On Tuesday, September 21, 1938, eleven days after my brother Walter R. Monahan was born, and while he and my mother were still in the hospital, a hurricane of cyclone proportions, which had come up the East Coast undetected by the U.S. Weather Bureau, struck with a 40 foot wall of water at Montauk in Long Island, crossed Long Island Sound and cut a path across the New England states. It hit Long Island at 2:30 p.m. and was in Montreal, Canada, by midnight. Seven hundred people were killed, seventeen hundred injured, and 63,000 people had lost their homes. A commercial airplane was blown off a Logan Airport runway. By Friday the 24th, the country realized that a disaster greater than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake or any Mississippi flood had ravaged New England. The W.P.A. Army and Coast Guard, numbering 100,000 men, went to work to get electric and telephone service back again.

Local 103 men worked around the clock until December with utility company employees and equipment, restoring power all over New England. My father did not get home to see his second son (Richie) until Thanksgiving. He was working and living on a line truck on the Connecticut River in Vermont.