Hurricanes Donna, Cleo, and Betsy

From 1957 to 1977, I lived in South Florida, first in a little town northwest of Miami called Opa-Locka (1957-60) and then in Hollywood (1960-77) a larger city lying a few miles further north. The first three (and only) hurricanes that I directly encountered during my childhood occurred in the relatively compressed span of 1960 to 1965. The first, Donna, hit while I lived with my family in a modest apartment complex in 1960 while I was three. I remember very little from the storm, except that my parents seemed a bit wary of it. Fortunately for the Miami area (and unfortunately for others), Donna sideswiped us, although it did cause a lot of wind damage in the area.
A few months after Donna hit, we moved north to a house in West Hollywood (annexed in 1965 by Hollywood). In 1964, Hurricane Cleo made its way across the Atlantic, devastated Hispaniola, and then cut through Cuba, making a direct beeline toward Miami (and West Hollywood). Fortunately, we’d already had awnings installed on most of our windows, and we boarded up or taped the rest. Like Donna, Cleo struck at night, and it appeared at one time during its worst part that it would blow down our front door! Unfortunately, we got the hurricane’s eye and the associated severe eyewall. And even though our house was situated on a slight elevation, water nevertheless seeped through and covered our (fortunately) tiled floors. I remember being moved to the back bedroom with my sister and listening to hurricane updates on the portable radio. The station we listened to was 1580-WWIL out of Fort Lauderdale (a little to our north), which a few years later would change its name to WSRF and its format to cool rock music. But we and our house survived Cleo. A few weeks later, Hurricane Isbell crossed the state from the Gulf side, but, although we experienced stormy conditions, we escaped most of that hurricane’s fury.
The next year, I was ready for some more hurricanes, with my tracking map ready. I’d keep up with each new storm that appeared. And it didn’t take long for a doozy of a storm to appear on the scene. Betsy had a very strange path that gave forecasters fits. Twice, in the western Atlantic, it appeared to be making a turn toward the north away from Florida, and each time it made a 360 degree loop. Finally, it bore down on the Miami area. But it was more like Donna than Cleo in that its worst area went though extreme south Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico (eventually to hit New Orleans). Betsy, it turned out, was the only really prominent storm in a short season that year.
Not being a particularly happy camper at school, I found myself keeping up with hurricanes in the news during the next few years. But, alas, my hopes of getting time out of school went unrealized when none came close to striking the South Florida area (except maybe in October 1973, when Gilda flirted with the possibility for a little while). My subsequent encounters with named tropical storm systems would be as a resident of Gainesville, here in north central Florida.