due until 1944. The veterans who came to Washington in 1932 wanted Congress to pay them half of the bonus immediately.

President Herbert Hoover opposed the early payment, and in July 1932 he ordered General Douglas MacArthur to evict the men from federal property. MacArthur exceeded Hoover's orders, however, and used troops to chase the men out of the District of Columbia and set fire to their ramshackle camps.

Photos of the eviction were published in newspapers across the country. The incident helped turn public opinion against President Hoover and contributed to Franklin Roosevelt's landslide victory in the November 1932 election.

Roosevelt had campaigned on a pledge to help the "forgotten man," and after his inauguration in March 1933, jobless vets again assembled in Washington to urge early payment of their bonus. The vets were the epitome of the men Roosevelt had promised to help. Like Hoover, FDR also opposed paying the bonus early, but recalling Hoover's public relations blunder, he sought a way to help the vets while simultaneously getting them out of the nation's capital.

When Key West -- once one of the nation's most prosperous cities -- declared bankruptcy in 1934, Roosevelt Administration officials saw a chance to showcase the New Deal, put the vets to work, and get them far away from Washington. They decided to remake Key West as a tourist town.

In August 1934, the Roosevelt Administration's efforts to restore Key West were showcased in a New York Times editorial written by Julius Stone, who was in charge of the federal government's emergency relief operations in Florida. The federal government would use Key West's natural beauty and the labor of its residents to return the city to prosperity and demonstrate the effectiveness of the Roosevelt Administration's policies to pull the nation out of the Depression.

But in 1934, getting to Key West by car wasn't easy. Motorists had to use a combination of secondary roads and ferries. The journey was slow, and the ferries didn't operate during rough weather.

The solution was to build a major highway down the islands so tourists could easily drive from Miami to Key West. And the jobless vets were the ideal labor force for the project.

When the Washington Post reporter arrived, about 600 men were living in the camps and more were arriving every day. Their meals were provided at no charge, and they were being paid $30 a month for their work -- about $465 in 2009 dollars.

But Folliard had little sympathy for the vets' plights. His March 24, 1935 story focused on the "debauchery" in the work camps and said almost nothing about the construction work the vets were doing. The story of March 25 -- 75 years ago today -- briefly mentioned a bridge construction project the vets were working on, but again focused on politics and described the primitive work camps in terms that made them seem comfortable.

Folliard did not mention, however, that only a few months earlier, conditions in the camps had been so bad that two vets died from meningitis.

The photo at the top of this post shows one of the work camps in the Florida Keys that housed World War I veterans working on a highway construction project in 1935. The camp was destroyed by a hurricane that struck the Keys on September 2, 1935.