“No, not really,” Bill said.
The student told them to walk toward 17th Street; he’d get his car and take them to the hospital. Moments later, the throaty rumble of a V-8 broke the silence as a burgundy-colored ’64 GTO accelerated up the street and then screeched to a halt in front of the Huttons. The young man leaned over and popped open the passenger door.
“Get in.”
Bill Hutton hesitated. The GTO was the first of Detroit’s muscle cars, and the interior of this one was dazzling and immaculate: customized, rolled-and-pleated white vinyl. The Huttons, on the other hand, looked like survivors of the Bataan Death March.
“We can’t. We’re really going to mess up your interior,” Bill said.
“Fuck the interior!” the kid shouted. “Fuck it! Come on, get in!”
So they did.
Patti McDiffett opened her eyes in the crawl space of her parents’ home near the Shunga Creek. She was alive. Her parents were alive. Her dog was alive. The floor above her was gone. The house was gone. Blue sky and sunshine were all she could see. Everything was so still. She heard a bird sing. The McDiffetts climbed up and out and into the yard. They were covered with mud and tar. Their house had blown into some trees at the edge of the backyard and was wedged there still, semi-intact. Patti looked down at where the family had sought shelter. A silhouette of their huddled, human forms stood out in sharp relief against the whitish-gray concrete. Mud had been sprayed everywhere except where they’d been. It was a ghostly image, like something from Hiroshima or Pompeii.
Across the street, the Scheibe house was leveled, too. A 20-foot I beam had been lifted up, twisted like a corkscrew and then bent into the shape of a horseshoe before being dropped back down on the foundation. No sign of Johnny, the 19-year-old delivery driver for Westboro Cleaners. His father showed up a few minutes later and started ripping through the rubble in search of his son. He found him, alive but unconscious and badly cut up. Together with Mr. McDiffett and a couple of other men, Glen Scheibe managed to get Johnny onto a door. They carried him to a station wagon.
Banker John Fernstrom listened as the dreadful grinding grew more distant and finally ceased altogether. Utter and complete silence ensued. He was still hunched on the floor of the hallway in the basement of Carnegie Hall. He was covered with mud. He had splinters in his arms and face. He was cut and scraped. But he was alive. He looked up and was amazed to see, straight above him through what had been two floors of building, the bluest sky he’d ever seen. People were beginning to stir and stand. Several women were badly cut by broken glass, and they were in a near panic, screaming and sobbing and frantic to get out. Leon Taylor made his way up the stairs to the door with a crowd behind him. But power lines were down outside.
“Get back! Everybody get back! There are live wires all over the place out there!” Taylor said.
The group retreated back down the stairs as Fernstrom and some others picked their way toward a window on the east side of the basement. Someone took a chair and smashed out the remaining pieces of glass from one of the frames. Outside, they heard a crackling buzz. Fernstrom poked his head out and saw a live wire arcing and bouncing above the window.
“For God’s sake, you guys, we just came through this all right. Let’s don’t go outside and get electrocuted!” he said. With jittery caution, one by one, the survivors climbed out of the ruined building, carefully avoiding the dancing wire. Fernstrom was appalled. He’d attended Washburn and knew its every nook and cranny. But as he looked around, he couldn’t even recognize the place. The tall, brick smokestack at the nearby power plant was sheared off halfway up. Every building, as far as he could see, was either damaged or destroyed. The accoutrements of a once-vibrant university — books, papers, desks, chairs, typewriters — were scattered across open ground like the wreckage of a sunken ship. The sun was shining brightly.
It looks like Berlin . . .
What struck Fernstrom most, though, aside from the enormity of the destruction, were the smells: raw and pungent odors from trees splintered and stripped of their bark, like freshly cut lumber in a sawmill; the sweet, earthy stench of mud, pulverized bushes and leaves; and the must of long-hidden corners and dry wood from buildings many years enclosed. All asserted themselves with each panting breath.
Fernstrom rallied a dozen or so of the refugees from the banking test and slowly the group began to make their way through the wreckage. They would head for Fernstrom’s home a few blocks south of campus. When they reached Washburn Avenue, they flagged down a passing car. But the man behind the wheel took one look at the group and shook his head. They were too dirty. He drove off.
So they trudged on.
Ward Summerville, the law librarian, came out a different window with his wife and some others. Eventually the couple made their way to their car, a Corvair parked near the football stadium. All the glass was blown out of the vehicle. As they contemplated whether to try to drive it, the Summervilles felt a deep rumble and watched in amazement as a two-story wall of nearby Crane Observatory collapsed with a roar and a cloud of dust. It had been a good 10 minutes since the tornado had passed.
Silence engulfed the recital group in the basement studio of MacVicar Chapel. Slowly, people began to stir and pull themselves to their feet. The room was smoky with plaster dust. Everyone was covered with what looked like fine, white flour. Irma Hillebert looked around for her mother and father and finally spotted them near a window. She couldn’t hear a thing. She was deaf from the tornado, just like Chris Hutton. Her mind was blank.
Marjorie Cofran, mother of Tom Cofran, one of the would-be recital performers, saw a man pull himself up in the middle of the room. The man broke the silence by asking, in a high, plaintive voice: “Has anyone notified the authorities?” Cofran laughed then and laughs now at the absurdity of the moment. Of course no authorities had been notified; the tornado had just departed and no one had yet managed to get out of the room. And it wasn’t like they had a telephone or two-way radio.
Parents began checking children for injuries. A physician, John Grimshaw, was attending the two individuals who appeared to be hurt the worst. Doris Tarnower, Jean’s mom, had numerous shards of glass embedded in her legs and a cut on her forehead from the explosion of the transom over the door. And Ralph Drayer, the boy whose bassoon solo was cut short by the tornado’s arrival, had a nasty slice above his ear and a bad cut on his arm. He was bleeding profusely. A quick-thinking Marjorie Cofran removed her slip and pressed it tightly against Ralph’s scalp to staunch the blood. Laurie Grimshaw, the 12-year-old daughter of Dr. Grimshaw, would-be clarinet soloist and an inveterate tomboy, was staring down at the dress her parents had bought her especially for the recital. It was red and navy and had big brass buttons and, from what Laurie could determine, it had been enormously expensive. Now it was covered with dust, mud and the blood of Ralph Drayer.
I’ve ruined my special dress was all she could think.
There was water streaming down onto the floor from broken pipes above. The door to the room was packed tight with rubble, like a tunnel cave-in. In a fit of adrenaline-fueled strength, Irma’s father managed to pop open one of the tall window frames long since painted shut. And one by one, the men helped the children and women climb from the building. The couple that had bolted from the room just before the hallway collapsed had made it to an interior doorway and survived. They were European and evidently had learned from experience that a door header provided reliable shelter when the bombs started falling. As families stepped into the dazzling sunshine, someone exclaimed, “Look!” The southwest-corner basement room, where by all rights the recital should have taken place but for the out-of-tune piano, was buried under tons of stone and timbers.
After all the sounds finally stopped, John and Elaine Martin remained huddled in the dark basement of Stoffer Science Hall with several dozen others. The reek of gasoline permeated the room.
“Don’t anyone light a cigarette!” someone yelled.
&nbs
p; “We need to get out of here!”
People raced up the stairs and into the daylight. The Martins would later learn that the gasoline fumes had come from an automobile thrown into air-conditioning vents on the side of the building. Stoffer was a relatively new structure: a long, rectangular, three-story box housing laboratories and classrooms. It wasn’t the prettiest thing to look at, but thanks to its sturdy steel construction, it had come through the tornado relatively intact. An adjacent, wood-framed lecture hall was crushed, the observatory dome on the roof housing a powerful telescope was ripped away and nearly every window was broken.
In a nearby parking lot, the wind had built an enormous pyramid of cars, perhaps 25 feet high. Horns were stuck and blared incessantly and the acrid smell of battery acid and gasoline filled the air. The Martins briefly searched for their VW, but it was impossible to tell where it might have ended up. So they joined a group of people moving south and, with their neighbor, began walking back to student housing. Elaine, six months pregnant, was carrying the neighbor’s newborn child. As they neared their apartment, who should appear but Elaine’s parents, coming up the drive on foot to check on their daughter.
“Good Lord!” Elaine’s father cried in amazement and dismay. “Elaine’s given birth to the baby!”
Three days later, the police called and told the Martins they’d found their VW: The tan-colored car was flattened to less than a foot high and camouflaged under 20 feet of limestone blocks amid the ruins of Rice Hall.
Nadine Gilbert listened intently as a female voice came across the public address system at Stormont-Vail, the city-owned hospital a half mile north of Washburn University. “Attention all staff: Code 99, repeat, Code 99.” The code meant that a community emergency had occurred. The hospital’s disaster plan was being implemented and the staff should prepare for multiple casualties.
Gilbert was 25, tall and slender, with a long, delicate face and Roman nose. She wore a white skirt and had a small nurse’s cap bobby-pinned precariously to the back of her wavy blond hair. She was working the 3:00–11:00 p.m. shift as charge nurse on the intensive care unit. When word spread that a tornado was approaching the city, she’d called her husband at their home just north of 29th and Gage and urged him to get their two children to a neighbor’s basement. Then the hospital’s power failed and the emergency generators kicked in. The lights were dim. With the air conditioners down, it quickly became sticky in the dim corridors.
As it happened, one of Gilbert’s patients in the ICU was the hospital’s longtime administrator, Carl Lamley. He’d suffered a heart attack over Memorial Day weekend. But now he was awake and alert and doing everything he could from his hospital bed to help the staff prepare for the onslaught. “You go help in the ER, Nadine,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”
The acting administrator, 28-year-old Jerry Jorgensen, soon came panting up the drive. He’d set out from his home south of Washburn immediately after the tornado had passed, catching a ride with a physician neighbor. When debris blocked their progress, Jorgensen had jumped out and continued on foot. Walking and running, he’d threaded his way through the damage path to make the final half-mile push to the hospital.
Gilbert could hear the sirens of approaching ambulances, and out the window she could see cars pulling into the emergency room’s circle drive and stopping under the brick portico. The Huttons, the father and two sons caught in the open at Washburn, were among the first to arrive. Nurses brought them in and immediately began cleaning their many cuts. Soon doctors were stitching them up. Disc jockey Rick Douglass, Virginia Tuttle and Mrs. Tuttle’s grandkids showed up a few moments later. The journey across the city had been difficult for the survivors from the I-470 underpass, as their path had been repeatedly blocked by the tornado’s damage. It was only through considerable back-tracking and circumvention that they’d finally made it in.
Douglass was in a bad way. He’d lost a lot of blood from his leg wound, and strangely, he could no longer see in color but only black and white. He’d become frantic when they passed WREN radio’s offices a few blocks from the hospital. “Can we pull over real quick?” he said. “I’ve got to tell them I can’t find the WREN-mobile. I’m going to lose my job over this if I don’t.”
But the Good Samaritan driving the car, an off-duty nurse, would have none of it.
“You just settle down,” the woman said. “You’re not going to lose your job. You need to get to the hospital and that’s where we’re going.”
Douglass was helped into the emergency room, a tattered, filthy mummy — two white eyes swimming beneath a straw-packed helmet of mud. He was mumbling incoherently at this point. A nurse assumed that the long sliver of wood hanging from his lip was a cigarette and told him smoking wasn’t allowed in the hospital. But she quickly realized her mistake and removed the piece of wood. Gilbert, the nurse from the ICU, arrived and, with the assistance of a young man, helped Douglass toward a nearby gurney. A photographer from the Daily Capital, Delmar Schmidt, captured the moment’s horror and tension forever.
People were streaming into the hospital now and the emergency room quickly became bedlam. As Douglass lay on a gurney awaiting transport, a nurse walked past and, taking him for dead, pulled the sheet over his face. She jumped back when Douglass struggled to push the cover off.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said.
In the ER’s concrete entryway, the cacophony of people yelling and car horns honking was deafening, as more cars pulled up to disgorge the wounded. Inside, Gilbert triaged the casualties as they arrived, separating the minor injuries from the life-threatening ones. She knelt on the floor of the waiting room and started IVs in the semidarkness, holding a flashlight in her mouth. An unconscious Officer Hathaway was rolled past on a stretcher. The little boy he’d helped pull from the rubble at the base of the mound — the one who’d been so badly hurt — arrived on a board in the back of a white station wagon. The child was conscious and crying and clinging to life. Physicians sedated him and with three snips of a pair of scissors, completed the amputation of his right leg.
College Hill / Central Park
A – Stein, Byron St.
B – Whitney, 17th St.
C – Bartley, 17th St.
D – Maxon, Polk St.
E – Hatke, Clay St.
F – Johnson, Buchanan St.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Knife to the Heart of the City
The College Hill and Central Park neighborhoods merged into one northeast of Washburn and marched in dense, symmetrical blocks toward downtown. White, two-story clapboard homes built early in the century occupied narrow lots along uneven brick streets shaded by a thick awning of oak and elm. Many of the homes shared old-fashioned driveways, the kind with grassy medians down the middle. Shedlike garages built to house Model Ts slouched along the alleys. Central Park, a few blocks to the east, featured two lagoons, rose and tulip gardens, tennis courts, and groves of pin oak, black oak, blue spruce and ironwood. A row of majestic Craftsman-style homes — two and three stories tall with deep eaves and wide porches — stood along the west side of the park like mighty ships in port.
For 11-year-old Tony Stein, the area was paradise. Stein lived on Byron Street, a quiet dead end a couple of blocks northeast of campus. The street swarmed with kids and Stein and his friends never ran short of things to do. They hunted frogs in the lagoons and played army along the back alleys. They shot baskets in Washburn’s field house and periodically harassed the university’s parking police, who beetled around campus on motorized three-wheelers.
Stein was the son of a framing carpenter. The tall, quiet, dark-haired boy had just graduated from Central Park Elementary School, an imposing brick building three blocks away. When boys would fight after school, and fight they did, the contests generally took place on a secluded patch of ground behind the old Congregational Church.
On the evening of June 8, a football game was under way on Byron Street. Kids frequently took over the dead-end s
treet to play a rough game of touch between the curbs. But Stein’s mother was worried about the tornado watch and she refused to let Tony go outside. He was steamed as he watched the action through the front-room window.
A few blocks away, Mary Hatke eased her T-Bird into the garage and went inside her grand, old home across from the park to prepare dinner. Mary worked with her husband, Roy, at his art supply store downtown. Earlier, she’d been struck by the queer, oppressive nature of the day. Her friend Wilma Gilmore had gone so far as to express apprehension about what the stillness might portend. But Mary had thought no more of it. Her husband arrived home and they sat down to eat. Then the sirens went off.
Across from the Washburn campus, 22-year-old Neil Bartley stood on the porch, encouraging his father to come to the basement. Bartley’s parents lived in an airplane bungalow on busy 17th Street. Neil had just graduated from Washburn. He would begin teaching in the fall and he’d just purchased a home for his wife and two-year-old son. But they wouldn’t take possession for a few months, so the family had moved into the empty student apartment in the basement of Neil’s parents’ home. Now the sirens began to wail and raindrops smacked the pavement. Still, Neil’s father, a foreman with the gas service company, wouldn’t come in.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 19