films, but he remained a prolific writer and pro-
ducer into the twenty-first century. He is best known,
however, for his 1980’s teen comedies.
Impact John Hughes’s teen films are characterized
by a deep understanding of the pain and fears of the
high school experience. Despite the films’ comic na-
ture, they treat their characters seriously. They deal
with the difficulties teens experience fitting in and
with issues of class difference, social identification,
and self-determination. He portrayed characters who
struggled with identity issues, usually resolving his
films by having disparate groups realize that they had
more in common than they believed. The thoughtful
handling of teen characters and their problems set
these movies above the usual teen sex comedies and
farces that preceded and followed them.
Further Reading
Bernstein, Jonathan.Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of
Teenage Movies. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,
1997.
Clarke, Jaime, ed.Don’t You Forget About Me: Contem-
porar y Writers on the Films of John Hughes. New York:
Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2007.
Leslie Neilan
See also Brat Pack in acting;Breakfast Club, The;
Fast Times at Ridgemont High; Film in the United
States; New Wave music; Teen films.
Hurricane Hugo
Identification Disastrous storm
Date September 9-25, 1989
Place Formed off the west coast of Africa; struck
the northern Caribbean and the East Coast of
North America
When it struck North America and the Caribbean in 1989,
Hurricane Hugo became the most devastating and costly
hurricane then on record. It reached Categor y 5 on the
Saffir-Simpson scale and wrought havoc throughout the
Caribbean before striking the United States. The storm
killed at least seventy people and caused an estimated $10
billion in damages.
In 1959, Hurricane Gracie, a Category 3 storm, made
landfall near Beaufort, South Carolina, wreaked
some havoc but swiftly weakened, and disappeared
into Georgia. At that time, the Sea Islands of coastal
South Carolina were thinly populated, inhabited pri-
marily by African American descendants of freed
slaves. From the 1960’s onward, virtually all of coastal
South Carolina—except for an area north of the Isle
of Palms to Pawley’s Island—witnessed massive devel-
opment: golf courses, gated communities, and tourist
destinations. For three decades, hurricane season
brought a brush or two, but nothing of significance to
remind natives or visitors of the dangers posed by the
powerful storms. Preservation of nature’s defenses
against storms—sand dunes and sea oats, for exam-
ple—was often overlooked in the building frenzy.
Thirty years after Gracie, following several years
of drought, good summer rains refilled lakes, and
September brought more of the same. On Septem-
ber 9, a tropical wave moved off Cape Verde, Africa,
developing into a tropical storm two days later. Hugo
became a hurricane on September 13 and intensi-
fied rapidly, becoming a Category 5 storm—a storm
with sustained winds of at least 156 miles per hour—
while it was still one thousand miles from the North
American continent. A National Oceanic and Atmo-
spheric Administration (NOAA) reconnaissance air-
craft flew into Hugo on September 15 and discov-
ered sustained wind speeds of 190 miles per hour
and a barometric pressure of 918 millibars. Weak-
ening slightly to Category 4 when its highest sus-
tained wind speeds dipped to 140 miles per hour,
between September 17 and September 19 Hugo
passed over the Caribbean Islands of Guadeloupe,
Montserrat, Dominica, the British and U.S. Virgin
Islands, and Puerto Rico with devastating fury.
Puerto Rico left Hugo much diminished in
strength, but the Gulf Stream quickly restored its
power to Category 4. Doppler radar made hurricane
tracking easier, but it was clear only that Hugo would
strike somewhere along the Georgia-South Carolina
coast. The residents of Savannah, Georgia, were or-
dered to evacuate, but a northward hitch by Hugo
turned the storm directly toward Charleston. Dur-
ing the night of the September 23, packing sus-
tained winds of 138 miles per hour, Hugo passed
over the city. On the windward side of the hurricane,
a storm surge in excess of twenty feet inundated the
tiny fishing village of McClellanville, among others.
The winds virtually destroyed most of the mature
longleaf pines and palmettos in the Francis Marion
National Forest, snapping their tops off about twenty
feet above ground. Sadly, despite having deep root
systems, the live oaks of the forest were also devas-The Eighties in America Hurricane Hugo 495