22 WBM JJust more than 24 hours beforehand, when marine radios revealed a hurricane First responders wade through thigh high floodwaters on Harper Avenue at Carolina Beach. Second building on left is the former bus station, now Laney Real Estate. was heading toward the beach the evening of October 14, 1954, Cecil and Silvey Robinson stayed up all night listening. At dawn the next day, they loaded up the children and Silvey drove inland. Her husband and her brother stayed behind and weathered the storm in their boat, the Dixie Rebel. That same day, classmates Marie Ashworth and Millie Vestal, now Millie Knowles, woke up to what they believed to be an ordinary Friday morning. Ashworth’s father, Robert “Bob” Ashworth was the North Carolina Department of Transportation district engineer who had moved with his wife Eugenia, little Marie, her two older brothers Gene and Bobby, and elder sister Lib to the then unnamed Airlie Road in the 1930s to build Waynick Boulevard Knowles’ father, Marion Calhoun “M.C.” Vestal, was the volunteer Wrightsville Beach Fire Chief and lived at the corner of Lindy Lane and South Channel Drive on Harbor Island with his wife, Mildred, and only child Millie. When both Ashworth and Knowles awoke that morning, their fathers were gone. “It was just a nice fall early morning when we woke up,” Ashworth says. “Our telephone rang about 4:30 am and it was my father being called into work. Then about two hours later he called my mother and said, ‘Get out now, and do not try to take anything with you.’” It was two days before Ashworth’s fifteenth birthday and early that morning she and her mother heeded her father’s warnings to leave the house immediately. With none of her siblings living at home at the time, Ashworth says she and her mother were out of the driveway in the family’s navy blue Pontiac by 7 am. “We got in the car, turned right going toward what we called Dead Man’s Curve on Airlie Road and the water was already pouring over the road there so my mother was calm enough and had sense enough to drive through it very slowly and we got to the other side without the motor stalling out,” she says. october 2014
October 2014
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