Forty-one years ago this March, the citizens of Fort Wayne, Indiana, were in a desperate battle against rising floodwaters threatening to utterly engulf their city.
And they were losing.
Mountains of piled-up, heavy winter snow—81 inches had fallen that season—combined with an unseasonably warm March thaw, had swollen the St. Joseph, St. Marys, and Maumee Rivers to historic and cataclysmic levels.
Already, after four days of struggle, much of the city was under water and evacuations were underway. Before leaving their homes and businesses, citizens piled furniture high in their living rooms and hung bags of belongings from ceiling fixtures. Rising floodwaters were sweeping in the front doors and slushing out the back. All around the city, levees became so waterlogged they started to leak; 69-year-old dikes were failing.
With the heart of Fort Wayne in eminent danger as water continued to rise, and no more civil or governmental resources left to help, an exhausted yet intrepid Fort Wayne Mayor Winfield “Win” Moses did the unthinkable.
He called the kids.
“They were the only hope we had,” Moses said recently in an interview. Within hours, hundreds—then thousands—of Fort Wayne school children began answering the “urgent need” for help, Moses said. Boys dressed in corduroy slacks and sweater vests, and girls in ruffled peasant blouses, overalls, and monogrammed sweaters filled the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum and lined the 8 miles of city dikes.
And in six days, some 10,000 school children had filled, hauled, and stacked more than a million sandbags, reports claimed—used to buttress the leaking dikes against the three rivers that were drowning their town. Teenagers out in the freezing rain—some with no boots or gloves—were passing sandbags and singing, hour after unrelenting hour, floodlights illuminating their work.
But they beat back the rivers. “It was a children’s crusade, no doubt about it,” Moses recalled. His memories have clearly not receded, unlike the floodwaters. He estimated that teenagers comprised 60 percent of the flood-fighters.
“I meant it then and still mean it today,” said the retired Indiana pol now living in North Carolina. “The kids of Fort Wayne saved our city.”
A Strong Community
Former “kid” Anne Duff, now an at-large member of the Fort Wayne Community School Board, was a high school junior in 1982. She remembers the fire department coming to her family’s front door one evening and telling them they had to evacuate. Their home was along the swollen St. Joe’s but thankfully escaped damage. Her parents fled to a hotel, and she stayed with a friend. But soon she and her friends were out in the effort.
“My friends and I went down to the Coliseum to help bag, but the lines were so long and massive that we couldn’t join in,” she recalled in a recent interview. The sight of the children’s army shocked but didn’t surprise her, she said. What did amaze here was the spectacle of community members from all corners of the city, banding together.
Duff and her friends watched as civil emergency leaders showed the kids how to bag the sand, and carry it, how to safely pass it down a line of people and ultimately stack it on the dikes.
“Honestly, the kids were having a terrific time,” she said. “It was an incredible adventure. It was the best memory I have of my entire high school career!”
While not seeing it then, Duff said she now realizes that the value of community service was evident. “They call us ‘The City That Saved Itself,’ and I guess that’s true,” she said. “But we didn’t know we were saving the city. We were just doing what needed to be done. Who else would do it?” She’s also convinced that the kids today would do the same if needed. “We’d just band right back together,” she said, with plucky Hoosier confidence.
Rivers Run Deep
In 1793, the United States government dispatched General Anthony Wayne to “subdue the local Native Americans and build a lasting U.S. presence,” according to Historic Fort Wayne, Inc. A permanent fort named after the general was completed on October 20, 1794. The area was chosen, historians recall, because of its fertile grounds and the convergence of three major rivers: the Saint Joseph River, the Maumee River, and the Saint Marys River. When those rivers started inching their way toward record highs on Saturday, March 13, it was the beginning of high school basketball sectionals. Former Mayor Moses remembers warning residents not to attend the games that were held in other, less threatened areas of the region.
“Many of them went anyway, and came home to flooded homes and cars,” Moses recalled.
“At first, it was the Nebraska area, and it went underwater pretty quickly,” he said. “That’s when everyone went on full alert.” The typical first responders rallied: city emergency workers, the National Guard, the fire and police departments, the American Red Cross. But it still wasn’t enough.
City school buses hauled the volunteers to designated sandbag sites after Moses and his logisticians “bought just about every sandbag ever made,” Moses said. And cafeteria workers at Fort Wayne Community Schools donated 3,000 meals and packed 10,000 sandwiches for workers. Those who couldn’t bag and lay sand began holding clothing drives and rendering other personal aid.
“It was just a sight to behold,” he said. “And it was just the beginning.” But it wasn’t until Tuesday night that Moses asked the superintendent of Fort Wayne Schools to do what hadn’t been done before, that the real tides started turning. “I said, ‘You’ve got to close the schools and let the kids come help this fight,’” he said. “They are our only hope.”
The superintendent told Moses that he’d close the schools, but he couldn’t guarantee that all the kids would report for duty. Moses closed them for a week. There were nine public and parochial secondary schools, and all canceled classes Wednesday and Thursday, March 17 and 18, he said, so students could join the effort. Kids of all ages wanted to help, but the backbone were the high schoolers. They showed up excitedly waving their parental permission slips, Moses said, and quickly got to work. A few hundred at first, and then they just kept coming.
It was the epitome of a lesson in citizenship. “We’re always teaching them to show love and concern for their neighbors,” Guenther K. Herzog, the principal at Concordia Lutheran High School, told a local reporter at the time. His school closed for two days so students could volunteer.
The President’s Visit
Their efforts did not go unnoticed. National news media soon turned up in droves to report on the crusade. So heavy was the coverage that President Ronald Reagan, who had been barnstorming in Oklahoma, heard the news reports of the Fort Wayne flooding and had Air Force One diverted on the return to Washington, D.C. He wanted to personally tour the area.
Moses said he was out surveying relief efforts when he got the news of the president’s impending visit. He did not believe it would actually happen.
But it was true. Moses soon found himself on the Fort Wayne Airport tarmac with the president of the United States and the press gaggle that accompanies him.
The president, his aides told reporters, had decided on the spur of the moment to stop in Fort Wayne. He’d seen the morning television reports about northern Indiana’s worst flooding in nearly 70 years, reporters wrote. A Washington Post report noted that stories of “washed away crops, inundated houses and businesses troubled him greatly,” and he wanted the citizens to know it.
In brief remarks at the airport, Reagan told reporters he wanted Fort Wayne “to know that their neighbors in the rest of the country were thinking of them.” He also remarked on the incredible community effort. Things were indeed devastating, Reagan said, but “would have been far worse had it not been for thousands of volunteers including young people who have been working literally around the clock.”
He said he came to visit because he wanted Fort Wayne to know “how much all their neighbors in this country feel for them; how concerned we are. … Maybe this will be a good time, from coast to coast, and border to border, for our people to remember their neighborliness.”
Reagan’s presidential limousine, “The Beast,” was soon prowling city streets surveying damage and flood-fighting efforts. People poured out onto the streets to catch a glimpse of the president. Moses said they took the president to the corner of Herman and Sherman Streets to witness a sandbagging effort in action. Hundreds of local teens were there, caked in mud but sporting huge smiles.
The above Washington Post article noted that the president was “clad in white shirt, crisp black suit and low-cut, rubber boots borrowed from a farmer, standing in a line of people to help pass sandbags up to the river’s edge as throngs of onlookers, reporters, and cameras watched.”
After slinging sandbags, Reagan went to the Precious Blood Catholic Church to meet with residents who’d been forced to evacuate their homes. Moses recalled that Reagan climbed on top of a table inside the temporary Red Cross center at the church and addressed the evacuees. “I think you’d all be very proud to see those youngsters up there pitching those sandbags. I did it for a couple of minutes, then stepped in some sticky mud and lost a boot,” news reports recalled Reagan saying.
The president added that the volunteerism exhibited in Fort Wayne “makes me realize we haven’t got anything to be afraid of in this country.”
By week’s end, thanks to an unimaginable community effort, it was clear the battle had been won. More than 300,000 bags of sand were planted by local folks. The floodwaters receded, and the rivers returned to their beds. And so did the weary teenage Hoosiers.
A Heroic Deed
Final damage estimates for the city were $56.1 million. More than 9,000 people were forced to flee their homes, and 1,820 residences and 260 businesses were damaged. But it could all have been so much worse, Moses said. Some 1,860 homes and properties were saved. No instances of looting or vandalism occurred and there were no injuries, Moses said.
Months after the flood, the city paid for 12,000 kids to attend Kings Island Amusement Park in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a way of saying thanks. They also convinced a young, up-and-coming Indiana rocker named John Mellencamp to perform at an appreciation rally at the Coliseum. “It made the kids and their parents proud,” Moses said. A year later, Moses and other city officials traveled to Washington, D.C., to receive an “All-America City” designation presented by Reagan.
Today, in Fort Wayne, at the southeast corner of Promenade Park, near the intersection of Superior and Harrison streets, sits a swirling, 19-foot-tall, 28-foot-wide, white sculpture named “Convergence.” According to city leaders, it represents the flow of Fort Wayne’s three rivers coming together, which has unified the region and its people. “It represents the energy of all people in town who want to make a difference,” said Fort Wayne philanthropist Richard D. Waterfield.
Moses said the rescue effort “restored people’s faith in the kids of Fort Wayne. … And it was the most exciting week of my life, slip-sliding in the mud. I felt good knowing that those kids would grow up to run our city.”
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
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