AAshworth and her mother would make it safely to her great aunt’s house in Winter Park, but the same could not be said for the Vestal family until much later in the day. As the fire chief, Knowles said it was her father’s duty to travel door-to-door warning residents about the coming storm. “Back then the news was nothing like it is today and he was knocking on doors telling people to get off the beach because that is what he did every hurricane,” Knowles said. “Mother and I were at the house waiting until daddy came back to get us and he finally came and said, ‘We have got to get out of here, look outside!’” What the family would see outside around noon that day was water from Banks Channel pouring into their front yard and into the first-floor apartment of their two-story home. After packing a few suitcases and setting out to check on her mother’s friend, LaRue McKenna, the Vestals encountered an obstacle. “We got in the car, which was an old green Packard, went around Above: Boats were swept from the Intracoastal Waterway in Airlie Road yards. Right: Silvey Robinson, one of the first residents to return to Wrightsville Beach after Hazel, captured this photo of the Dixie Rebel, her husband’s boat, in which he weathered the storm. The high flood waters carried the boat above the pilings before the hull was punctured. Here the boat is tied to a light pole beside Waynick Boulevard. The Robinsons’ daughters, Esta and Joan, in grass hula skirts, are shown looking in the hole. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH MUSEUM OF HISTORY PHOTO BY SILVEY ROBINSON the traffic circle and water started coming in the doors and it flooded the car completely,” Knowles said. “In that storm, with a couple suit-cases and carrying our dog Poochy, we started walking. The current was bad, the wind was blowing and we carried everything all the way up to the Causeway with the water up to my waist.” There, parked on the Causeway, like a lifeboat in a storm, was an old truck ready to take any remaining residents off of the island. “I don’t know who was in it but I had never been so glad to see a truck in my life,” Knowles says. “It gives me chills just thinking about it to this day. … I don’t know what we would have done if it was not there.” To her knowledge Knowles says they were the last people to leave the island and would not reach a family friend’s house on Parkway Drive next to Hugh McRae Park until dark. Waiting the storm out during the day proved to be a frighten-ing and long affair for Ashworth and her family. 24 WBM october 2014
October 2014
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