Floodline
How the Great Flood of 1937 brought two Kentuckians — and the family that followed — to higher ground.
Before the water came, before the city turned to river, before a man rowed through a drowned street to reach the woman he’d only just met — there was Aunt Mag.
Anna Margaret Whelan Thomas had a romantic streak. She believed in timing, in fate, and in paying attention to the things other people missed. Working at Fontaine Ferry Amusement Park in the mid-1930s, she worked a ride and kept a watchful eye on her coworkers. One in particular stood out.
Mary Lee Zweydoff was graceful in a way that didn’t draw attention to herself. Friendly, poised, and always composed, she had inherited her mother’s German cheekbones and her father’s charm. She had an eye for beauty — not just in appearance, but in the way people moved, in color, in detail. It was a quiet gift that would stay with her, eventually leading her to become an artist at age fifty. She was the eldest daughter in a sprawling Catholic family of ten siblings. Born in the Portland neighborhood of Louisville on August 23, 1919, she’d grown up among the flatboats and floodplains, the clang of steamboat bells, and the hush of family stories told in kitchens over weak coffee and strong memories.
Her name — Mary Lee — was a bridge between two pasts. “Mary” for her maternal grandmother, Mary Louisa Rolfes Ringswald, who died before she was born. “Lee” for her paternal grandfather, Lee Zweydoff, whose name, passed down, was a whisper of older worlds: of Germany, of hardship, of a family that had long since made the Ohio River home.
Mag liked her immediately. But more than that — she saw something. She thought of her nephew: Wilbur Padgett, born on a Meade County farm on November 7, 1915. He was the second-oldest son of twelve, raised at the meeting point of Otter Creek and Dry Branch, where the land folded into itself and boys became men early. He had callused hands, a work-worn back, and eyes the color of Kentucky limestone under morning light.
Handsome, yes — but it wasn’t that. It was something steadier. Something you could trust.
“They both had pretty eyes,” Mag would say later. “And I thought they’d make a good match.”
So she made the match.
The blind date was set for New Year’s Day, 1937 — a holiday dance at the Casa Madrid Ballroom on Third and Guthrie. It was a night for pressed suits, polished shoes, and jazz slow enough to sway to. Mary Lee wore a simple dress and her favorite necklace. Wilbur stood tall in a well-fitted suit, sharp as ever. He dressed the way he carried himself — with quiet pride and intention.
They danced. Talked. She liked his quiet confidence. He liked the way her gaze held his without hesitation.
“He was a very good dancer,” Mary Lee would say decades later. “And he had really pretty eyes.”
They agreed to see each other again.
But life — and the Ohio River — had other plans.
The Ohio has always carried moods.
It’s been a lifeline, a boundary, a mirror — sometimes serene, sometimes brutal.
It has shaped cities, drawn borders, swallowed whole towns, and stitched together the lives of those who built homes along its edge.
In winter, it broods under gray skies — cold, slow, and watchful.
In spring, it surges with memory, swollen with snowmelt and storms, as if reminding the valley who’s in charge.
Some years it whispers. Other years it roars.
For Louisville, the river has always been both blessing and warning —
wide, winding, not to be underestimated.
It brings commerce, connection, and beauty — but also danger.
It’s part of the landscape and the legend, always there, always waiting.
You don’t live beside the Ohio without learning to respect its moods — or without wondering what it might take, and what it might give back.
And in January of 1937, it took more than anyone was prepared to give.
The rains began almost immediately after their first meeting. A slow, persistent drizzle at first. Then a downpour. Day after day, the skies refused to clear. In Louisville, January 1937 brought twenty-three straight days of rain. The Ohio River, already swollen from a wet winter, surged. Creeks spilled their banks. The city’s stormwater systems failed. And then the river turned on the city.
Flood stage came and went. By the third week of January, the water had risen more than 30 feet above normal. On January 27, the Ohio crested at 52.15 feet — an unprecedented high. Seventy percent of Louisville lay underwater. Streetcars were stranded. Telephone lines snapped. Gas and electric services failed. Thousands fled, their belongings bundled on their backs.
Slevin Street, in the Portland neighborhood where Mary Lee’s family lived, was no exception.
The water came slowly, lapping at doorsteps like a visitor unsure whether to come in. Then it rose, relentless, swallowing sidewalks, porches, and parlors. The Zweydoff family tried to wait it out, but there was no end in sight. They needed to evacuate.
And that’s when Mary Lee sent word to Wilbur.
She didn’t ask him to come. She only told him what was happening. That was all he needed.
Wilbur found a canoe.
No one remembers where it came from — if it was borrowed, found, or fashioned. What’s remembered is what he did with it.
He paddled across streets that no longer had names, only currents. Past telephone poles that looked like river markers. Past drowned storefronts and submerged curbs. The city was eerily quiet, the way it gets after disaster takes the noise with it.
And then — there they were. The Zweydoffs, waiting on what remained of their front porch.
“When I saw his crystal blue eyes in the canoe that day,” Mary Lee said later, “I knew I wanted to be with him the rest of my life.”
He ferried them to safety — Mary Lee, her parents, her siblings. They stayed with relatives elsewhere in the city until the waters receded.
Sometimes, love doesn’t arrive with roses. Sometimes, it rows.
The flood took everything. More than 175,000 residents were displaced. Damages totaled what today would be over a billion dollars. It would take decades to construct the 29-mile floodwall system the city now depends on.
But amid all that ruin, something else was built — quietly, and without blueprint.
When spring came, Wilbur proposed. And on August 23, 1938 — Mary Lee’s 19th birthday — they were married at Saint Cecilia Catholic Church in Portland, where her parents had wed before her.
There was no spectacle. Just two families, four witnesses, and two hearts that had already known what it meant to endure.
They made a life together.
Eleven children. A house full of noise, faith, and motion. Wilbur spent most of his career as a supervisor for Armour-Klarer, a Louisville-based meat processing company owned by the Broecker family. He worked with steadiness and integrity, earning respect not just for what he did, but how he did it. Mary Lee anchored the home. The family grew. Years passed. A flood of a different kind — children, then grandchildren, then great-grandchildren — followed.
Wilbur was a storyteller at heart.
Around kitchen tables and front porches, he could spin a memory into something larger than life — funny, heartfelt, always stitched with a thread of truth.
His stories stitched the generations together, giving shape to the past, giving the young ones a sense of where they had come from.
He wasn't just building a family.
He was building its memory.
Together, they were a storyteller and an artist — shaping a life stitched with memory, color, and love.
What they built wasn't just a home.
It became a world that others would inherit and keep alive.
Wilbur and Mary Lee would be married for 48 years, until his untimely death in 1986. Mary Lee lived on for another 25 years — steady, strong, and surrounded by the family they built — until her passing in 2011. But the life they made together never stopped growing. Today, their descendants number seventy-six.
Mary Lee spent her final decades on a farm in Meade County — land Wilbur had purchased in the late 1970s, not far from where he had grown up as a boy.
It was a piece of history I had previously written about in I Remember It All Too Well: A Taylor Swift-Inspired Guide to Family History — land once lost to the expansion of Fort Knox.
There, she built a life shaped by the things she loved: a sprawling garden, two ponds Wilbur had dug himself, chickens that kept the rhythm of the days, shelves of well-worn books, and the steady, patient creation of her landscape paintings.
Family was never far from her doorstep. Her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren came often — gathering in the house, walking the fields, laughing by the ponds — weaving new memories into the place she and Wilbur had built.
Even after he was gone, Wilbur found his way into her artwork.
Mary Lee believed he had beautiful penmanship — strong, steady, and elegant — and when she completed a painting, she would often ask him to sign it for her.
It wasn’t common — an artist asking someone else to place the final mark on her work — but for Mary Lee, it made perfect sense.
Their life had always been a collaboration, stitched together with steady hands and open hearts.
She created the worlds; he gave them a name.
And in doing so, they signed their story together — over and over again.
In every brushstroke, in every signature, he remained part of her canvas.
Their story never really ended.
It simply found new ways to take root and grow.
And Aunt Mag?
Her story came back to me decades later — at a dinner held exactly seventy-five years after the night she sent my grandparents out on their first date.
In 2011, I joined the Downtown Louisville Rotary Club. At a small welcome dinner held at Vincenzo’s Restaurant for new members in early 2012, I found myself seated next to a man named Steven Schmidt. We struck up a conversation — the kind of easy back-and-forth that happens when two people share a city, a history, a way of speaking.
At one point, he mentioned his grandmother.
“Her name was Anna,” he said. “Anna Margaret Thomas.”
Something stirred.
“Whelan?” I asked.
He smiled. “Yes. Anna Margaret Whelan Thomas.”
Aunt Mag.
I paused, then smiled. “You may not know this,” I told him, “but your grandmother set up my grandparents on a blind date in 1937. And had she not played matchmaker, I wouldn’t be sitting here — or telling you this story.”
Sometimes, I think life has a quiet way of introducing us to the people we’re meant to know — whether by grace, by timing, or by the gentle tug of ancestors who aren’t quite finished connecting us.
Steven was quiet for a moment, visibly moved. He’d never heard the story before. “I had no idea,” he said. “That’s incredible.” He told me how meaningful it was to learn that his grandmother’s quiet instinct had helped shape another branch of the family tree — one he hadn’t known he was connected to.
Steven, I learned, was a business deal maker by profession — which felt fitting, considering the quiet matchmaking his grandmother had brokered decades earlier.
It was a full-circle moment. The story of the canoe, the dance, the flood, and the family that followed — it had been told to me many times over the years by my grandmother. And in every telling, Aunt Mag’s name carried weight. She wasn’t just remembered. She was revered.
Now, her grandson was sitting beside me, in the same city, at the same table — 75 years after her quiet act of matchmaking changed the shape of a family.
The spark she lit in 1937 is still burning — not just in memory, but in the lives that followed.
Sometimes, the past doesn’t feel so far away.
Sometimes, the people who changed everything leave ripples that never stop reaching.
Floods come.
They rise, destroy, and remake.
They erase old paths — and carve new ones.
Louisville knows this all too well.
The city just weathered another historic flood — one of the worst in its recorded history.
And as the waters crept up again, so did the memory of 1937,
when a young man paddled a canoe through the city — not to flee, but to find someone.
Mary Lee and Wilbur met on dry ground,
but it was the rising water that revealed who they truly were.
Not swept away — but carried forward.
He came for her in a canoe.
She saw him and knew.
And from that moment on,
the river was no longer something to fear.
It was the current that began a family —
guided first by love, and just a little by Aunt Mag.
Their love still traces the shape of the floodline.
And even now,
their story carries us all toward higher ground.
Another Ripple
In the years after our conversation, Steven and I occasionally shared family stories over email — threads from two branches that had unknowingly grown from the same root.
Steven Louis Schmidt passed away on December 14, 2021, while I was out of the country. He was the grandson of Aunt Mag, the matchmaker who helped spark this story, and he had never known the full extent of her role until we sat beside each other that night.
A business broker by profession, Steven had a quiet gift for connection — something he may well have inherited from his grandmother.
I was grateful to tell him the story.
And even more grateful that, in some way, he became part of it.
Notes Behind the Story
The Great Flood of 1937
Louisville Metropolitan Sewer District, “Floodwall History and Facts,”
National Weather Service, “The Great Flood of 1937”
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Ohio River Flood History Archives
Courier-Journal archival reporting, January–February 1937
Mary Lee Zweydorf and Wilbur Anthony Padgett
Oral history interview with Mary Lee Zweydorf Padgett, March 1990
Padgett Family Archive: family photographs, wedding records, and written reminiscences
Marriage Record, St. Cecilia Catholic Church, Louisville, Kentucky, 1938
Obituary of Wilbur Anthony Padgett, Louisville Courier-Journal, 1986
Obituary of Mary Lee Zweydorf Padgett, Louisville Courier-Journal, 2011
Anna Margaret Whelan Thomas (“Aunt Mag”)
Marriage Record: Anna Margaret Whelan and James Kelly Thomas, Vine Grove, Kentucky, November 12, 1912
Family records shared by descendants, including Steven Schmidt (2011–2018)
Personal conversation between author and Steven Schmidt, Downtown Louisville Rotary Club Welcome Dinner at Vincenzo’s Restaurant, February 2012
Contextual Material
Jefferson County Floodplain History Map Layer (Louisville/Metro GIS Consortium)
Casa Madrid Ballroom: Louisville Dance Halls, University of Louisville Archives; Courier-Journal
U.S. Census Records, Portland Neighborhood Enumeration, 1920–1950
History of Armour-Klarer Company - Broecker Family website www.broeckerfamily.com
Outstanding.
Marvelous. Awe-inspiring!! Life affirming and magnificent!