a dead horse. Windows were blown out and people huddled in the lightless hallways of upper floors. Downtown was left a jumbled mass of lumber, masonry and glass, vehicles and boats, and often oil-drenched bodies of people and animals, with only the strongest structures remaining. Again, the Nueces stood up to the storm, but the city was devastated and an uncertain number of people, hundreds if not more, were killed. The 1919 storm motivated the city to construct the seawall. 1920s-1950s Despite this, the town and the hotel prospered through the 1920s. Railroad service was constantly improved, and in 1926, Corpus Christi's deepwater port was opened. More hotels were built, and in 1928, Jones added a 103-room wing to the Nueces. Despite the next decade's economic troubles, there still seemed a measure of prosperity. A fire broke out in a penthouse-level repair shop in 1938, with spectators on the street watching the fire department and shouting suggestions, but it appears to have been more spectacle than disaster. In 1939, when the Naval Air Station was being built, so many people came to work on it that the hotels were full and the Nueces set up extra beds in the Sun Room. The hotel maintained its status through the Great Depression, the World War II years, and into the 1950s. The Nueces of this period is mentioned in at least one work of fiction, the young people's novel Lone Star by Barbara Barrie, published in 1990. A girl from Chicago moves with her family to Corpus Christi in 1944. Riding with her father on a Sunday night, she sees the town dark and only the hotel's "flickering" neon sign is on, casting alternate red and blue light on the sidewalk. Downfall During the 1950s, the Nueces began to lose out to the new crop of hotels and motels, perhaps making less and less of the money needed to maintain it, and suffering the occasional battering by hurricanes. It was then no longer the civic and cultural meeting place it had been. The Jones heirs finally decided to sell it, and in 1961, Joseph Barshop of San Antonio bought it, operating it as a hotel until 1967, when it became a retirement home. After surviving many storms, the Nueces was at last badly damaged by Hurricane Celia on August 3, 1970. Celia was more of a wind storm, with gusts over 200