Hurricane Celia Hits Corpus Christi
We rode out the storm in my mother's 3 bedroom house on the southern side of town. We were lucky, because we didn't lose any windows and had minimal water damage inside the house. A very large number of limbs down that eventually became this huge set of limbs piled up in the front of everyone's house going down the street.
We were out of power for a number of weeks. Each evening, the kids on the block would all get together and gather around and look up at the sky and tell stories.
My grandparents had been moved to a nursing home in Corpus after my grandfather's stroke. We went over there and found out that the upper floor had collapsed and that all of the residents had been moved downstairs during the storm.
My grandmother was scared out of her wits that we had been killed in the storm. My mother had to check them out of the nursing home and have them stay with us until some sanity returned to Corpus Christi.
Besides the loss of electricity, there was no telephone service. My father's father made a special trip down from Houston to check up on us and make sure that we were OK. This always seemed really out of character for him, because my father's parents were are odds with my mother after the divorce. They always managed to blame my dad's mental illness on my mother or felt that she just needed to stay with him through it all.
I managed to miss his visit as I had cobbled together a bicycle from some parts around the house and I had gone exploring around the neighborhood.
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