What the hell?
Noack watched in disbelief as people began to get out and run down to the yards that backed up to the interstate. They’d grab objects from the debris field and dash back up the embankment. Then they would jump in their cars and speed away. Not just one or two, but maybe a dozen people, alone and in small groups. Looters. The tornado hadn’t been gone five minutes. Noack’s heart sank and his stomach turned. Anger rose inside him. He shut off as many gas meters as he could. Then he started slowly back up the destroyed street.
A few blocks away, 10-year-old Teri Huffman was coming to. She raised her head and looked around. She was covered with mud and shivering violently, as if an arctic front had blown through. But the air was warm and still and the sky was blue. Her sister lay beneath her. Their bodies were askew in the muddy grass near a concrete slab that a few moments before had been their home. Everything was gone, everything, just vacuumed away. The tornado was thorough: Even the floorboards and wall-to-wall carpet had been ripped up and carried off. Only gray concrete remained. A hot water heater lay on its side in the center of the slab, slowly leaking water.
Teri looked around. She didn’t understand why her mother was climbing a pile of rubble in the backyard, digging frantically with her hands. In a moment, Joanna came down with a pair of men’s pants and a child’s T-shirt. She walked back to the slab where Teri’s father was pulling himself to his feet.
“Put these on,” she said unsteadily.
Harold was naked and covered with mud. On his back and side was the perfect imprint of a chain-link fence, outlined by a matrix of red welts. Teri’s head was pounding. Something had hit her and knocked her cold. She had a goose egg the size of a fist on the back of her skull. But her sister, Tami, seemed to have fared the worst. She had three deep cuts in her back that looked like claw marks and her two front teeth were broken. Her mouth was just blood.
Harold put on the pants, which were much too large, and the shirt, which was much too small, and he helped the girls across the street to a neighbor’s house that had not been destroyed. Joanna was following but collapsed coming up the driveway. Some men found a door and put her on it, and another station wagon was pressed into ambulance duty. The rest of the family climbed in.
The stampede that thundered across the laundry room of the Huntington Apartments seemed to last for all eternity. But the ceiling didn’t collapse, much to Sue Goodin’s everlasting amazement, gratitude and relief. When silence finally returned, someone went up the stairs and yelled that it was safe to come out. The group slowly made their way from darkness to light. There were murmurs and gasps as people stepped into the day. The square, two-story apartment building that surrounded the courtyard — modern and solid and full of life moments before — was shattered on every side. The apartments were opened like a rabbit warren or simply blown away. In the three-building Embassy complex, all 150 apartments were destroyed or severely damaged. A car was perched in a second-story apartment. Another lay at the bottom of the swimming pool. Everyday objects that correlated to someone’s existence were scattered across the fractured landscape: a child’s doll, a muddy Bible, a broken highchair, a pink Princess telephone.
The destruction was so stunning that Goodin had a hard time taking it in. She looked up and thanked God she was alive and marveled at the beauty of the sky.
I need to get a hold of my sister and let her know I’m okay.
The Lollars’ car had come to a rest, right side up, amid the rubble of the Embassy Apartments. Albert Lollar tried to lift his head but could not. A plank had run through the front window, through the spokes of the steering wheel and out the back window. It was lodged there still. Everyone in the car was coated with mud and tar. A few had cuts, but nothing severe. The group slowly climbed out of the battered Pontiac and made their way to Gage Boulevard. Albert flagged down a passing car and a man gave them a ride to the hospital.
The family eventually made it back to their home and found the house destroyed. A wall had collapsed into the southwest corner of the basement and filled it with debris. Albert’s instincts, as it turned out, had been correct: The southwest corner would have been a death trap had the family stayed put. Strangely, though, in the opposite corner of the basement, two vases stood untouched on a stand. And odd curios littered the wreckage — a stereo cabinet containing a packet of lunch meat, a dinner fork stabbed into a board, a sealed soft drink bottle with only an inch or so of fluid left in it.
Aside from tiny fibers of insulation embedded in their skin, attorney Jim Ward, his wife, Carolyn, and their two children were unhurt. The family walked out of the basement of the unfinished home on Atwood Street. The house was badly damaged. The north wall and roof of the garage were gone. The family’s Nash was still parked inside but covered with a thick layer of mud and sand.
Carolyn stared out to the west and north.
“My God, Jim.”
Below, the shallow valley between Atwood and Burnett’s Mound was impossibly wrecked. It looked to Jim like a scene from World War II. Cars were upside down, scattered and piled in heaps in the parking lots of the Embassy Apartments. Tons of debris lay in long, irregular windrows, recklessly gathered by the great spinning machine. The brown trail of devastation swept up the ridge to the top of the hill, as far as the Wards could see to the north. Silence lay like a thick blanket across the ruin.
Everyone in Topeka is dead, Carolyn thought. Thousands of people are dead.
What else could you think?
Suddenly, a car roared down the hill and screeched to a halt in front of the house. A teenager — shirtless, his eyes blazing with panic and his face covered with shaving cream — stuck his head out the window and shouted urgently, “What happened? Are you all right?”
Junior high schoolteacher Ron Olson came upstairs to find the roof and most of the second floor of his home gone. A two-by-ten floor joist was sticking through the west wall of an upstairs bedroom like an arrow. He stepped outside and saw that the detached garage was gone. He immediately thought of Beowulf, the family’s Doberman. There’d been no time to get the dog to shelter. But just then the dog came trotting up, muddy and dazed but apparently okay. Olson looked down the shattered street. No color was visible. Even the blades of grass were gone. Only black and brown stood out in sharp contrast to the blue sky above. Olson’s own front yard bristled with dozens of boards driven like porcupine quills deep into the ground. His wife, Linda, made her way up from the basement and somehow managed to find a clean diaper for six-week-old Tawnia. She gasped when she opened the old one. The wind had infiltrated the diaper and filled it with tiny shards of glass and insulation. Tawnia had a few cuts and scratches, but she wasn’t badly hurt. Neither was anyone else in the home. The cars were destroyed. Soon a friend made his way up the wrecked street and Olson loaded the family into the car. They would escape to Burlington. He would stay to stand watch over what was left of their home.
Grace and John Steuri opened the pantry door in the first-floor apartment on 29th Street and saw blue sky. It appeared as if the apartment building had been bombed. They picked their way out through the rubble. Everyone in the closet was okay, although Grace’s inner ear evidently had been damaged by the roar or the pressure drop because she was having trouble keeping her balance. They looked back toward the mound. Tiny fountains had sprouted from the broken water lines in many of the destroyed homes. The air was pungent with natural gas. Across the street, a Volkswagen Beetle was balled up and lodged in the crotch of a tree.
John Griebat had waited for death beneath the Shunganunga Creek Bridge. It wasn’t until the roar began to fade that he realized he and his family just might get out with their lives. When the ordeal was over, John, Sherry and their daughter, Julie, and the other couple stood around for a moment. No one said anything. Finally the man suggested that the Griebats come to their house nearby.
“You go, Sherry. I’ve got to check on Peg and Paul.”
The group helped one another up the st
eep, muddy bank. Then John took off running south. It was immediately clear that the area ahead had been entirely wrecked. The adrenaline was pumping as John quickened his pace. He ran out of his slippers somewhere on Gage, and then he was barefoot, dodging the glass, shards of metal and boards bristling with nails. Hot power lines were down at 29th and Gage, and he leapt them without breaking stride.
He had just one thought in his mind: Get up to that house. See if Peg and Paul are okay.
He reached Atwood, a block up from the base of the 29th Street hill, and then turned south. The devastation was even more complete there. Everything was flattened. Griebat looked ahead to where his sister’s house should have been. But he could see only rubble. He counted back the blocks from 29th to make sure he had the right corner. Then he pulled up panting and slowly walked toward the site. He got closer and stopped, afraid of what he was about to see. He could recognize familiar items in the wrecked basement. But there was not a soul around. In fact, he hadn’t seen another human being since he’d left the bridge. It was as if everyone had been killed. The realization began to sink in that Peg and Paul probably were dead, too.
And then . . .
“John? Is that you?”
Griebat looked up. It was his sister, Peg, walking up the street toward him. Paul was with her. She still had on the brightly colored, floral-patterned dress she’d planned to wear to the wedding shower that night. But it was stained and muddy. Her finger had been badly cut, and they’d gone up the street in search of a bandage. Peg’s hair was wild and she didn’t have any shoes. Paul appeared unhurt but likewise was covered with mud. His crew cut and scalp were oddly speckled with dozens of tiny dots of tar, almost like a tattoo, probably from the many asphalt and gravel roofs in the neighborhood.
A wide grin spread across John’s face as he ran toward them. He swept Peg up in one arm and Paul in the other and lifted them straight off the ground. And then he squeezed them both so tightly that Paul thought John liked to nearly kill them.
Shunga Park / Washburn University
A – Riddle, Countryside Methodist Church
J – Whiting Fieldhouse
B – Breuninger, SW 23rd St. Park
K – ROTC Building
C – Fernstrom, College Ave.
L – Crane Observatory
D – Scheibe, Shunga Dr.
M – Thomas Women’s Gymnasium
E – McDiffett, Shunga Dr.
N – Fernstrom, Taylor (Leon), Summerville, Carnegie Hall
F – Warfel, Wayne Ave.
O – Rice Hall
G – Martin (Cleve, Hazel & Carol), Randolph Ave.
P – Martin (John & Elaine), Stoffer Science Hall
H – Torrence (Mary), Kansas Neurological Institute
Q – Hillebert, Snyder, Tarnower, Drayer, MacVicar Chapel, Recital
I – Martin (John & Elaine), Washburn married student housing
R – Hutton, Morgan Hall
CHAPTER NINE
A Recital Interrupted
My gosh, Ruth! Look at the sky!”
Twenty-nine-year-old John Fernstrom gazed up as he stepped out the door of his home near Washburn University at about 10 minutes before seven o’clock. The sirens had not yet sounded. The sky was mustard-green and swollen with the grotesque bulges of mammatus clouds, hundreds of pendulous sacks that rolled off to the southwest like an enormous field of boulders. The clouds, though harmless, indicate heavy turbulence in the atmosphere and often precede severe thunderstorms. Short of a tornado, mammatus are among the most apocalyptic cloud formations Mother Nature can invoke.
Fernstrom and his wife stared up in silence.
Finally, John said, “I doubt we’ll ever see another sky like this,” and Ruth agreed. “I just hope it doesn’t mean something bad is going to happen.”
The couple climbed into their white ’65 Buick Skylark and drove several blocks to the Washburn campus. John was a Washburn grad, a hail-fellow-well-met type and a rising star at the Kaw Valley State Bank in North Topeka. Tonight was the final exam in a continuing education course he’d been taking on the emerging role of computers in banking. Ruth was a social worker for Shawnee County. Conscientious and practical, she’d been swamped at work and decided to go back into the office to catch up.
The Skylark swung wide into a parking lot on the east side of the Washburn campus. John grabbed his raincoat, gave his wife a hurried kiss good-bye and strode briskly toward an imposing stone structure known as Carnegie Hall. The building housed Washburn’s law school.
In 1966, Washburn University encompassed 13 major buildings and several dozen smaller ones on a 160-acre campus a quarter-mile square. The newer structures — Stoffer Science Hall, the Student Union and Morgan Hall (the library and administrative building) — all evoked the dreary, austere functionality of the Cold War era. But they didn’t dominate the campus. Rather, it was a group of six older limestone buildings that gave Washburn its character and charm. The two- and three-story structures had gone up between 1874 and World War I, and each reflected the style and budget of its time. Some were plain and stern like the people who built them; others incorporated Romanesque and Classical Revival features, such as arches and columns. The buildings were not laid out on a quad or grid but instead were scattered around the north side of campus like huts in an ancient village.
The result could have been an aesthetic mishmash, given the architectural disparities and the absence of a master plan. But consistent use of the yellow limestone native to Kansas — hewed in large, rough blocks — unified the buildings and imbued the campus with a warm and graceful dignity. A pleasant network of walkways shaded by abundant pine, elm and pin oak completed the effect.
To 13-year-old Irma Hillebert, the university appeared almost enchanted that night. She’d arrived with her parents a little before 7:00 p.m. at MacVicar Chapel, the music building adjacent to Carnegie Hall. She was to play in a preparatory flute recital. Irma had been taking lessons through the spring from a Washburn music professor, Robert Snyder, and all of Snyder’s students from across the city would be there tonight. Snyder’s wife, Jackie, taught clarinet and bassoon, and her students would play in the recital as well. It was a major event. Irma wore a fine, blue organza dress, and her long, blond hair was done up in looping braids. She would perform a flute solo titled “Sioux Serenade.” The piece was not easy, and though she’d practiced for weeks, Irma had butterflies as the appointed hour drew near.
Still, she couldn’t help but marvel at how incredibly vivid the campus appeared under the queer, ominous light of that fading day. It was almost as if she were seeing the world for the first time. The grass never looked greener or the trees more vibrant and alive or the old stone buildings more majestic. MacVicar Chapel, built in 1880, featured a solemn stone archway on one end and a tall bell tower on the other. So handsome did the chapel and the other buildings appear that a person might just have thought — if given to such turns of mind — that the old, stone giants were taking a bow.
And it wasn’t just the strange light that burned the moment into Irma’s memory. Curious electricity seemed to hover in the air, so palpable you could almost touch it. Even the birds seemed affected. They were singing their hearts out — singing for all they were worth in the unnatural stillness of the dying afternoon.
“Look how beautiful the campus looks!” Irma exclaimed to her mother. “I’ve never seen it like this!”
Thunder growled in the distance.
Elaine Martin baked two chickens, one for dinner and one to cut up for lunch for the rest of the week. The 23-year-old was six months’ pregnant and living with her husband, John, in a nondescript, one-story duplex in the student housing area on the southeast corner of campus. Elaine worked part-time as an administrative assistant. John worked full-time as a manufacturer’s sales rep. But he had still managed to knock down 12 credit hours at Washburn through the spring semester. The Martins were outgoing and optimistic people. And Elaine was so beautiful, she
might have been a movie star. She had long, dark hair and a smile that would nearly blind you.
The couple was finishing dinner when the sirens wailed. Almost immediately, fat, solitary raindrops began hitting the driveway like water balloons. The mustard sky grew dark. The young woman with a newborn who lived next door, whose husband worked nights, came over and asked the Martins if they could give her a lift to Stoffer Science Hall, the designated storm shelter for residents of student housing. Absolutely, the Martins said. The group piled into John’s sand-colored ’66 VW Beetle and drove across campus in the pelting rain.
On the second floor of Carnegie Hall, John Fernstrom and about 20 others were just putting pencil to paper to begin the computer banking test when the sirens cranked to life. People looked up from their tests and glanced at each other. The teacher, a local banker, took measure of the moment and said: “Well, do you want to go to the basement or finish the test? It’s up to you.” There was a brief discussion and a consensus emerged. They’d finish the test.
In nearby MacVicar Chapel, 40 family members and friends quietly filed into the chapel’s plain wooden pews for the music recital. Snyder handed out programs, and the 13 performers, aged 10 to 17, took their seats near the front. The room grew hushed as the first clarinet soloist, Jean Tarnower, screwed up her courage and stepped onto the broad stage. She was about to begin her selection, a tune titled “Dorothy’s Dance” (to piano accompaniment), when the sirens started.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 15