Laura’s Restaurant
The Rescue
Laura’s Restaurant
An iconic photograph captures a locally famous rescue of a waitress, kitchen worker, and Jim Hickey, the bartender from Laura’s Restaurant, as it floated from its foundations at Westport Point into the river. A Herald News photographer, George W. Potts, was on site to memorialize this dramatic event.
The rescued waitress, Natalie Silvia and kitchen worker, Harry Macomber, sit in the skiff as it was rowed to shore by fishermen Roger Reed and Augustus Robillard. The skiff has been secured with a rope.
“The only thing that saved Jim Hickey was that half of Laura’s Restaurant caught on the marsh. And you could see him at the window. So, there was a joke that was going on that it was a rat and Jim Hickey on the table. And we saved the wrong one.” Walter Vincent, interview 2004
Fall River Herald September 1, 1954
Rescuers in bobbing skiffs defied the storm to save three lives at Westport Point. Two men and a woman, employees at Laura’s Restaurant, were saved in a daring operation.
The restaurant split in two, one section drifted northwards and was beached, the other section floated NE and became snagged on a shoal.
Paul Denadel, 15, and William White removed James Hickey, trapped in his quarters above the south side of the building. The rescuers first chopped a hole in the roof above the room in which Hickey was barely able to keep his head above water for nearly five hours. The rescue was finally effected by smashing a window which had ironically stayed intact despite the severe buffeting that sheared the building from its foundation and sliced it.
Roger Reed, first mate on the fishing boat, Nora S., teamed up with Augustus Robillard to extricate Natalie Silvia, 20 of 601A Russells Mills Road and Harry Macomber, 64, of Westport Point, from the other half of the restaurant structure.
Miss Silvia reported for work at 9.30. She was a waitress. Macomber, who lived across the street from the building, worked in the kitchen.
Hickey said water began pouring into the restaurant about 10.30 AM. The Silvia woman and Macomber were trapped in the kitchen. Their cries for help could not be heard in the howling wind. The building was swept away within half an hour.
Chef George Kourafas of 275 Russells Mills Road, who considered himself lucky to have had the day off yesterday, said Hickey was rescued about 2 PM. That was about the time that Reed and Robillard got to the Silvia woman and Macomber. Mrs. George Mintz of 241 Union Street, whose cottage a Westport Point suffered heavy water damage, was the one credited with alerting neighbors to the disappearance of Hickey, the Silvia woman and Macomber.
An interview by Beverly Schuch with Paul Denadel and Sheila Denadel Salvo, 2004
Paul and Sheila discuss Laura’s Restaurant
The bar was a great bar. Laura was a Laura Allen from the Cuttyhunk Allen’s. She made great chowder. She had a special recipe for chowder. Great lobsters. You would see all sorts of people. You would see limousines come down and people go in there for lunch. They came from all over to go to this little restaurant.
Interviewer:
Okay, so brother, sister, it’s the morning of the hurricane of 54. Where were you?
Paul:
Yeah, Westport Point. We were batting down the hatches. We knew something was going on.
Interviewer:
How did you know?
Paul:
Well, my father sent an empty beer truck down here to Laura’s Restaurant and told Jim Hickey the bartender, “Throw all the tables, the cash registers, all the books, everything into this truck here, and we get out of here before this thing takes everything away.” And Hickey looked at him and said, “What are you talking about?” He said he went through the ‘38 hurricane. This building never moved. That was a famous last statement because three hours later he was out here, building and all.
Interviewer:
Riding the building, wasn’t he?
Sheila:
Right. He was. He stayed in the building and a lot of people were willing to let him just stay in the building and not go out after him too.
Interviewer:
And who finally went out.
Sheila:
A group of kids. They couldn’t get any adults to do it. The adults said, “Leave him there.” And the kids said, they said to the kids, “Okay,” and the kids went out.
Paul:
Actually, they launched right from the other side of that building right there in the back of Bill White. Bill White lived in that house and Roger Reed Sr., or we call him Father Reed, he and I think Brownie (Augustus Robillard), were in the skiff. And they went out to the building and got the two waitresses out.
And when they came back, the waitresses got out of the boat. They’re screaming and yelling, “Hickey’s still in the other part of the building. Bill White says, “Well, we’ve got to go out and get him.” Which one of you guys want to come? There’s about twenty-five guys standing there. They’re all like this (with arms folded).
Interviewer:
And where were you Sheila?
Sheila:
I was right down here in all the middle of everything that was going on. People could get down to our house, but they couldn’t get any further. And they were just walking in and out of our house. Nobody was knocking or doing anything. The state police, people were coming down.
Paul:
All the fishermen were in there. And these people were in my mother’s kitchen, and my father’s in there orchestrating this whole convention of people that were walking out there, shots of whiskey, a couple of beers, and my mother’s screaming and yelling at my father, “What are you doing? We’re all going to die here.”
“What the hell are you talking about,” he says, “Rosie. Yeah. Have another beer.” And he’s passing around all these beers because he knew there really wasn’t anything you could do about it except just hang on and hope that the water didn’t get any higher than it did, which it got to right underneath the kitchen floor.
Sheila:
Right to the ceiling of the cellar.
Interviewer:
But was there any sense among any of you that this could be doomsday, that the water could keep going?
Sheila:
Well, as teenagers I don’t think. We just had no conception of doomsday.
Paul:
Because we were all river rats at that time.
Sheila:
Right. We were in the water more than we were out.
Interviewer:
Tell me how you got Jim Hickey out of Laura’s.
Paul:
We went out there and we got up on the roof with an old Boy Scout hatchet, which was as dull as, but I’m hammering away the stuff with the roof and nothing’s happening. I’m saying, “Bill, I can’t cut this stuff.”
Interviewer:
Are you moving at this point?
Paul:
Yeah, the building and everything.
Sheila:
The building is just floating right out there.
Paul:
So then he says, “Jump overboard and punch that window out.” So I got out and I can only see about that much of the window. Broke that in and there’s Hickey inside and the tables are floating around. And the wharf rats was about that long. They’re all jumping around from table to table, and he’s in the middle of all of these trying to get this box of records. Finally, he gave me his hand and I pulled him out the window. But that’s as far as I get him outside the window because he was about 200 pounds.
Paul:
And Bill White was a rugged individual. By the way, he’s still alive in Florida. He and his wife, both. They’re in the nineties. He just reached down with, because he used to [inaudible 01:08:30], a strong guy. He reached down, pulled him. He was like a 300-pound swordfish. He pulled him into the skiff. He slid into the skiff and then they had a rope on the skiff, and they pulled us back into the back of that barn right there.
Sheila and Paul discuss what happened to Laura’s Restaurant
It was a shame. It was a shame that they could never do something after that. Because it was on town land. And after it had opened, a law was passed that no liquor could be served on town land. So there was no way of doing it and she finally said, “That’s it. I’m going back to Cuttyhunk.” And that’s what she did. She went back to Cuttyhunk. But it was a shame because many people came from all over to go to Laura’s.
It was full of memorabilia from back in the late 1800’s. There was charcoal drawings of all the local fishermen. And Al Lees, is before Al passed away here recently was trying to discover if anybody had gone out to the buildings after the storm and saved any of that stuff.
I don’t remember of anybody. I know that there’s a placard that’s hanging in town, a wooden sign that says Laura’s that was on the front of that building. Cukie said he found it 20 years later floating in the river.
And where did Laura’s end up?
Oh, down where that bridge is somewhere. And it sat out here for quite a while. Of course, those abutments weren’t there, and they burned it the next year. They had a big bonfire.