by Holly Bailey
In those crucial early moments in the life of a storm, a radar could tell you only so much. It could tell you a tornado might be forming but not that it definitely was. While the National Weather Service had posted storm spotters in every county and city in Oklahoma, it was often the live pictures transmitted by storm chasers on one or more of the local television stations that gave the Weather Service the definitive evidence that it was time to declare a tornado warning.
England often pointed to this when critics mocked the station’s coverage as over-the-top or belittled it as nothing more than entertainment. While he conceded that some of his viewers were storm fanatics who loved the thrill of the chase—and sometimes his chasers got caught up in the adrenaline—he truly believed deep in his heart that what he and his team were doing was a genuine public service, and more often than not, people agreed. While it was easy to pinpoint where thunderstorms would erupt and which ones had conditions favorable to producing a tornado, no one knew if a funnel would actually hit the ground or where it would happen. All England could do was examine the storm projections and pre-position his team based on the forecast and his gut sense of what the weather might do. For all of the radars and technology, tornadoes, in some ways, continued to be as mysterious as they had been when he was a little boy.
• • •
Gary England was born in 1939 in a small wooden farmhouse with no electricity in Seiling, Oklahoma, the tiniest of tiny towns near the Texas border, where the seemingly endless short-grass prairie had been ravaged by the extreme drought of the Dust Bowl. His parents were farmers struggling to raise livestock off the dry land. The Great Depression had not made things easy. Cash was so tight that his parents paid the doctor who delivered him in the form of live chickens—a transaction that was not uncommon in those days.
Fewer than two hundred people lived in or around Seiling at the time, spread so far apart that one could go for days without seeing anyone. There was not much for a child to do beyond tending livestock and looking up at the sky. And as much as England liked his pigs, what he really loved was the mystery of the weather. There were wild blizzards that dropped what felt like yards of snow, followed by blistering-hot summers with blinding dust storms that could turn the day as dark as night. But it was the spring that most excited him, when ominous thunderheads would suddenly explode, unleashing terrifying winds, torrential rains, jagged zigzags of lightning, and gigantic clumps of hail. The storms were particularly dangerous on the wide-open landscape of the farm, where there was nowhere to escape if you were caught out in the open fields. On more than one occasion when he was a boy, Gary and his family were forced to run for their lives when a storm blew up.
Back then forecasting simply didn’t exist; you had to rely on folk wisdom and superstitions passed down through the generations. If you spotted more furry caterpillars in the fall or your cow’s hair was thicker than usual, a bitter winter was coming, his parents told him. Winds from the east and achy bones meant rain was on the way. In storm season people looked for even more peculiar clues, like flies congregating on the screen door. If the birds stopped singing, it was red alert. Later in life England still clung to those signs from nature, indicators that were often as accurate as any offered by technology.
His first memory of a tornado was in April 1947, when a twister made a direct hit on the nearby town of Woodward. Swirling to life 100 miles away in the Texas panhandle, it was said to be nearly 2 miles wide and had been on the ground for almost an hour as it approached the city just before 9:00 P.M. Still, there was no warning, and the tornado leveled a hundred city blocks in Woodward, engulfing what remained in a terrible inferno. In all, at least a hundred people died—it was the deadliest tornado in Oklahoma’s history.
Gary was just seven years old at the time, but decades later he still remembered the sky that night before the storm—how the clouds had looked like fuzzy pink egg cartons as the sun set. He learned years later that these were mammatus clouds and those puffs, sinking pouches of air that were usually indicative of a severe thunderstorm. He and his parents had stood outside their home looking at the odd sight, and his father declared in a matter-of-fact voice, “Somewhere tonight, there’s going to be a bad tornado.” A few hours later, after the sun had gone down, Gary was lying in bed wide awake. A light wind opened his curtains, and through his open window he could see his hound dog, Cookie, nosing around the front yard looking for night critters. Suddenly Cookie went rigid, and a few seconds later he let out a low, mournful howl, a sound Gary had never heard before. It scared him to death. Not long after, he heard the sound of sirens screaming in the distance, coming closer and closer. It went on all night, and he barely slept.
Television did not exist in Oklahoma back in 1947, and news and weather coverage on the radio was almost unheard of. So it wasn’t until the next morning, once his father had gone out to investigate, that the family learned about the deadly tornado next door. Later he listened in horror as adults told stories of how its winds were so strong they had literally blown people’s clothes off and police had found naked people impaled on telephone poles. He saw pictures of the aftermath, wagons piled with dead bodies and devastation as far as the eye could see. And he heard terrible stories of how kids had been sucked up by the storm and dropped far away, miraculously alive but never to be reunited with their families. The stories scared him. It was the first time he realized that the weather, as fascinating as it was, could be ruthless.
A few summers later Gary and his father were cleaning out one of their livestock pens when they were hit by the fiercest winds he had ever felt in his life. With dirt and debris flying in the air around them, they both dropped to the ground and clawed their way toward a brick chicken coop, where Gary’s dad threw his body onto his son and grabbed a support beam buried deep in the ground. It seemed to be their only hope of not being sucked away. Hanging on for dear life, he heard the windows around him breaking and opened his eyes just as the building’s tin roof peeled away like the lid of a soup can. Chickens, squawking for dear life, were zooming past his head like “feathered bullets,” he later recalled, and at that moment he believed his young life was over. But then, with a flash of lightning and a ground-shaking crash of thunder, the storm was suddenly over—vanishing almost as quickly as it had come. Covered in a mix of mud, bird droppings, and feathers, he sat there shaking and terrified but thrilled by the storm. His father, who was by then no stranger to the random assaults, was not quite so excited. “Good Lord,” he said to his son. “Will we ever know when these darn things are going to hit?”
At that point the only warning system one could hope for was a police officer parked on the west side of town on stormy days to keep watch for funnels. If the officer spotted a storm coming, he would radio back to the station or, more often in those days, race back to town and blow the emergency siren himself. After that storm Gary and his family moved closer to town. As he grew up, he’d hear the siren go off seconds before the storms hit. He and his family would race to the storm cellar—crawling down into the dark hole in the ground that also served as storage for the dozens of mason jars his mom canned every year. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what was more terrifying—that roar in the distance or the darkness of the cellar, where snakes and black widows with their deadly venom lurked.
England’s fascination with storms only grew as he got older. He looked forward to the spring with a mix of fear and anticipation. He was ten or eleven when he finally saw his first tornado, a funnel that magically appeared in the distance when he was riding the school bus home one spring afternoon. It dropped down in a field near the North Canadian River, which ran south of town. It wasn’t a big tornado, and it faded away quickly, but he was mesmerized. His dad had taken a job as a delivery driver for a bread company, and Gary occasionally joined him on the long routes around western Oklahoma. The truck didn’t have a radio, and his dad passed the time singing old country songs while Gary stared out the window at
the sky, looking for signs of that next storm.
Television had arrived in Oklahoma by then, though England and his family were too poor to own a set. The first time he saw a television was through the front window of his uncle’s hardware store. A crowd had gathered around a brown box where he could see a faint picture of people who appeared to be caught in a snowstorm. The reception was poor—Seiling was more than 100 miles away from Oklahoma City, home of the state’s only television station at that point—but soon the picture became clearer as tall antennas began to rise on the landscape like metal weeds. He would walk by the hardware store as often as he could, staring into that storefront where the brown box gave him a glimpse of a world that seemed so far away.
By then Gary was old enough to begin to think of what his future might hold. He figured he’d probably be a pig farmer someday—he’d always liked pigs. But one fateful night he walked past the hardware store and saw something he’d never seen before: a man standing in front of a map of Oklahoma that was covered in chalk lines. He couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but crude lines on the map appeared to represent weather fronts, cold air and hot air, and they were converging right over Oklahoma. He watched as the man wrote numbers over different regions of the state. In one corner of the map he wrote, in all caps, “RAIN.” A day later it did rain, just as the man had predicted—and England was hooked.
• • •
Though England didn’t learn his identity until later, that man was Harry Volkman, the very first television weatherman in the state of Oklahoma and one of the first broadcast meteorologists in the entire country. A Boston native who was obsessed with the weather before he could even read, Volkman came to Oklahoma when he was discharged from the army after World War II. He enrolled at an aeronautical school in Tulsa, one of the few institutions at the time to offer a degree in meteorology. Forecasting back then was primarily viewed as a function of the military, but Volkman’s interest wasn’t just scientific. As a child he’d seen his mother petrified by the sudden appearance of thunderstorms, and he dreamed of being able to tell people what was coming so that they could be prepared and could perhaps even appreciate the weather around them. He was a precocious kid who even started his own amateur radio station at one point using his family’s roof antenna. In Tulsa he revived those skills and took a job as a disc jockey at a local radio station, where he begged the management to let him do the forecasts too. Finally they relented, and he began to do a nightly weather report.
Even in a place like Oklahoma, where the weather has such an impact on people’s lives, many of Volkman’s colleagues had no actual knowledge of its most basic science. A colleague who introduced him could barely pronounce his new title. On air the man called him the station’s “meaty-e-rologist.” In 1949 KOTV, Tulsa’s first television station, went on air, and Volkman pitched himself as a forecaster. The station’s staff dismissed him, telling him they weren’t even sure they would do weather. A few months later, after he’d taken a job working as a janitor and doing other odd jobs at KOTV, Volkman finally got his shot. He went on air with a plastic map of Oklahoma and illustrated his forecast by drawing over it with a grease pencil that could be wiped away after every show.
The U.S. Weather Bureau, which handled forecasting at the time, shared only broad sketches of what it thought the skies would do, and few people outside the military had access to weather radars. Volkman had learned Morse code in the army as part of a team that decoded weather updates sent between units to protect artillery. In Tulsa, and later in Oklahoma City, he used a shortwave radio to tap into those transmissions, listening to coded messages sent to and from nearby military bases with atmospheric observations and forecasts. He used them to craft his own forecasts.
In March 1952 Volkman moved to Oklahoma City and joined WKY-TV—or, as the locals knew it, Channel 4. (Decades later it would change its call letters to KFOR, as it is known today.) By then the Weather Bureau knew he’d been cracking military forecasts—but it didn’t stop him. In his first week on the job a potentially deadly outbreak of severe storms erupted, threatening Oklahoma City. With the skies growing ever more ominous, Volkman and his boss, Buddy Sugg, a former navy officer, heard transmissions over the radio that a “tornado alert”—the early version of a “tornado watch”—had been issued by forecasters at nearby Tinker Air Force Base. Officials there had started to take the weather seriously after two tornadoes hit the base within days of each other in 1947, almost wiping out its fleet of B-2 bombers, but though their forecasts were considered among the most accurate in the air force, they were kept secret from the public. Some were leaked to Volkman, who was still monitoring the coded messages, but he was limited in what he could do with the information. The FCC had actually banned radio and television broadcasters from using the words “tornado” or “tornado alert”—concerned that they could cause mass panic. Sugg would have none of it. He felt that to not alert the public was to needlessly put lives at risk. He told Volkman they absolutely had to get the alerts on the air. It was their duty. “We could get arrested,” Volkman said. “I’m giving you an order,” Sugg replied. “If they want to arrest anyone, let them arrest me.”
The station dispatched a reporter to Tinker with a hidden microphone, and on base he recorded audio of the tornado alert, which listed specific counties that were at risk. Back at the station Volkman interrupted programming and, in front of his crude map, warned viewers of the impending storm heading toward Oklahoma City. Though nothing touched the ground that day, it was the first televised tornado watch in history. Government officials were furious—they threatened to arrest him and strip the station of its broadcasting license. But in the end they did nothing because they knew they wouldn’t have the support of the public, who sent Volkman thank-you cards and kind notes. After that he kept issuing tornado warnings, including one for a 1954 twister that wiped out part of Meeker, east of Oklahoma City. A few months later, in early 1955, he was hired away by a relatively new rival station, KWTV. It was the opening salvo in a bitter and personal war spanning decades between Channel 9 and Channel 4 for weather supremacy in Oklahoma City.
• • •
England knew nothing of Volkman’s history or the important role he had played in the development of television meteorology. All he knew was that he was dazzled. The idea that someone could predict the weather blew his young mind. Amused by their son’s interest, his parents accommodated him by driving him over to his grandparents’ house every Sunday night. They were the first in the family to own a television set, and while the adults talked, Gary would park himself right at the foot of the television, inches away from the screen, listening intently. At the time, the pioneering weatherman was doing forecasts twice a day every day. He had his own Sunday-night program, Weather Station, which sometimes had the feel of a variety show. An accomplished vocalist in his church choir, Volkman occasionally sang a sentence or two when proclaiming the forecast, and as he talked about air fronts moving through the state, he would enact them with a big “Whoooshhh.” England loved it, and one night he turned to his father and excitedly declared that he wanted to be like Harry Volkman when he grew up. “Well, what is he?” his father replied. “I don’t know,” England said, “but I want to be one.”
• • •
While Volkman had started to change the way people thought about forecasting and public awareness, most universities around Oklahoma still didn’t offer meteorology degrees when England graduated from high school. Only the military had weather training, so he joined the navy and after a couple of years was able to take classes at its weather school based in New Jersey. It was there that he finally learned why Oklahoma’s weather was so volatile—what all those lines on Volkman’s crude weather map really meant. Until then he had believed that no one but God really knew what Oklahoma’s weather would do—and while in many ways that was still true, he finally understood that there was vital data available that suggested when and where storm
s would erupt—clues most Oklahomans knew nothing about.
After a stint in the Midway Islands, where he helped guide navy pilots through some of the wildest weather conditions on the planet, including massive tropical storms, England left the navy and went back to Oklahoma, where he got married and began taking classes at the University of Oklahoma. Decades later OU would offer one of the most celebrated meteorology programs in the country, but in the early 1960s it still didn’t offer a weather degree. He was forced to major in math, a subject he had barely studied in high school, with a meteorology “option.” His adviser was beyond skeptical, telling him he wouldn’t make it in meteorology, but “you can try.” All he wanted to do was be a TV weatherman. He had no idea how hard it would be to get there.
As he struggled through classes—made more difficult by his dyslexia, which wouldn’t be diagnosed until years later—he got a part-time job at the Atmospheric Research Lab on campus. Scientists were only just beginning to study the origins of tornadoes and what made them so deadly, and he was right there on the front lines. But he couldn’t give up on the idea of television, and he contacted David Grant, who had replaced Volkman at KWTV. Grant told him to make an audition tape. Suddenly England was terrified. In all his years of dreaming of being on television, he’d never practiced in front of a camera. But he did it, and then later he auditioned in person. When Grant called to offer him a gig doing the weather on the weekends, he astonished his wife by turning it down. He was too terrified of going on television.
Instead he and Mary moved to New Orleans, where he took a job forecasting weather and oceanographic conditions for a private meteorological firm whose primary client was the offshore oil industry. He spent a few years guiding clients through storms, including Hurricane Camille—one of the most destructive hurricanes to ever hit the Louisiana Gulf Coast until Katrina. But all that time he couldn’t stop thinking about the storms back in Oklahoma. In 1970, when he saw reports of a tornado that had hit parts of Oklahoma City without warning, he decided to go back, more confident in his abilities and convinced he could make a difference. But when he went home for interviews, none of the Oklahoma City television stations were interested. He had no on-air experience.