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

by Bonar Menninger

  The incessant clang of a burglar alarm announced itself from across the street. The windows of a jewelry store were blown out but expensive watches and diamonds remained. Just then, a man came running around the corner, frantic and waving his arms.

  “Take cover! It’s coming back!”

  What the hell?

  Jackson dashed to the next block, where he could gain an unobstructed view to the northeast, the direction the tornado had gone. The sky was azure. The tornado wasn’t coming back. The idea itself was far-fetched. Seldom do tornadoes reverse course or backtrack.

  Crazy son of a bitch . . .

  Just then, a souped-up, black ’36 Ford coupe rumbled up Kansas Avenue and slowed to a stop near Jackson. A couple of scruffy teenagers looked out.

  “You all right, mister?” Jackson was ripped and filthy, and with all the glass in his hair, his head glittered as though encased in diamonds. He told the teenagers about the destruction of the bowling alley and the death of Lisle Grauer.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m trying to get back to my apartment and my wife and kid over by Washburn,” Jackson replied.

  “We’ll give you a ride.”

  Jackson climbed in, and the hot rod moved off as the teenagers excitedly described their close encounter with the twister. Evidently, the youths had found themselves driving near the edge of the storm. They’d watched a house shoot straight up into the funnel — spinning like Dorothy’s farmhouse in The Wizard of Oz, high above the treetops and still intact — before disintegrating in a starburst of shattering lumber.

  “What happened to your roof?” Jackson asked. Some of the old Fords had a detachable cloth square on the top, kind of a proto-sunroof. But the canvas on this one, save some ragged, torn edges, was gone.

  “Tornado ripped it clean away. We were that close, man. I’m telling ya, it was crazy!”

  The kids were jacked on adrenaline.

  Since this entire ordeal began, Jackson had assumed that the tornado had touched down just west of downtown and started its march there. But when the group repeatedly found their way blocked by downed trees and other debris, the grim realization sunk in that the funnel actually had been on the ground for many blocks before striking the bowling alley. With each new detour, Jackson’s anxiety grew.

  Please let them be alive.

  Finally, by bushwhacking along side streets and driving up through yards and around fallen trees and downed power lines, the kid at the wheel managed to reach the north edge of the Washburn campus. Jackson’s soul went black as he stared at the devastated university in the fading light of that eventful day. His apartment was on the far side of campus.

  They’re dead. I’ve lost Trish and Shane.

  He thanked the teenagers, bailed out and started running through the ruins, leaping hot lines and juking around wrecked cars and fallen trees, still carrying his bowling bag. He quickly made it past the heart of the campus, and he could just make out his white apartment complex in the gathering dusk across open ground that served as the school’s nine-hole golf course. As he drew closer, he began to take heart: The building appeared to be intact. Then he could see people out front. And then, still running, he spotted Trish holding Shane in the crowd.

  Elation. Thirty seconds more and Jackson pulled up panting.

  The couple embraced for a long moment.

  Finally, Trish asked, “What in the world happened to you?”

  Jackson explained.

  “Oh my God . . . Everybody here figured the tornado went back up after hitting Washburn,” Trish said. “How far east did the damage go?”

  “As far as the eye can see,” Jackson replied.

  Used car salesman Jerry Estes crawled on his stomach through blackness across the rubble-strewn floor of the basement barbershop on Kansas Avenue. He could hear hissing and he smelled gas. The lines that supplied the many dryers in the laundromat above had sheared off and natural gas was filling the basement.

  “Don’t anybody light a match!”

  Narrow shafts of daylight bore down through the darkness near the front of the shop. Fortunately, several large window frames and doors had fallen across the stairs and formed a rough lattice that prevented the stairwell from filling entirely with debris. Estes yelled to his three companions.

  “C’mon guys! Let’s get outta here. This place could blow.”

  The men crawled and slithered through narrow openings, amid brick and broken glass and stabbing nails and shattered wood before finally breaking through to daylight at the top of the stairs. Once all had emerged, the men gazed around in amazement. The stillness of death enveloped the city.

  Suddenly, a car horn started blaring from the ruins of Joe Smith’s lot.

  “What in the . . . ?” Smith said.

  “One of your cars is talking to you, Joe,” Terry Steele said.

  The building above the barbershop was destroyed. There was no sign of the stubborn old man on the second-floor apartment, the one who’d refused to come to the basement. There was no second floor. His prospects couldn’t be good.

  The group heard cries coming from across the street, from one of the old homes that had been converted to offices along the east side of the avenue. A big tree had fallen in front of the property and the path to the door was nearly blocked. Several women were calling from the porch. They were badly cut. The men made a human chain and carefully passed the survivors over and through the limbs. Then Denny Benge flagged down a Cadillac as it drove slowly past. He opened the back door. But the driver balked.

  “Hey, I’m not taking them anywhere. They’ll get blood all over my seats!” the driver said.

  Benge was in no mood.

  “Your seats will be a lot bloodier if you don’t get these women to a hospital right now, mister!”

  With the women loaded and hospital-bound, Benge bid his companions a hasty good-bye and took off jogging for his home near Burnett’s Mound, four miles away. Barber Terry Steele went with him. A mechanic named Johnny Means, another mutual acquaintance, pulled up a few minutes later and offered to take Smith and Estes back to his service station on Topeka Boulevard. They could use his telephone to call their wives. But the phone line was dead. So Smith and Estes started walking: Estes heading for his home north of Washburn to find his wife and children, Smith returning to the car lot to see what he could salvage before night fell. Estes happened to look down as the men parted company and was amazed to see that he still carried the big coat-hanger ring full of keys, the ones he’d pulled from all the cars on the lot before the tornado hit. Through it all, he’d never let go.

  Tim Lyle and Dick Brumme made their way down the stairs in the Santa Fe office building to the eighth floor where Brumme worked. The windows were shattered and IBM punch cards were tossed everywhere. Brumme’s supervisor assessed the damage.

  “Okay, let’s get this cleaned up,” he said as the men came in.

  “Bullshit! I’m not cleaning anything up,” Brumme replied. “I think the tornado might have hit my house, and I’m going to check on my wife and daughter.”

  The supervisor didn’t argue. Brumme and Lyle raced down the stairs to the street. Along 9th Street, IBM punch cards were scattered and drifted in piles like snow. The men found Brumme’s car with a large tree limb across it, so they jumped into Lyle’s green VW Beetle. It had been parked nearby. Except for some dents and nicks, the little car was in good shape.

  They drove south on Jackson, the wrong way down the one-way street. The wrecked state printing building across 10th Street looked like a factory in Stalingrad. A man was sitting alone on the sunlit corner, bleeding from the head. A city bus lay on its side nearby. The man appeared to have superficial cuts from debris. He was conscious.

  “Stay right there, mister. Don’t try to move. Help will be here shortly.”

  Then Lyle swung west on 10th Street, swerving to avoid objects in the street. Brumme was becoming increasingly agitated.

  “I hope Dizi and Cryst
al are all right. I swear, it looked like the tornado went right through Central Park. Didn’t it to you?”

  Lyle didn’t say a word. But he flogged the VW.

  Brumme had met Dizi (pronounced “Die-zee”) when he was stationed at Arlington Cemetery as part of the Army’s Old Guard. Many’s the time he’d stood watch over JFK’s grave. Dizi had grown up in the Washington, D.C., area; her father was a top civilian director in the Department of Defense. The Brummes had been back in Kansas for a little over a year, and Dizi wasn’t exactly thrilled with her new home. She didn’t have many friends in Topeka.

  Driving southwest, Lyle quickly became entangled in the tornado’s broad damage path and, like Pete Jackson and the kids in the hot rod, he was forced to make repeated detours. Finally, the bug was three blocks north of Central Park and Lyle could go no further. The men jumped out and ran, avoiding downed trees and hot power lines that burned like flares in the street. They pulled up panting at the shattered north edge of the park and could immediately see the large, old home where Brumme rented a third-floor apartment. The top of the building was sheared off.

  “Oh my God!”

  Muffled shouts and cries were coming from the storm cellar on the side of the house when the men reached the yard. The cellar stairs were covered with heavy, wooden doors, and wreckage was piled atop the entryway. Lyle and Brumme made quick work of clearing the debris and flung back the doors. And there, in the sudden light at the bottom of the stairs, was Dizi. Her eyes were as big as saucers and she was holding her baby tightly in her arms. She came up slow and crying.

  “Are you okay, Dizi?” a shaken Brumme asked. “Is Crystal all right?”

  Dizi turned and looked at him when she reached the top step. Every emotion bottled up through 30 minutes of terror came pouring out.

  “Yeah, we’re okay,” she sobbed. “But you can screw Kansas! I’m going home!”

  Brumme turned to Lyle and shook his head. He had tears in his eyes and a wry grin on his face.

  “What can I say?”

  Sure enough, Dizi departed for the East within a week, and Brumme followed soon after. They never did return.

  By the time the tornado let go of Dorothy Decker — the woman dragged off by the winds as she prepared to step into her car in the middle of downtown — she’d traveled almost 200 yards, or the full length of the 900 block of Kansas Avenue. That she wasn’t pulled into the vortex and lifted high above the city must have been due to some lucky accident of physics and timing. Evidently she was just far enough from the core of the tornado that it was already moving away and thus losing its grip by the time she reached the main damage path near the intersection of 10th and Kansas.

  But that, no doubt, was of small consolation at the time. Dorothy was conscious and alive, but barely so. The tornado had ripped off her shoes, dress, blouse and underwear and left her in only her bra. Her left heel and right ankle were broken. And virtually every inch of her body, except for the skin under her bra, was sliced, punctured or scraped. She had a particularly deep wound in one knee, and she was a mass of blood when her husband, Earl, found her heaped in the middle of the street. Earl had ridden the storm out lying on the front seat of the Ford. He and some others applied a tourniquet to Dorothy’s leg, carried her into a nearby building and covered her with a blanket. Within minutes, Earl was able to flag down a policeman, who drove her to St. Francis Hospital. But Dorothy was not expected to survive.

  How ferocious was the assault that Dorothy Decker endured? When Earl finally got back to his car, he was stunned to see that the entire north side of the vehicle — the side farthest from the tornado — had been sandblasted down to bare metal by the grit-packed winds racing to reach the funnel.

  After the roar and chaos stopped, Catherine Sommers could hear water running, like a brook. All else was silent. The water was gurgling down through a gap in the ceiling in her mother’s dining room. Catherine’s sister, Frances, lay unconscious on the floor. She’d fainted as the storm pressed in. Their mother, Nell, appeared to be okay. She could talk and was still in her bed under the card table roof that Catherine had fashioned after the sirens went off.

  “Frances will come to in a minute,” Nell said. “She’ll be all right.”

  And sure enough, Frances quickly recovered. She wasn’t injured, just covered with glass and dust. They all were.

  Catherine stood up. Broken glass and shattered furniture lay everywhere. A piece of limestone the size of a melon — perhaps from one of the buildings at Washburn University — was sitting squarely atop the card table. But for Catherine’s quick thinking in setting the table over her, her mother probably would have been badly injured or killed. The sisters lifted the rock and table clear. Then Catherine went to the front door. But debris was stacked so high outside that there was no way through. So she went to a broken window and hailed a man walking by in the street.

  “Say, mister! Do we have limbs on the roof?” she called.

  The man looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

  “My God, lady, you’ve got no roof!”

  Catherine realized they would need to get Nell out quickly.

  “You stay here. I’ll go for help,” she told her sister. Catherine climbed out the window and into the yard. She saw several policemen standing near the corner of 11th and Quincy. Catherine approached and explained that her mother needed to be transported. The officers were writing down the address when a middle-aged woman suddenly appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Help me,” the woman said in an uneven voice.

  Her face was badly cut and she was bleeding profusely. But she still had the presence of mind to hold out her apron with both hands so the blood wouldn’t drip on her dress. The policemen quickly helped the woman to a cruiser at the end of the block as Catherine returned to the house.

  Fortunately, Catherine’s brother and nephew arrived soon after to check on Nell. They got her into a chair and then carried the chair to a waiting car. They would take her to the home of another sister, in Rossville, a small town northwest of the city. Frances went with them. At that point, Catherine started on foot for her own house, six blocks to the southwest on Harrison Street. Much to her relief, the house wasn’t hit. But her two sons, aged 8 and 16, were nowhere to be found — in the basement or anywhere else. Catherine raced back to her mother’s house. When she arrived, she found the boys waiting. They’d come to find her on their own. The youngest rode on his brother, piggyback-style, to avoid the downed power lines.

  With her mother and boys safe, her husband stuck on the second shift at Goodyear until 11:00 p.m., night coming on and the power out at the house, Catherine decided to retreat to nearby Assumption Church. The stately, mission-style Catholic church was located directly north of the capitol grounds, on 8th Street. The assistant pastor escorted the family back to the parish house, where the head pastor, Father Moriarty, greeted them warmly.

  “Are you all right, Catherine?”

  The exhaustion and stress finally caught up with her.

  “Father, what I’ve been through is just this side of hell,” she said.

  Father Moriarty hurriedly turned to an assistant.

  “Quickly, my son, bring the altar wine. Lord knows she needs it!”

  At the 10th Street underpass, Ramon Esquivel Jr. pulled himself to his feet, walked out from under the bridge and looked around. Cotton-white clouds drifted past in a cobalt sky. The silence was as pure as the air. Esquivel’s sisters and father followed him into the sunlight; Marcia crawled up the bank from the interstate. All were battered but okay. The family climbed back over the chain-link fence and walked slowly toward the dental lab where they’d been working before the tornado hit. The building had been reduced to a pile of cinder blocks. Ramon Sr.’s work car, a behemoth, two-tone green 1955 DeSoto wagon, was buried under the blocks in the back. The Esquivels heard voices. The two dental technicians who’d stayed behind were battling through the wreckage and eventually made their way out. They’d been hu
ddled in a back room when a wall came down. The wall caught the top of the pop machines and created a pocket, which allowed the men to survive. But they were badly shaken. It had been a very near thing.

  “Will your bike start?” Ramon Sr. said, pointing to his son’s Honda 305 Scrambler lying nearby. Ramon Jr. picked up the motorcycle. It was battered but appeared to be intact. He gave it a couple of kicks and it fired.

  “Go to the house to check on your mother and sister,” Ramon Sr. said. “It looks like the tornado went that way. I’ll walk with the girls. Be careful, son. There are a lot of downed lines.”

  Jill Nauman, the nine-year-old whose journey from Tennessee to Washington State was interrupted by the tornado, regained consciousness about the time the rest of the survivors at the underpass were getting up. She made her way down the embankment to the highway with her cousins, Wayne and Roger, and her uncle, Robert Goodson. All were covered with mud. Wayne started crying.

  “You’re bleeding, Dad!”

  Dirty blood was flowing from an ugly gash in Goodson’s hand. He looked at Jill.

  “My God, you’re bleeding, too . . .”

  Jill could see the blood dripping off her chin, falling to her knees and splattering at her muddy feet. A sliver of wood about four inches long, an inch wide and a half inch thick, had been driven like a carpenter’s shim between her scalp and skull, just above her forehead. Goodson led the children back to the westbound lane of the interstate. They could see their car a quarter mile up the road, smashed and rolled. A semi slowed down; the driver looked but didn’t stop. Then a carload of nuns stopped. But they had no room. Finally a couple of men pulled over and quickly opened the back door and the group climbed in. Evidently, the men were salesmen of some sort. The backseat was covered with stacks of business forms.