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forever to live in tents and eventually to build New Shawneetown four miles inland. As the mayor said, the lives of two generations had been ruined; they owed it to their children to relocate.
    Throughout the countryside villages went under, automobiles and farm equipment swirled away and sank, permanently wrecked beneath the flood. Houses caved in, floated off. Some people, refusing to leave, chopped holes in their ceilings and frantically tried to store furniture in their attics before huddling on rooftops to be rescued—if they were lucky. Livestock swam until dead, their carcases caught in trees.
    Although Harrisburg was more than twenty miles from the Ohio, backwaters seeped into the town, rising an inch an hour for several days, inundating eighty percent of the area and sending its citizens into refugee centers. Harrisburg’s water and gas plants shut down; lumps of coal became precious; water had to be sent in five-gallon containers from Marion and Eldorado.
    It was an economic disaster and a medical one. Women gave birth in schoolrooms, even in boats. Fears of cholera and typhoid epidemics spread, and exposure led to scores of pneumonia cases. Because Eldorado had eight physicians and was the closest town to the flood safe from the waters—Muddy, only four miles away, had to be evacuated—the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the National Guard, and the U.S. Naval Reserve made it their headquarters. The Red Cross set up headquarters in the city hall and in the American Legion hall, and the mayor of Eldorado issued a proclamation asking people to open their homes to the refugees and to donate to the relief fund. Twelve hundred refugees poured into Eldorado, filling churches, lodges, the bank, the Cinderella Ballroom. They arrived in boats on the outskirts of town, soaked and helpless. The First Christian Church became a kitchen and a dining hall, with volunteer women cooking three meals a day for the homeless. Steamers put in at Shawneetown to take people out on the swollen river. Motorboats arrived by train from Chicago and from as far away as Boston for the rescue effort, which was frustrated by a freeze that followed the rains. Men had to dynamite the ice to free the boats, and the weather made the medical situation more dangerous. Eldorado doctors offered free vaccination against typhoid, diphtheria, and smallpox.

    Like everyone else in Eldorado, Dale and his parents worked to aid the refugees. Noma cooked. Peck was out with L&N railroad crews rescuing people and providing boxcars for shelter. Dale’s Sunday-school class donated eight dollars to the relief fund, and his grammar school welcomed refugee children and their teachers during the nearly two months that it took for the waters to subside.
    The flood became a decisive influence on Dale’s vision of his personal future. In this spectacle of human dependancy, everyone praised the Eldorado doctors whose work, Illinois Governor Henry Horner among· others said, prevented epidemics and kept the death toll in Little Egypt to around forty. Prominent among these doctors was Lee Pearce, whose father had founded and run the Eldorado Hospital before turning it over to his son. It was after the ’37 flood that Dale began talking about becoming a doctor and started paying attention to Dr. Pearce’s daughter, Helen Jean, who was just Dale’s age and in school with him. By the time the two entered high school, Dale was seeing a lot of Helen Jean. She followed his athletic feats, they went to the movies together—there were three picture shows in Eldorado then—and he began dropping by the Pearces’ house regularly.
    Helen Jean was a small, pretty girl with short brown hair—kewpie-doll-cute was how some people described her. She was neither as hard-driving nor as successful as Dale in school—as a doctor’s daughter, she did not have to be—and socially she was above him, but with his brains and ambition they were a natural match. Noma Cavaness was jealous of