She graduated in 1972. Her MS Coast classmates saved her from Hurricane Ian destruction.

Cindy Eaton is forever grateful.

She had left her Long Beach High School 50th class reunion early last fall, raced home to Florida and braced for Hurricane Ian. The storm had ripped her roof off and pounded her house so hard her cats could escape from the hole that used to be her ceiling.

But days later, Long Beach Mayor George Bass came to the Sunshine State to help the pummeled region. Maybe, Eaton thought, her old classmate would bring her bottled water or tarps.

Instead, he handed her a box.

It held $4,148.

“All I could do was cry,” Eaton said.

The Long Beach High School Class of 1972 scraped together cash and gift cards from Home Depot, Lowe’s and Visa to help their old friend and her house. Their money means by Christmas, Eaton hopes to have a ceiling in her kitchen. Soon, she could stop doing dishes in the bathtub. And the gifts, she said, left her surprised, overwhelmed and the most grateful she had felt in her whole life.

“For them to do that for a classmate,” she said. “It took my breath away.”

She cried the whole way home.

Denise Ladner Daniel, who graduated with Bass and Eaton, collected the money. After she heard news of the storm, “I literally had flashbacks to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Camille,” Daniel said. “I understand what she was going through.”

Daniel asked everyone in the class for help. Day after day, classmates sent money and gift cards or stopped by Daniel’s house, signed a card and left money for Eaton. By the end, 42 classmates and three others who heard the story and wanted to help raised $2,448 in cash and $1,700 from gift cards, Daniel said.

Bass had already planned to bring a separate donation of gift cards to workers in Punta Gorda, Fla., — a city that helped Long Beach after Hurricane Katrina — so Daniel got the idea to send him there with money for Eaton, too.

Eaton used the gifts for groceries, repairs insurance would not cover, and new plants, because the storm dropped her roof in her front yard and flattened her butterfly garden.

She has not used it all. She is saving it, she said, because nearly a year after the storm she is still in the thick of repairs.

Eaton is retired but volunteers as a master gardener.

“We’ve all grown up, we’ve all had our lives, our careers,” she said. That people she had not seen in 50 years would help her, she said, shows how much “they care about people.”

The Class of 1972 is exceptionally close, said Anna McCoy, Eaton’s best friend from high school. So when Eaton left the reunion early after news of the storm, McCoy said, everyone wanted to help.

“Nobody thought twice,” she said.

And, she added, “We know what goes on after a bad hurricane. It’s just something that we do.”