Miami is a city of color. Vibrant, tropical colors assault the eyes wherever you look. The cool turquoise of the ocean, the green palms framed by deep blue sky, and huge, white clouds. The deep reds and vivid yellows of hibiscus and ixora, the watermelon-colored bougainvillea and orange poinciana trees. And all are punctuated by row after row of pink and yellow and purple and green and blue houses topped with red and white tile roofs. Vibrant. Hot. Tropical. Sultry. Everywhere you look.

But the old Blimp Base was gray. The gray concrete skeletons of the three blimp hangars stood sixteen and half stories tall, towering over the dull green sawgrass and scrub pines that were all that would grow in the fine gray-white sand covering the area.

The Blimp Base had burned in 1945. The two thousand acres of dusty gray land was considered pretty useless and were donated to the University of Miami. And there it sat empty for years and years until the university allowed a portion of the land to be used by the Gold Coast Railroad Museum. That was the fancy name a group of old railroad buffs had given to their collection of steam engines, railroad cars, and other memorabilia of the Florida East Coast Railway, most of which was way too big to be housed anywhere other than the wilderness.

Almost every weekend the museum was open, Mama and Granddad and Grandma Rogers took us down. We loved it. Our family had a special connection to the Gold Coast Railroad because the star of the museum, the engine that was used to pull everyone around those few miles of track, was the Old 153. And the 153 had been my great-grandfather Herbert Spencer Roger’s last engine.

Herb had driven several engines during his more than thirty years at the Florida East Coast Railway, but the Old 153 was special. He pulled the train carrying Calvin Coolidge to Miami in 1928 with that locomotive. And he ran it daily from Miami to Key West on the Overseas Railroad until most of the bridges on the 300-mile track known as “Flagler’s Folly” was destroyed in the Hurricane of 1932. Yes, the 153 was special. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Although it hasn’t actually run in many years and the museum has moved from the Old Blimp Base to a new location a few counties up the coast, it is still the pride and joy of the Gold Coast Railroad Museum. It is a Pacific-type passenger steam locomotive that ran on the Florida East Coast Railway from 1922 until 1939.

But even though the Hurricane of 1932 is the one everyone in Florida always talked about, at least until Hurricane Andrew in the 1990s, that wasn’t the hurricane that my great-grandfather remembered. It wasn’t the hurricane my family talked about over and over again. The hurricane my great-grandfather talked about was the Hurricane of 1919.