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Dunn, Jacksonville’s assistant director of hurricane forecasting, was probably a bit of both. When his predictions were off, he would arrive at the station dripping wet and dry off as he worked. Cool and resourceful, Dunn had earned a reputation as one of the best mappers in the Bureau. He was about ten years younger than Norton, taller and broad-shouldered, with a craggy handsomeness. Both men were farm boys — Norton grew up on an Alabama dirt farm, Dunn on a Vermont dairy farm — and both had a dry humor. In most other ways, they were poles apart.
    Norton was folksy, Dunn was reserved. Norton, intuitive; Dunn, analytical. Norton trusted empirical observations; Dunn was a stickler for mathematical precision. Dunn loved to squaredance; Norton had two left feet. Dunn would write the definitive book on Atlantic hurricanes. Norton avoided putting much in writing. He believed that you never track the same storm twice. Their different approaches reflected the changing state of meteorology in 1938. However individual their styles, though, on the Friday night of September 16, 1938, the two men were in accord. With another killer storm in their sights, they were not taking any chances.
    In the thirties, without sophisticated tools to guide them, forecasters relied almost entirely on surface observations. Data came in to the Weather Bureau continuously from shortwave radio transmitters and a Teletype network linked to every major port in the Caribbean. As they received additional information, Norton and Dunn located the storm within the Caribbean and within the context of the prevailing atmospheric conditions. According to their best estimates, it was sauntering at twenty miles an hour due east, and within the system, cyclonic winds were whirling at 109 miles an hour.
    Until Benjamin Franklin picked up a Boston newspaper one day in 1743, storms were assumed stationary, having no forward motion. Franklin read about a storm in Boston and realized that the same rains had visited Philadelphia the night before, spoiling his plans to observe a lunar eclipse. From this he deduced that storms could travel great distances. Nine hundred miles of warm open water — the nourishment that hurricanes thrive on — separated this storm from Miami. It was centered about 450 miles north of San Juan and east of the Bahamas. Barring any change in direction, it would hit the Bahamas Monday night and drive straight into Dade County sometime on Tuesday, September 20.
    Saturday, September 17
    On Saturday morning Floridians woke up to the sound of Grady Norton’s easy drawl: “A tropical disturbance of dangerous proportions is gathering in the Caribbean. Traveling at twenty miles per hour in an easterly direction, it should reach the Miami-Dade area sometime Tuesday morning. Every precaution should be taken in the face of this dangerous storm.”
    As the hurricane developed, Norton issued so many weather updates, he became known across the state as Mr. Hurricane, his voice as familiar in Florida as Arthur Godfrey’s broadcasting from the pink mirage of Miami’s Roney Plaza. Norton’s report was the first statewide storm warning ever broadcast in Florida. Twenty-five stations carried the alert, and from the Keys to Miami’s Collins Avenue the response was immediate and intense.
    Remembering Labor Day 1935, anxious residents began barricading their homes and businesses, drydocking their boats, clearing out of the path of the storm. The Red Cross called up extra relief workers, pulling them from New York and New England and dispatching them to Florida. The Coast Guard sent radio trucks to outlying areas of the state. WPA (Work Projects Administration) and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) workers received immediate orders to begin evacuating camps in the Keys. Miami newspapers reprinted photographs of the ghastly devastation of ’35 under headlines that asked is it happening again?
    Norton and Dunn were determined the answer would be no. During