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Author and Stanly County native Willie Drye will be presenting “Hazel, Andrew and Me: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Live with Hurricanes” at the Stanly County Senior Center on Sept. 19.
His 45-minute presentation includes videos and photos from three of the most powerful hurricanes in history. It will begin at noon at the Senior Center at 283 North Third St. in Albemarle. There is no admission charge.
Drye was a reporter and editor for newspapers in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, and wrote about hurricanes and other topics for National Geographic News for 15 years. His presentation explains how his experiences with Hurricane Hazel in 1954 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992 led him to write his first book, “Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.”
The narrative nonfiction book tells the story of a long-ago hurricane that made landfall in the Florida Keys on Labor Day Monday, Sept. 2, 1935. That storm is still the most powerful hurricane to strike the U.S. The storm’s official death toll of 408 included about 260 World War I veterans who had been sent to the Keys by the federal government to work on a highway construction project linking Miami and Key West.
Drye was 5 when Hurricane Hazel devastated the coasts of North Carolina and South Carolina in October 1954. After the storm he went with his parents to Oak Island near Wilmington to help relatives who’d lost their home. The destruction of Hurricane Hazel — still the most powerful hurricane to strike North Carolina — left a lasting impression on him.
In August 1992, Drye was a newspaper reporter in South Florida when Hurricane Andrew made landfall there. He was not near the worst of Andrew’s winds but saw the storm’s massive destruction in Florida City and Homestead soon after its landfall. Andrew is the third-most powerful hurricane to strike the continental U.S.
Seeing Andrew’s destruction prompted Drye to start researching hurricanes, and his research led him to the story of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.
He was intrigued by the complexity of the story he uncovered.
“Hurricane stories are dramatic and compelling and full of tragedy,” Drye said. “But the plots are simple: The storm forms, comes ashore, the survivors pick up the pieces and move on. But the story of the Labor Day hurricane had layer upon layer of complexity.
“It happened in the middle of the Great Depression, when the world was suffering and headed for the chaos of World War II. The tragedy of the veterans, who were left in harm’s way by the construction supervisors, added another layer of complexity. Their deaths made it a national news story and prompted investigations that threatened President Roosevelt’s reelection chances in 1936. But the story started fading soon afterwards and was all but forgotten within a few years.”
The first edition of “Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935” was published by National Geographic in 2003. The book became the basis for a documentary film, “Nature’s Fury: Storm of the Century,” that premiered on the History Channel in 2006. An updated and expanded second edition of the book was published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing in 2019.
Drye’s classmate, John Fisher of Bald Head Island, will assist with the presentation. Signed copies of the book will be available afterwards.
Drye grew up in Misenheimer and is a 1968 graduate of North Stanly High School. He is a U.S. Army veteran and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.