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were only halfway, and I didn't think we would make it.”
The mayor’s two-bedroom house was crowded—“there were at least 10 or 15 children, most of them under 7, and there were some elderly people.”
‘•The next morning we looked up and there was no roof—and we had thought we were safe!” she exclaimed.
“Our house is standing. We lost shingles and part of the roof and the furniture’s soaked, but we’re alive.
“We’re going back, but I’ll never stay for another gale warning,” she insisted.
She puased and then said: “Please thank Louisiana for me. Everyone has been wonderful.”
*	* *
NEXT TO HER, Mrs. David Peranich of Bay St. Louis, homeless, sat holding her sister’s 9-month-old baby. Her own three tots mingled with the other refugees.
“I was scared. I knew we were dead,” the tired blond admitted and she recalled the night she and her sister and brother-in-law and their combined eight children spent huddled in the sister’s Waveland attic.
“My husband was working for a power company when it struck. I left our |
“Ecftfie trlea t o come up,
but the refrigerator had float- , ed into the way, and he couldn’t get up the ladder.
“It was miserable. The rain came in and the kids were cold ■and we feared snakes would climb up the tree.
“The water frightened me more than the wind. I wouldn’t bear for my children to drown. I kept saying, ‘If my children are going to drown, let us be electrocuted first.’
“Then Eddie said the water had stopped.
When the eye came it was so nice and calm, but you , could hear the wind nearby. It sounded like the roar of a ; train.
“Then the eye started! moving, and you could feel ; and hear the winds coming j closer. The roof started shaking and I was afraid to stay because I knew if it went, we’d go with it.
“BY THAT TIME, Eddie said the water was going down faster, maybe faster, than it’d come in, so we came down. He found a partially dry mattress and put seven of the children on it. We put my niece Beth and her Siamese cat Chin Chin — she held him the whole time — in a baby