After wading through 26 pages of international and domestic news in the September 21 issue of the New York Times, readers in New York and New England would have seen, nearly hidden in the bottom left-hand corner of page 27, a short article on an approaching hurricane, which had been born a few weeks earlier in Africa. On September 4, a French weather observer at the Bilma oasis in northeastern Niger noted a slight disturbance in the atmosphere, perhaps as mundane as shifting winds or a thunderstorm. Although no one realized it at the time, that disturbance became an easterly wave that morphed into a Cape Verde–type hurricane, which marched across the Atlantic, arousing the attention of meteorologist Grady Norton.
Norton had joined the US Weather Bureau in 1915. His early assignments focused on general forecasting, but he switched to hurricanes after an affecting encounter in late September 1928. On the way to visiting relatives in Florida, he stopped to watch as men shoveled dirt into a trench filled with the decomposing bodies of people killed by the Lake Okeechobee Hurricane. He overheard a woman behind him say, “There’s something wrong with them forecasters or Joe would have got away in time.” Norton later recalled, “I took what that poor woman said to heart, and I knew then and there that what I wanted to do most in life was to prevent such senseless destruction.”
Norton got his big chance when he became chief hurricane forecaster at the bureau’s Jacksonville office just a few months before the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. The tragic outcome of that devastating storm, especially the great loss of life, only increased his determination to improve forecasts. So when he heard via radio on September 16, 1938, that a Brazilian steamer, the SS Alegrete, had reported a very low barometric reading and hurricane-force winds about 1,000 miles northeast of the Leeward Islands, Norton sprang into action, focusing all his attention on the approaching storm.