On Nov 2, 1927, the afternoon sky grew ominously dark as residents of River Street received the daily North Adams Transcript. Thirty-six hours later, over six inches of soaking rain had fallen, carrying a few tenement houses into the raging water. The Marshall Street bridge broke free and slammed into the Brown Street bridge. Anthony Talarico, who passed away in 2001, told me that he witnessed the devastation when he was 13 years old.

"There were about three tenement blocks right after Harris Street. The water began to eat away at the first tenement block. All the people in the houses put planks from one tenement block to the other and crossed over to the center of the middle tenement. The fire department came over and put a ladder across River Street, which was like a rushing torrent. People were screaming. I can still hear it."

Eighty-three years later, I received a letter from a woman in Shelburne, Vermont, whose grandparents lived in North Adams up until the 1970s. She told me that she had read one of my books about the city. She enclosed a well-preserved photograph and told me I could keep it. On the back was written, "1927, River Street looking west, North Adams flood." It showed a man and woman on the porch of a house, watching the water pour down the street with great force.

My first reaction was that I wanted to make the one-hour drive to North Adams right away and find the exact spot, perhaps even the original house. I stared at the picture for quite a while, and then it suddenly dawned on me, "Why not try something a little more challenging, like identifying the people in the picture?"

But how does one go about doing that? I thought to myself: "If I can find out the address of the house, I can look up that address in the 1927 city directory and see who was living there." Several days later, over breakfast with my North Adams friend Carl Robare, we examined the picture, and Carl said he thought the house might be at the bottom of Harris Street, where it intersects with River Street. I drove over there, but the house looked quite a bit different, so I wasn't sure.

The next day, Carl called and said that he had gone to the North Adams Public Library and examined the city map from 1904, and he was still pretty sure of his first guess. Back in town two days later, I went to the library and showed the picture to staff members Robin Martin and Katharine Westwood. Robin said: "I can see in the photograph that there isn't a house in the foreground next to the house with the people on the porch, just a large space. So there must have been a street coming down from the hill, probably Harris."

I looked in the 1927 city directory, and the house on that corner was 385 River Street. The only occupant listed was Samuel Giulino, and presumably his unnamed family members. When I got home, I found the family in the 1920 census, living at a different address: 18 Waverly Place. There was Samuel, age 32; his wife (spelled Philiphino), also 32; and five children. In the 1930 census, Samuel was not listed, but his wife (listed as Josephine this time) and the kids were living at 385 River Street. She owned the house. So at that point, it seemed likely that the two people were Mr. and Mrs. Giulino...except for one thing: Both of them would have been about 39 years old in 1927, and the man and woman in the photo looked much younger. That bothered me. So did the article which I found the next day in the December 19, 1932 edition of the North Adams Transcript: