It was a typical school-day morning — typical, except that one of the largest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States was bearing down on the South Carolina coast.

But that thought was somewhere in the back of Sabra Till’s mind on Sept. 21, 1989, behind the rushing to get her 5-year-old daughter Shana out the door of her Four Holes home and off to school.

“I bent over to put on her shoes,” Till said. “When I stood up, I felt something kind of rip.”

It was too early — Till wasn’t expecting her second child until November. She and her husband, the late Gary Till Jr., headed for the Regional Medical Center, while young Shana was ushered off to stay with nearby relatives.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Hugo moved closer and closer to the Eastern seaboard.

“The nurses said it could have been something to do with the (drop in) barometric pressure” associated with the looming storm, Sabra Till said of her early labor. “I was hemorrhaging, and they were trying to get him out as quick as possible.”

At 10:15 a.m. that day in 1989, Gary Laverne “Tripp” Till III was born via emergency cesarean section, weighing 4 pounds, 15 ounces.

“They said his heart and everything was fine. He was breathing on his own,” Sabra Till said. “He just didn’t know how to suck, so they had to feed him through a tube.

“(The nurses) said, ‘Oh, he’s the first Hurricane Hugo baby. Name him Hugo,’ and I was like, ‘No, I don’t think so,’” she said.

Till said she doesn’t remember much about the storm, which made landfall in McClellanville at midnight between Sept. 21 and Sept. 22.

“Nobody could come and visit me. I didn’t know what was going on outside,” she said. “I didn’t even know the storm was going to actually hit. ... But I knew it had to be pretty bad for the hospital to be running on generators.”

Orangeburg obstetrician Dr. Richard Williamson volunteered to stay in the hospital the night of Hugo. He said a couple of babies were born at RMC that evening — he remembered one was delivered by emergency C-section, one shortly after arriving at the RMC, and a third was taken care of by other physicians at the hospital.

“It was really quite interesting,” Williamson said. “We had one patient in labor and actually stopped her (labor-inducing drug) pitocin for a few hours ... during the peak of the storm.”

While some may claim that barometric pressure had something to do with a spike in births leading up to and during Hugo itself, Williamson said that’s like saying there’s more crime during a full moon.

“It does seem like that ... (but) it’s more of a wives’ tale,” he said. “That has not been scientifically proven.”

He said everyone from babies to nursing home patients were transported from hospitals along the coast to the RMC leading up to Hurricane Hugo.

“Even nursing home patients from Beaufort” were sent there to ride out the storm, Williamson said. “And we actually got more (of the storm) than Beaufort did.”

“The air conditioning was out. It was really hot,” he said. Williamson remembers having to perform a C-section Sept. 22. “It was 85 degrees in the room. We had emergency power just for lights and necessary equipment ... but no air conditioning.”

One of Williamson’s patients, Lucia Carroll, who delivered her baby girl Hallie on Sept. 20, said what stands out most in her mind was the doctors peeking in patients’ rooms with flashlights.

“There were babies bumper-to-bumper in the hallway,” the St. Matthews woman said.

Hallie Carroll was born three weeks early, which Lucia Carroll said was totally unexpected.

“We had made all these preparations for two days, battening down the hatches” of her home and horse-training facility, but she said she wasn’t completely prepared for her daughter’s birth.

Carroll said she thought she was just going for a regular check-up with Williamson on Sept. 20, but her water broke and she was wheeled over to the RMC. She didn’t even have a car seat to take her newborn home in when she was released from the hospital a couple days later.

“As much as they were trying to get those babies out of the hospital,” they wouldn’t let them leave without a car seat, Carroll said. “So my sister spent all day driving around Columbia trying to find ... a car seat” in Hugo’s wake.

Concerned about his home, Williamson said he caught a ride from the hospital sometime around 4 p.m. Sept. 22. His home was fine, but four large pine trees had trapped his car in the garage.

“I guess the biggest thing — even in the core of the hospital, you could hear the wind roaring,” Williamson said of memories from the night of Hugo. “All night, just that constant roar. It literally sounded ... almost like a big fan was blowing, like you were standing just beside it, and it was constant. ... Every so often, you would go to a window and look out and see the light poles ... swaying with the wind.

“(It was) a pretty amazing thing. I hope we don’t see anything like it again.”

Tripp Till spent the first two weeks of his life at the RMC, while his mother was released from the hospital three days after his birth. Sabra Till said because her family lived “out in the country,” they were without power for nearly a week.

“I think it was best he was there (in the hospital) during that time,” she said of her newborn son, whom she visited often. “I was hunched over, hurting, but I went up there to see my baby.”

Today, Till’s “baby,” who graduated from Orangeburg Preparatory School in 2007, is a junior Spanish major and business minor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

“He’s got his head on straight,” Till said. “After he started getting older and all of the pictures (of Hugo) came out, I bought him pictures of the storm. And he likes to tell it.”

“It’s kind of like a unique fact to tell my friends,” Tripp Till said. “I can’t say that I remember much about being there, but it’s something to throw out there in conversation — ‘I was born during a hurricane — what can you say?’”

Hallie Carroll said she doesn’t really think about being born in the days leading up to Hugo.

“So many different people have told me their versions of what happened,” the 2007 Calhoun Academy graduate said. “I don’t think about it until September rolls around, and someone mentions it.”

T&D Features Editor Wendy Jeffcoat Crider can be reached by e-mail at wjeffcoat@timesanddemocrat.com or by telephone at 803-533-5546. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.

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