Remembering the 'Ash Wednesday Storm' of 1962
I was stationed at the Coast Guard base in Cape May, NJ when the storm hit. My first experience with adverse ‘ocean’ weather was one for the history books. The resident old-timer’s in Cape May still refer to it as the “Great Nor’easter." There is quite a bit of old home-movie footage showing the aftermath of that storm on Youtube. I have several 35mm slides packed away in a box somewhere….
While the diurnal tides here on the panhandle of Florida usually range around 1.5 feet, the semi-diurnal tides at Cape May commonly range 6 feet or more, and this storm hit during a three-day period of unusual high (spring) tides, which along with the onshore 60 knot wind, is what did the damage.
With some brief preparation, we were able to keep things anchored down and fairly intact at our Coast Guard base which was located at the edge of town near the inlet, but the boardwalk area and downtown got hammered big time. The old Beach Tower Restaurant (at 8:32 in the following video) was located near our base. My parents had visited a few weeks prior and had stayed at the "Stockton Inn", pictured at 12:06 in the same video.
Cape May, the Wildwood’s, Ocean City, and Avalon were wrecked, and the storm cut the old Steel Pier at Atlantic City in half. Some of the historic structures in Cape May, like the old Boardwalk Convention Hall pictured below (where I had attended an event a few days before the storm), along with the street that it was on— gone or wrecked beyond repair!
I have an old 15” bronze three-bladed propeller attached to a 16” length of 2” bronze prop-shaft that washed up on the beach during that storm; a 38-lb souvenir that is currently setting by my front door. A reminder of my initiation to the adventure of living on the Atlantic coast!
/fl