H – Fleenor, Kansas Ave.
B – Esquivel, Heumann Dental Laboratory, Monroe St.
I – Decker, picked up by the wind, NW corner, 9th St. & Kansas Ave.
C – Sommers, Quincy St.
J – Decker, dropped by the wind 10th St. & Kansas Ave.
D – Grauer, Jackson (Pete), Pla-Land bowling alley S. Kansas Ave.
K – Lyle, Brumme, Santa Fe Railroad General Office Building, 9th St. & Jackson St.
E – Estes, Smith, Benge, Steele, Barbershop basement S. Kansas Ave.
L – Dalrymple, Southwestern Bell Building, 9th St. & Jackson St.
F – Estes, Smith, Joe Smith Motor Company, S. Kansas Ave.
M – State capitol building
G – National Reserve Life building, SE corner, 10th St. & Kansas Ave.
N – Santa Fe Hospital, 6th St. & Madison St.
O – Eiesland, Laird (David), Police Garage, 5th St. & Van Buren St.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Maelstrom
Pete Jackson stood still and straight, carefully sighting his blue-and-white Brunswick Crown Jewel on the triangle of pins 62 feet away. He cocked his shoulder back, took three quick steps and then whirled his arm forward like a propeller blade before releasing the ball at the nadir of its arc. The 16-pound ball jumped to the polished maple and sped down the lane, seeming to accelerate as it drifted in a tight spiral from the edge of the alley toward the center. Impact occurred just to the right of the lead pin. The red-and-white formation exploded in a rattling crash.
Jackson smiled.
Another strike.
The loping rumble of bowling balls, the clatter of pins, the ring of pinball machines, and the smell of popcorn, cigarettes and beer filled the air in Lisle Grauer’s Pla-Land bowling alley at 1024 Kansas Avenue just after 7:00 p.m. The best bowlers in the city had gathered for the first night of summer leagues. Twenty-one-year-old Jackson, five foot six and stocky, had been bowling since he was 15. He carried a respectable 186 average. But this was his first time competing with the big boys at Pla-Land. And Grauer’s eight lanes were unforgiving, expertly polished and oiled. The young apprentice printer wasn’t intimidated, though. Far from it. He’d just bowled three strikes in a row.
Mainly, Jackson was just glad to be off the job. Serving as a printer’s apprentice was hard, loud and dirty work. Jackson would run the cutter, stack and box paper as jobs flew off the press, help switch out heavy lead plates, bring up ink, and spend eight hours every two months breaking down the press to clean its every nook and cranny. He’d come home at night with ink stained up to his elbows. And always, there was the oily smell of the ink and the whirring clatter of the colossal machine. But you don’t complain. When you’re 21 and have a wife and two-year-old son to support, you do what you have to do. Jackson did know this much, though: the wild freedom of youth, of high school?
Those days were gone for good.
Kansas Avenue between 10th and 12th streets hummed with commerce and life in 1966. There were shops, businesses and walk-up apartments — a café, liquor store, locksmith, printer, bakery, bar, dry cleaner, laundromat, barbershop and a grocery store. And car lots. Superior Lincoln-Mercury was just south of the giant neon bowling pin that adorned Pla-Land. A block east on Quincy was Tom Mix Rambler Ranch and next to it, Shortman Dodge. Joe Smith Motor Company occupied a lot south and west, on the far side of Kansas Avenue.
Joe Smith had been selling cars in Topeka since the early 1930s. He was a big man with a terrific sense of humor and a deep belly laugh to match. He’d been a great pitcher in his younger days and even played a season with the Cincinnati Reds before throwing his arm away. Now the car business was Joe’s life. So there he was on that Wednesday evening, working the lot with 32-year-old Jerry Estes. Estes was a good-natured family man. He held fast to the principles espoused by Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi: In life, the most important things were God, country, family and work. In that order.
Workwise, it had been a slow day. Some Mennonites up from Garnett, Kansas, had come in earlier. The man was dressed in black britches, suspenders, a homespun white blouse and a straw hat. The woman wore a bonnet and long dress. The kids dressed the same. The family looked around for a while before the man finally made an offer on a dark blue ’64 Chevy Impala. But Estes and the farmer couldn’t get together on price. They were $50 apart and stayed there. So the Mennonites left without the car and Estes missed the sale. Now heavy rain swept in and rattled the little steel building that served as the car lot’s office. Estes and Smith were listening to the radio, waiting for the storm to pass, when the sirens went off.
“We’d better go over to the shop,” Smith said, motioning toward the small garage at the corner of the lot.
“No, if we get hit, that building will come down right on top of us, Joe,” Estes replied. “It’s nothing. The barbershop is where we need to be.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve checked it out. It’s below ground with a concrete reinforced ceiling and a 12-inch I beam running down the center. It’s just about the safest place around here.
“You go on over,” Estes added. “I’ll pull the keys and be right there.”
Smith nodded and started for the barbershop a half block away. Estes grabbed the public address microphone used to page employees and locked the talk key down. Then he laid the mike beside the radio. With WREN broadcasting across the PA system, Estes would be able to track the storm as he pulled keys from 58 cars on the lot. It wouldn’t do to leave the cars unattended with the keys still in them. Rick Douglass was warning of the approaching storm as Estes dashed to the first car. He carried a big ring fashioned from an old coat hanger to hold the keys.
The rain was letting up.
The Santa Fe Railroad General Office Building — an ornate, buff-colored skyscraper erected in stages in the early decades of the century — stood two blocks north and west of Joe Smith Motor Company on Jackson Street. The building served as the railroad’s operational nerve center and employed more than 1,800 people. At 7:00 p.m., 28-year-old Tim Lyle and co-worker Dick Brumme, 26, made their way down to the lobby for their dinner break. Both worked the 3:00–11:00 p.m. shift on different floors in the tabulation department. They’d been friends since high school. Each had served in the military. Lyle was single; Brumme, married. Neither was what you might call a man in a gray flannel suit. The two usually went to dinner at one of the restaurants up on Kansas Avenue. But as they walked through the lobby toward the door, the security guard hailed them. A funnel was on the ground southwest of town, the guard said. He’d heard it on the radio.
Lyle and Brumme thanked the man and stepped outside. Across the street, the stark beauty of the state capitol seemed amplified by the strange light of the evening. The statehouse was constructed of cream-colored native limestone and featured four massive wings centered on a towering, limestone- and copper-clad dome gone green from exposure. Like the U.S. Capitol upon which it was modeled, the seat of Kansas government featured broad pediments, classical pillars and wide flights of stone steps that ascended to heavy doors on each wing. The building dominated downtown, sitting squarely on 20 parklike acres like a fortress amid winding sidewalks and towering cottonwood, ash, sycamore and elm. Local legend held that one of the big cottonwoods in fact had sprouted from a wooden stake sunk by capitol construction crews 100 years before.
The rain stopped. Lyle, a tall man with a thin face, marveled at the stillness. Even the highest branches in the tallest trees were entirely devoid of motion. It was as though the air itself was paralyzed with dread.
“Man, is it weird out,” Brumme said. “We probably ought to go back inside.”
“Yeah, probably should,” Lyle replied.
In the lobby, the security guard was busy directing other Santa Fe employees to the basement shelter. “You fellas need to go to the basement,” he told Lyle and Brumme. “They’re saying the tornado is heading for Burnett’s Mound.”
The two friends made their way toward the flight of stairs. But as they passed the building’s bank of elevators, they paused. Lyle turned to Brumme and spoke quietly.
“You want to go up and check it out?”
The men glanced at the security guard, who was occupied, then quickly stepped into an open elevator. Lyle punched the button for the 10th floor. The doors slid shut and the car started to rise.
Lois “Dorothy” Decker was 46, brown-haired, short and big-boned, a beloved grandma and nine years into her second marriage in June of 1966. She had just begun making dinner when the telephone rang. It was an aunt calling to wish her a happy anniversary.
“Good Lord, I forgot completely about it!” Dorothy said. “Thanks for reminding me. I think I’ll have Earl take me out to eat.”
And so it was that Earl Decker, owner of Decker Oil Company, and his wife, Dorothy, found themselves finishing dinner at the Coffee Cup Café in the 900 block of Kansas Avenue, in the heart of downtown, around 7:20 p.m. The couple was sipping coffee when the owner of the restaurant emerged grim-faced from the back. He told customers that a tornado had hit near Burnett’s Mound. The man lived out that way and he was determined to get home. The diners could stay if they wanted. Several waitresses and some of the kitchen help were going to wait out the storm in the back. But he was leaving. The Deckers sat for a few minutes until the rain stopped. Then they stepped outside and started walking up Kansas Avenue toward their car. Earl’s new Ford Galaxy 500 was angle-parked on the same side of the avenue, halfway along the shadowy canyon of buildings.
“Pick me up on the corner,” Dorothy said. “I don’t want to get my shoes wet. This gutter is flowing like a river.”
Laura Dalrymple was bewildered. She couldn’t figure out what was happening with her switchboard. The 20-year-old telephone operator was working in the windowless third floor of the Southwestern Bell building on Jackson, a half block north of the Santa Fe building. She was one of 60 operators on the shift. The women sat side by side in rows on opposite sides of the room, each manning a separate switchboard.
Dalrymple had come in at six o’clock and was busy connecting person-to-person, station-to-station and collect long-distance calls outbound from Topeka. She wore an ear-set and microphone and used both hands to pull and plug eight sets of jacks attached to cloth-covered cords, to link outbound lines and switching centers across the city.
But here was something she had not seen before. One by one, the lights on her board began to flash. Typically, a white light signified an incoming call and seldom were more than a dozen blinking at once. But now the entire board was beginning to flash, 500 lights representing 500 lines, coming on sequentially from circuits across the city. Even stranger, when Dalrymple would plug in, no one would be on the other end of the line. A dead circuit? But why so many? She looked around. Her co-workers’ boards were lighting up in a similar fashion. A nervous rustle swept the room. But no one spoke. You couldn’t. Company rules: No speaking to other operators during your shift. No exceptions. If there was a problem, call a supervisor.
Dalrymple suddenly heard a commotion by the door. One of the operators who’d been on break, an older woman, appeared disheveled and frantic. She was running and screaming. She was hysterical.
“It’s coming! It’s coming! It’s coming!” the woman cried.
Two male supervisors quickly appeared and wordlessly intercepted the woman. They grabbed her by the elbows, and, with the woman still shouting and flailing, bodily carried her from the room. The men offered no explanation and didn’t return.
The elevator doors opened on the deserted 10th floor of the Santa Fe building. Tim Lyle and Dick Brumme stepped out and made their way toward a window in the southwest corner of the large, open room. The two looked off toward the southwest, across the rooftops of the city. The rise of Burnett’s Mound stood four miles away as the crow flies.
“Look, Brumme! There it is!”
The tornado was broad and gray, just beyond the mound. It looked hideous; a malformed wedge and seemed to move like a laboring, wounded animal. They watched it climb the mound and inch down the other side and then explode into the homes along I-470.
“Look at that big son of a bitch!”
The funnel quickly became engorged with wreckage and turned coal black, a rolling debris cloud, as it moved into the city. Block by block, Lyle and Brumme could track its progress by the white and green flashes that flickered near its base as power transformers shorted out and exploded. On it snaked, growing steadily larger, until they could begin to discern houses disintegrating and shooting up into the funnel. The band of circling debris grew thicker.
Lyle had no mental reference point, no memory, to help him process what he was seeing. As a result, time seemed to slow way down and the world became thick and surreal, almost as if he and Brumme were occupants of a dream.
“It looks like it’s going through Washburn,” Brumme said.
They kept watching.
Pete Jackson had done it again: four strikes in a row. He was on fire. He nodded coolly to his teammates and was just about to take a seat when he heard proprietor Lisle Grauer shout across the din of the bowling alley.
“Hey, everybody! There’s a tornado coming! No joke. Come up here and listen to this!”
Grauer stood by the television near the snack bar. More than 30 bowlers quickly gathered around the set. Bill Kurtis was on the screen.
“. . . and now we’ve just received a report that the tornado is approaching the intersection of 12th and Topeka Boulevard,” Kurtis said.
The bowlers scattered. The tornado was four blocks away.
Grauer called out: “I don’t care where you go, but I’m getting under that pool table!”
Jackson glanced out the window. He could see papers and leaves swirling wildly in the street.
We’re in serious trouble here . . .
Most of the bowlers dashed for the concrete restrooms. But the rooms were small and Jackson knew not everyone could fit. So he and another bowler, a short, heavyset man named Joe Ramirez (who went by the nickname Dodo) ran the other way. Both men spotted a small pantry behind the snack bar along the south wall. The tiny room housed a stove and refrigerator. They flattened themselves against the floor and wall.
“Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos . . .”
Ramirez was praying as Jackson scrunched into a fetal position and covered his head. And he started praying, too.
Across Kansas Avenue at Joe Smith Motors, Jerry Estes was about to pull the last key from the last car on the lot — a white ’61 Saab — when a sudden, violent gust of wind ripped the handle from his hand and swung the door hard against the stops. He looked west. Four blocks away, above Topeka Boulevard, a huge tree cartwheeled 50 feet off the ground. Above it, a large section of roof soared and banked like a kite.
Shit, it’s here . . .
He turned and sprinted for the barbershop and raced down the outside steps. His boss, Joe Smith; Terry Steele, the barber; and Denny Benge, a friend and concrete finisher, all looked up as Estes burst in.
“What’s going on, Jerry?” Smith said.
“It’s coming, boys! It’s heading straight for us!”
Benge immediately leapt from the barber’s chair, ran to the back room and dashed up a flight of stairs to the building’s rear door.
The other men fled to the dingy room in the back of the basement. A couple of beds were there.
“What should we do, Jerry?” Smith said.
“Let’s grab these mattresses and pull ’em over us in case any shit comes flying in here.”
Earlier, while Estes was still pulling keys, Steele had remembered a man who lived alone in a third-floor apartment above the barbershop.
“I bet that old man is still upstairs,” Steele said.
Benge volunteered to go get him and dashed out. He ran up and pounded on the apartment door until an elderly, bald-headed man opened it.
“Hey, mister, there�
��s a tornado coming,” Benge said. “You need to get down to the basement!”
The old man scowled and shook his head.
“I’ve been living here for years and I ain’t never run from no goddamn storm,” he snarled. “Hell no, I’m not coming to the basement!”
He slammed the door shut. Benge turned and ran.
Denny Benge had been in tough spots before. The burly ex-Marine was stationed in Vietnam in ’63–’64 and had guarded the air base at Da Nang. Before that, he had been floating off Cuba in a transport ship with hundreds of other battle-ready Marines and was just about to climb down the nets into a waiting landing craft — and God knows what — when word came that the missile crisis had eased and the invasion was off.
But nothing could have prepared him for what he faced now. Benge stood at the barbershop’s back door, bracing against the doorjamb with one arm and shielding his eyes with the other against the howling, gale-force winds that whipped sand and gravel around like birdshot. He could see the black, ragged-edged funnel just to the west, crawling toward him across Topeka Boulevard. The tornado reminded him of a broadcast spreader, that ingenious piece of lawn care equipment that flings grass seed in a perfect, 360-degree circle with each turn of the wheel or crank of the handle. Except that here, obviously, the tornado wasn’t throwing grass seed. Instead, it was spitting out cars, trees, TV antennas, walls, roofs, air conditioners and power poles in a soaring arc hundreds of feet in diameter.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 21