And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado

by Bonar Menninger

  “That’s Hathaway,” Harold said. And then: “It’s too late. There it is. We’ve got to take cover. Pull over right here.” Everyone got out except Gypsy, the terrier. Virginia held Dena’s hand and Harold carried the toddler.

  Several others had gathered under the bridge for safety and someone yelled, “Run for it!” The Tuttles started up the steep embankment toward the small shelf where the bottom of the bridge deck met the abutment. Hathaway was climbing beside them. So were two other young men, Jim Russell and Tom Lux. Hathaway had flagged them down moments before. The tornado was close.

  “Oh, God, we’re going to be killed,” Lux yelled.

  Everyone pushed up tightly against the abutment. Harold Tuttle lay over his grandson, Adam, his feet hanging down toward the street. Virginia lay on top of Dena. She was facing south. The wind began to blow in earnest.

  Disc jockey Rick Douglass had radioed WREN immediately after he’d seen the blue house explode. “I can give a report that I just saw a house blow up on the mound!”

  “Roger. Stand by . . .”

  But there would be no standing by. Debris was beginning to pelt the WREN-mobile. The tornado was moving diagonally along the ridge an eighth of a mile west and was nearly to the water tower. Douglass tossed the mike to the passenger seat and opened the door. The roar from the twister engulfed him as he dashed across Gage for the bridge. He could see Hathaway standing at the top, bracing himself against the bottom of the deck. Pieces of wood and metal were flying past as Douglass started up the embankment. But he was heavy and the slope was steep and muddy and slick. Halfway up, his feet went out from under him and he tumbled back to the bottom.

  The wind hissed and howled.

  Douglass groped for one of the massive, concrete bridge pillars and tried to get his muddy arms around it. The wind was screaming now and it tore the back of his jacket right down the middle. Then it ripped off each sleeve — zip, zip — just like that. He could hear metallic banging as the cars parked under the bridge were gathered and rearranged by the wind. Up on the abutment, sand and gravel peppered Virginia Tuttle’s face like blasts of birdshot. She closed her eyes. The tornado was sucking all the air. It was hard to breathe.

  “God save us,” Virginia cried into the desolate roar. Then she felt herself begin to slip away. Slowly she was being pulled out the north side of the overpass. Now she was airborne amid the whirling debris. She shut her eyes tighter. Something struck her hard across the midsection. She clawed toward Earth but the wind was too strong.

  At about the same time, Douglass lost his grip on the big concrete pillar and fell. He tried to get up. But his feet weren’t touching the ground. Next, he was horizontal, flailing in the gale as though trying to swim upstream against a raging river. His body was facing south but he was moving north. He hit the ground and reached out to grab the earth. But it slipped through his fingers as the wind’s crushing grip tightened again and yanked him back into the air. He bounced and flew and tumbled north.

  I must look ridiculous was the only thought in his mind.

  Tom Noack, the electrician who lived just across the interstate from Burnett’s Mound — the one who’d watched the water tank go up six years before — knew the tornado was close. He’d heard Douglass’s warning on WREN. Now Noack stood on his back porch and watched the hill. Connie and the kids — seven-year-old Tom Jr., five-year-old Chris and one-year-old Leslie — already had gone to the basement. But Tom lingered. Connie kept yelling for him to come down.

  “I gotta see this!” he shouted back.

  Pretty quickly, the clearing sky was turning black again as the mighty column began to rise over the hill. “My God, it’s here!” Noack raced to the basement. It was 7:14 p.m.

  At this point, as the tornado stood at the edge of the city, the funnel was a half mile wide, at least 4,000 or 5,000 feet tall, spinning in excess of 200 miles an hour and traveling northeast at about 32 miles an hour. Then it slipped down the north side of the mound, loped across the interstate and plunged into the pastel houses of County Fair Estates.

  Noack just made it down the stairs. He could see the house starting to shake as he dove under a mattress with his family. Oh, Lord, it’s all gone! We’re losing our house is pretty much what he was thinking. The pressure of the air was like a vise and the volume of the sound was impossible to describe. For a moment, amid the chaos and tumult, the Noacks and the mattress were weightless, floating a few inches above the basement floor.

  A few blocks away, under the bed at the Huffman home, Teri’s sobs were soon drowned out by a steadily building wall of sound. The last memories she had, along with the rumble and roar, were the sudden darkness as the approaching tornado blotted out the sunlight that had filled the bedroom and a crushing pressure that made it hard to breathe.

  Teri’s mother, Joanna, felt the ground violently shaking beneath her. Then the bed lifted and flipped away and a wall flew past. The house was coming apart. Joanna reached over and tried to keep a grip on Teri. But the wind was determined to take the child. She couldn’t hold her. The little girl was slowly rising when Harold reached up with a powerful right hand and grabbed Teri and held her just like a ragged flag in the wind.

  A mile away, spotter John Meinholdt pulled off the interstate and turned to look back. He watched in astonishment as the tornado slid off the mound and crashed into the homes of the subdivision, blasting them off their foundations and scattering a million objects into the air. Dark shards of debris circled the funnel like a flock of angry birds.

  This can’t be real. Burnett’s Mound was supposed to protect Topeka. A tornado can’t do this.

  But it was just getting started.

  Albert Lollar had ushered his family to the basement after the sirens went off. Then he stood in the backyard of his home on Southwest 30th Terrace, a block from the Huffmans’, and watched the mound. The black clouds above the hill were cataclysmic, as dire as anything he’d ever seen. So ominous was the sky that Lollar began to second-guess himself and think that perhaps his family wasn’t safe after all, even in the basement. A few minutes more and he was sure of it. So he ran inside and yelled to everyone. They had to go, they had to get in the car and get away. It was a full house: Lollar’s wife, Darlene, a nine-year-old-son, seven-year-old daughter, six-month-old girl, a niece and her five-month-old baby — seven people in all, plus the family dog. Juggling babies, young and old ran upstairs and jumped into the Lollars’ new Pontiac. They backed out the driveway, raced down the short street and turned south on Gage, heading for the interstate.

  But the time for getting away had passed. The family watched the house on the side of the mound explode. They saw the tornado churn down the north side of the hill and cross the interstate. Now it was chewing through the homes along Twilight Drive, the curving, winding street closest to the highway. The homes were lifting in front of the tornado like leaves before a blower.

  Lollar sped up, but the Pontiac sputtered and died. He tried to start it again but could not. The tornado was sucking air for thousands of feet in every direction. The carburetor was starved for oxygen. Lollar glanced to the shoulder, but there was no ditch to speak of. Nowhere to run. The tornado was heading straight for them.

  “Everybody duck down!” he yelled as debris began to pummel the car.

  We’re going to be killed.

  Then the car was airborne, spinning like a Frisbee, first one direction, then the other. The windows exploded outward. But there was a strange stillness inside the car. Darlene opened her eyes at one point to check on the baby. Large objects were flying and whirling by outside. Everything was suspended in a cloud of fine, brown dust.

  How long did it last? A minute? A year? The car slammed into something solid.

  With 40 or 50 others, Sue Goodin, the schoolteacher, huddled on the floor in the basement shelter of the clubhouse at the Huntington Apartments. The shelter doubled as the laundry room. She heard the approaching roar just before the lights flickered and went out. A mome
nt later, there was pounding on the door at the top of the stairs. Several men ran up. Goodin followed. The men fought to open the door against the fury of the wind. A woman was standing there. She was middle-aged and holding a laundry basket. She was covered with mud. Her eyes were wide and her face contorted in fear, as if she’d seen a ghost. Her hair stood out in every direction. Goodin took the laundry basket and the men reeled the woman in the way you’d haul someone over the side of a ship in a raging sea. They yanked the door shut.

  “I didn’t know there was a warning! I was just going to do some laundry!” the woman said. She was sobbing and in shock.

  Goodin made it back down to the basement. The roar grew louder. No one spoke. Then someone shouted: “Cover your head!” The comment struck Goodin as ridiculous, for she was certain that they all were just moments from death. The floor above them would collapse, she was sure of it. Then it began: The buffalo were returning, riding the wind. Ten thousand hoofbeats pounded the ceiling above in a thundering, clattering stampede. Goodin felt her ears exploding from the change in air pressure. Time became rubbery as she waited for death.

  Two miles away, a 29-year-old photographer with the Topeka Daily Capital named Perry Riddle was tracking the tornado as it entered the city, composing and shooting and making pictures. He’d heard the warning and gathered his family, and because they had no basement, he’d driven four blocks to the Countryside Methodist Church on Burlingame Road. He put his family off at the door, parked the car, then opened the trunk and grabbed his Nikon 35-millimeter. Riddle started shooting a few minutes before the tornado crested the mound.

  It was still raining, so to keep his lens dry, Riddle periodically would pull up the front of his jockey shorts and use the soft cotton to wipe his lens clean. Then he’d start shooting again, advancing and retreating across the church parking lot as the tornado drew closer or seemed to move off. He wasn’t thinking much, just reacting in the moment, like all good photographers, and focusing on the shot. But he remembers being struck by the enormity of the funnel. From his vantage point, its full height and width were evident against the white sky in the west. And it was a colossus, completely off the scale when compared to anything in the human world.

  Riddle shot 20 to 30 pictures in all. The church parking lot and cars rushing to the shelter fill the foreground; the houses and wet streets of a nearby subdivision are visible in the middle distance. The tornado dominates the horizon, moving in from behind the ridge alongside Burnett’s Mound in the early frames, then climbing the hill and topping it. The brutish, wedge-like funnel morphs through the sequence, leaning forward like an animal springing to attack, and finally, in latter shots — after it had dropped into the subdivision below the mound — it seems to explode into a black, angry mass. All the pictures are exceptional for their clarity and drama, particularly those that captured fleeting figures running for the building.

  But one shot stands out. In the foreground, a family is sprinting for cover, nearly silhouetted in the strange light of that afternoon. A man is bent low and determined, like a soldier charging the enemy. A boy runs in front of him and a small girl is scampering out ahead. A woman, with a small child wrapped awkwardly but firmly under her left arm, is keeping pace to the man’s right. In the shadowy background stands a tall, slender cross attached to a church building. On the horizon, the tornado dominates the center of the picture. It is a desperate, earnest photograph and — given where it was and what it was — as iconic as any ever taken.

  Attorney Jim Ward and his family huddled as one in the corner of the unfinished basement. Jim had spotted a roll of insulation on the floor and pulled it close to their heads, paper-side down. Now the roar was upon them and crashing and ripping started as the house began to go. The pressure was crushing. The tornado’s snarling growl grew louder and louder and wood was flying around the basement. And then, as the sound finally began to abate, Ward heard his wife’s voice clearly beside him:

  “. . . and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory. For ever and ever. Amen.”

  Ward took a deep breath.

  Forty years later, Carolyn Ward’s hands would start shaking when she talked about the sound the tornado made.

  “It doesn’t look like there’s anyone here, John.”

  Goodyear night-shift worker John Griebat and his wife, Sherry, pulled up in front of the Crestview Recreation Center on Shunga Drive, looking for shelter.

  “I’ll check the doors.”

  Griebat jumped out and ran in his slippers to the main double doors of the center. Locked. He jogged around and rattled a side door to the gymnasium. Buttoned up. So he turned and ran back to the car. The air was dead still.

  “We’ll go to Peg’s,” he said as he slid back into the idling, black muscle car and dropped it into gear.

  Shunga Drive ran east and west and paralleled the Shunganunga. A thick belt of trees along both banks of the creek blocked the Griebats’ view to the south as they sped down the deserted street toward Gage. At the stop sign, Griebat looked both ways and then rolled right through, cranking the wheel hard as he turned south on the main thoroughfare.

  And there it was, big as life. The tornado was straight up Gage, less than a quarter mile ahead. It looked like a huge gray, spinning wall, firing debris in every direction.

  “Hang on!”

  Griebat punched the Impala and the car leapt toward a small bridge that spanned the creek.

  You dumb ass. You’re driving right toward it.

  Then . . .

  The bridge.

  “We’ll get under the bridge!”

  Griebat bounced the Chevy up over the curb and onto the shoulder on the far side of the short, low concrete span. He hit the brakes and the car slid to a stop in the wet grass. The front bumper just kissed a light pole.

  “Let’s go!”

  Griebat wrapped his right arm tightly around his daughter, Julie, and opened the car door. Sherry jumped out on the other side. And the noise just swept through them: a deep, percussive, thunderous roar. It sounded to Griebat like the continuous explosions of a carpet bombing, boom-boom-boom-boom, all the way up Gage. So scary was the sound that he thought they were about to die. It was the kind of fear that makes the limbs grow heavy and the flesh crawl, the kind where you can easily lose control of your bodily functions and your mind reverts to ancient mechanisms designed to quickly choose between life and death. The Griebats half-slid, half-fell down the steep embankment to the creek, John breaking a trail through the thick nettles with his body, balancing Julie in one arm and grabbing fistfuls of earth and vine with the other to slow his descent and keep his feet. When he reached the bottom, he saw two other people, a man and a woman, standing in the cool, black shadows beneath the bridge.

  “Thank God, you’re here,” the man shouted to Griebat.

  What? What did he mean? Were they expected? Did he know this man? It was an eerie, surreal moment.

  But there was no time to reflect, for the roar kept getting louder and very quickly a torrent of sticks and leaves was swirling under the bridge. Griebat covered the baby, pulled Sherry close to him and buried his face in the dirt.

  Five blocks away, John’s sister, Peg, the gym teacher, and her husband, Paul, the meat cutter, were peering out a shoulder-high basement window toward Burnett’s Mound. They watched the tornado cross Gage and slam into the Embassy Apartments. The building complex exploded upward in a thick cloud of red bricks, dust and lumber.

  To Paul, the tornado sounded like a hammer mill, an extremely loud piece of farm machinery used to mill grain into coarse flour to feed livestock. The sound had a high-speed, mechanical whirl to it.

  “That thing’s coming straight for us,” he said.

  Peg watched the apartment complex disintegrate, then saw the tornado march into the open, undeveloped ground between the Embassy and their street. The twis
ter was whitish-gray and engorged with debris. It was less than a quarter mile away. Peg turned to Paul and said, more in surprised, bitter disappointment than in fear, “We’re gonna die.”

  And Paul was in no position to argue, for he was likewise certain that they were about to be killed. He wasn’t scared by the thought. Just shocked and taken aback. At this point, the noise grew so loud that the couple was convinced the sound alone would kill them, that it would literally split their skulls like some kind of sonic ax. Nothing could survive such an onslaught.

  But then, suddenly, the base of the tornado bounced as it approached the tree line along the small creek that ran behind the houses across the street. The massive column was beginning to lift. The swirling base was almost even with the roofs of the homes that backed up to the creek across Atwood Street.

  “Get up! Get up!” Paul and Peg yelled frantically. They were motioning their outstretched palms upward like football fans trying to coax a long field goal through the uprights. But the moment didn’t last. The massive funnel slowly began to settle back toward Earth. They ran from the window and ducked under a heavy coffee table in the corner of the basement. Then all the savage sounds converged into one. A cacophony of breaking glass, snapping lumber, ripping shingles and collapsing walls engulfed them.

  This is it, Peg thought.

  Bill Kurtis was rooted in front of the camera at the WIBW-TV studios, passing along what information he could about the tornado’s whereabouts and apparent path. Citizens and police observers were feeding reports to the station in near real time, and the audio portion of the broadcast was being simulcast on WIBW 580 radio. From off-camera, someone handed Kurtis a note that read: “The Embassy and Huntington apartments have been destroyed.”

  A flood of thoughts and emotions swept through him. Kurtis immediately thought of his family. He could draw a line mentally between Auburn Road, Burnett’s Mound and the Embassy Apartments and deduce that the twister was heading straight into the city and moving toward the Washburn campus. That’s where he lived, in student housing, in a small, one-story duplex with no basement. That’s where his wife and daughter were right now. Kurtis always told Helen not to worry, that if the weather became especially bad, he’d give her a call and she’d have plenty of warning. But now he was stuck in front of the camera, broadcasting live. He couldn’t get away. His mind kept running. If the tornado had wrecked the sprawling Embassy complex, that meant it was big and wide and not just a slender little funnel. And if it was big, it probably would stay on the ground.