I graduated Prestonsburg High School in 1977 and I remember my senior year, just like most, as a season of dreams starting to be fulfilled. It was a season of blooming, as I recall. Don and I were dating. Tennis was a real focus for me, I played tennis every single day. I was a football statistician, a pretty big deal for a girl in Prestonsburg. I also was a lifeguard at Archer Park, the biggest of all deals. Oh I was one fine thing, driving around town in my faded red Toyota that sometimes wouldn't go in to reverse. Often the football team would come to my rescue and push my car backwards out of my parking space at the high school. In the winter months I worked at my dad's drug store which was also a hang out for the cool kids. In the spring my grandmother fell and broke her hip. Nannie was my mom's mom and she lived in a little apartment across the street from us. Nannie had to be taken to a hospital in Lexington for surgery and of course mom went with her. It was just dad and I and the pets in our house in Blackbottom near the Big Sandy River. In April 1977, the rain started to fall. It fell hard for 4 days. Black ominous clouds filled our skies for 4 days. Prestonsburg received over 6 inches of rain, and I relied on my dad to calm me and tell me what to do with mom being away with Nannie. On the day when it became clear that Prestonsburg was going to flood, we had to move all the merchandise at Fountain Korner. The Burke brothers decided the safest thing to do was to carry all the contents from the store, every candy bar, camera, cosmetic, Coke, and Coumadin had to be hauled upstairs to the empty offices. Dad let me bring my cat and my dog up to the store with me and let them stay in Ethel's office in the back. It was all hands on deck as items were pulled from peg boards, greeting cards were put in to boxes and carried up the steep stairs. All the Fostoria glassware had to be carefully packaged. Easter was near, so the shelves were full with Easter baskets from Russell Stover candies. All of those baskets had to be carried as well. The glass bottles of the perfumes were delicate and had to be carefully packed. Our merchandise was our life, our future and it didn't matter if they were ruined by flood mud or breakage. The merchandise had to be protected.
I remember standing there and listening to the grown ups talking about the '57 flood. High on the wall in the restaurant part of the store was a large clock. I remember the grown ups saying that in '57 the water reached the clock. I also remember seeing ambulances going by on Court Street taking the residents of Mountain Manor from the low part of town where it still sits to the old Prestonsburg General Hospital. The hospital was near where Mountain Muse is now. The residents of the nursing home were protected at the hospital. As the day wore on we moved all that stuff up the stairs. We were exhausted. Dad told me that I needed to take Little Bit and Kitty and go on home, that I should park my powder blue Nova at Uncle Johnny's and walk home. I did just that and I remember crying as I walked to Blackbottom. Due to the nature of the neighborhood and the nature of flooding, the part of the neighborhood on University Drive floods before our property which is right on the river. So my neighbors across the street had some water in their homes, but we didn't. I nervously waited for dad to come home, I didn't want to be alone. Thankfully dad made it home. He had to park his car in the upper parking lot behind Kentucky/West Virginia Gas Company, which for the youngsters is that area upon the hill behind Wendy's. Dad had to wade in flood water that was over University Drive and he had a black garbage bag full of money since the bank was closed. It was a scary night for a 17 year old girl in Prestonsburg, Kentucky.
We missed weeks and weeks of school my senior year. The flood destroyed PHS gym floor. We still had graduation services and we had to walk across a gym floor that was warped and twisted from the rushing water. And right as the flood water went down and my mom was able to make it back home, my grandmother passed away alone in a Lexington hospital.
