“Don’t worry about the papers,” one of the men said. They must have been local, because they knew to take the exit just a few blocks away. They swung quickly into the hospital operated by the Santa Fe railroad for its employees. Jill and her uncle were triaged and tagged, and then Jill was hanging her head over a sink as a nurse washed out the wound in her scalp. But it would take more than a few stitches to repair it.
Jill’s parents, brother and sister — traveling west in a separate car — had not stopped for the heavy rain when Goodson pulled over, so they’d dodged the tornado. But they lost contact with the other car. Further up the road they’d finally stopped and waited and when the Ford never appeared, they turned around. Now, driving back through downtown, the group was horrified to see Goodson’s battered Ford lying wrecked by the interstate. They frantically began searching and eventually found a policeman who pointed them to some shelters; they checked several but had no luck. They did, however — amazingly — run into the same nuns who’d stopped on the highway, and at that point, Jill’s parents at least knew their daughter was alive. A couple of hours later the family was finally reunited at the hospital.
It was an emotional scene.
East Topeka / Oakland
A – Stormont-Vail Hospital, 10th St. & Washburn Ave.
H – Robbins, Santa Fe shops
B – St. Francis Hospital, 7th St. & Garfield Ave.
I – Esquivel (Steph), Golden Ave.
C – Ellis, Johnson, Capitol City Pawn Shop, SW corner, 6th St. & Branner St.
J – Jones (Linda), Arter St.
K – Laird (Carol & Edna Mae), Arter St.
D – Ginter, Vickers station, NW corner, 6th St. & Branner St.
L – Taylor (Chick), B Street
E – Guthrie & Sons Grocery, SW corner, 4th St. & Lake St.
M – Idlet, Winfield Ave.
F – Jackson (Norma), Lime St.
N – National Weather Bureau office, Billard Airport
G – Gutierrez, Chandler St.
O – Briery, Strait Ave.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Behold the Pale Horse
Dave Perkins stood near technician Gordon Brokaw in the darkened radar room at the Weather Bureau office near Billard Airport. A two-way radio crackled as reports of the tornado’s progress and position filtered in. Brokaw was staring intently into the green cathode-ray screen, watching the hook advance with each sweep of the beam. Periodically, he’d mutter, “Damn, it’s coming down the line . . .”
Finally, Perkins, a volunteer with the local CB weather spotters group, asked, “What do you mean, ‘It’s coming down the line’?”
Brokaw paused the sweep and pointed to the screen. The tornado’s distinctive echo was following the line of the radar beam like a pencil lead tracking a ruler. The Weather Bureau office, of course, was located at the end of the line.
“It’s heading straight for us,” Brokaw said.
Eight-year-old Dominic Gutierrez peeled out in the alleyway behind his home on his silver stingray bike. He was pedaling fast for Guthrie & Sons, a small, old-fashioned grocery located on 4th Street, a block south and east of his home on Chandler. Dominic lived with his dad, mom, three sisters and two brothers in a plain, two-story, frame house, east of the rail yards beyond downtown and not far from the sprawling Santa Fe car shops. His dad was working the 4:00–midnight shift, sorting mail at the main post office. Dominic’s mother, Rosemary, was home with the children. She was worried. She didn’t have batteries for the transistor radio or the flashlight. If the storm knocked out the power, or worse, they’d need both. She had asked Dominic to ride to Guthrie’s to pick up some batteries.
“Go, Dougie!” she’d yelled from the back porch. That’s what she called him. “Be quick!”
Dominic was a skinny kid. He wore cutoffs and a white T-shirt. He pumped his bike furiously from side to side as the gravel crunched beneath his tires. The sky was burnt orange and the light diffuse, eerie and alien. The wind was flat calm. Never in his life had Dominic seen a day like this. Even the dogs that usually growled and barked at him from worn, fenced-in backyards on either side of the alley were silent. The boy swung wide onto 4th Street and skidded to a stop in the gravel in front of Guthrie’s. He leaned his bike against the white, one-story, block building; yanked open the squeaky, metal door; and dashed inside.
A window air conditioner hummed near the back. The store had just three aisles, each piled high with canned goods and other foodstuffs. There was a meat counter in the back and a couple of coolers along the far wall. The light was dim. You could smell the years stacked up in the place.
Cyrus, the oldest of the three Guthrie boys, grinned as he stepped out from behind the meat counter. He was a big man. He wore a white T-shirt and stained butcher’s apron. The Guthries had their own nickname for Dominic.
“Hey, Skeeter. What’cha doin’ out? Don’t you know there’s a storm comin’?”
Dominic caught his breath and told Cyrus his mom needed batteries for the radio and flashlight. He asked if he could put them on the bill. Cyrus pulled two packs from the shelf behind the cash register, dropped them into a sack, wrote up a ticket and handed the sack to Dominic.
Just then, the sirens growled to life.
“You’d better get your butt home, boy. The sirens are goin’ off. Tornado comin’! Go on, now. Git!” Cyrus hurried to close the store.
The wind was stirring outside, as if awakened by the sirens, and the temperature was starting to drop. The streets were empty; the sky still a poisonous yellow. Dominic’s heart raced. He jumped on his stingray and pedaled standing up with the bag gripped tightly beneath his fingers. Turning up the alley, he could just make out his mother’s panicked, high-pitched cry coming from the far end of the block. It mingled with the sirens’ wail.
“Dougie! Dougie! Where are you?!”
It seemed like the end of the world at that moment. But Dominic was home in a flash. He bailed off his bike and leapt up the porch steps.
“I got the batteries!” he cried. His mother hugged him and they ran for the basement.
Nearby, 19-year-old Norma Jackson sat on her front porch and watched the rain sweep in. Her neighbor, an ancient American Indian woman, sat on her porch next door.
“Guess I won’t have to wash the car now!” Jackson called out with a laugh as the rain began to let up.
The old woman nodded and smiled.
Norma had grown up in Nicodemus, a central Kansas town founded by ex-slaves after the Civil War. She’d come to Topeka after high school to stay with an aunt and find her way. She landed a job and met a man, got married, and on May 22 she had her first baby, Paul Frederick. Norma lived in the second-floor apartment of a two-story house near Ripley Park, south of the Santa Fe car shops. Her husband, Paul, worked for the railroad. But he was gone for two weeks’ training with the National Guard. Norma’s sister-in-law, Tessa Hale, lived in the first-floor apartment. Tessa’s husband and daughter were out of town as well, so the two women had dinner together in Tessa’s apartment. Then Norma put her son down in a bedroom and Tessa went off to get some sleep. She had to work that night.
Now Norma sat alone on the porch. Some family members came for her neighbor, the Indian woman. The rain stopped and the air became still. The sky was molten, like dawn. And then, out of nowhere, a huge piece of brown wrapping paper suddenly appeared, floating 20 or 30 feet above the street. It was rectangular and large enough to cover a car. It seemed to be burned around the edges. Norma watched the strange talisman drift slowly past like a leaf in a stream.
Now that’s just weird. Where did that thing come from?
A mile and a half away, in a small house on Winfield Avenue in the Garden Park district of Oakland, near the airport, 14-year-old Wanda Idlet turned on the black-and-white TV to watch Lost in Space. Her mother, Velma, was preparing dinner. Wanda was an only child. She was that shy, sensitive girl so terribly afraid of tornadoes — the one whose phobia had been fueled by
stories she’d heard from her mother and aunt about unimaginable violence visited from the sky. She’d been on edge all day, and the still, muggy afternoon did nothing to ease her dread. It was as if some terrible, unspoken question literally hung in the air. Now, as the sirens howled, the answer Wanda feared most was at hand.
“Mom!” she yelled toward the kitchen. “We need to go to the neighbor’s and get to the basement right now!”
“No,” Velma replied matter-of-factly. “I don’t believe a tornado could hit Topeka.” She continued making supper. “Everyone knows a tornado can’t come over Burnett’s Mound.”
“But, Mom, they said on TV that it’s heading for Burnett’s Mound right now! Come on! Let’s go. We should go.”
But Velma was unmoved. She was prideful. She wouldn’t ask anyone for anything if she could help it.
“You be still, Wanda. Your father will be home any minute. We’ll be just fine.”
Wanda didn’t believe it. She turned back to the TV, and when she heard Bill Kurtis exclaim, “For God’s sake, take cover!” her fear doubled and doubled again. She was nearly beside herself.
“Please, Mom, please!!”
Her mother turned suddenly and fixed Wanda with an angry glare. “Now you just pull yourself together, young lady! We’re not going anywhere.”
Sterling Taylor fished for carp all afternoon with his brother Harry at Lake Shawnee. He liked to give the fish to a black man in the neighborhood. Sterling was named for a Confederate general from Missouri, Sterling Price, but everyone called him “Chick” because he was born on Easter Day in 1904. Although he grew up near Rock Creek, Kansas, his people were from Savannah, Missouri, and his grandfather used to hide Frank and Jesse James in his basement. “Jesse was mean as a snake,” Grandpa used to say. “He’d have probably shot his own mother for a dollar.”
Nothing came easy for Chick. Once, when he’d worked at Swartze Basket Company, he was cleaning a big saw blade. Two co-workers were fooling around. When they hit the blade control, the saw dropped and severed three fingers on Chick’s right hand. During the Depression, the only way Chick could feed his wife, Fern, and their three girls was to walk 18 miles up to Rock Creek to hunt rabbit and quail. One time Chick and Harry came home with 20 rabbits. Fern would can rabbit and make roast rabbit and rabbit stew.
Chick eventually got work with the WPA, building the dam at Lake Shawnee for 50 cents a day. But times were still hard. Chick’s middle daughter, Katherine Boline, remembered more than once breaking up antiques and burning them in the wood stove to keep from freezing. Uncle Harry lived with the family in a small house near Seward Avenue on B Street, in Oakland.
Life wasn’t always bleak, of course. Chick loved to sing old western songs and he played the Jew’s harp. Uncle Harry played bones, and Fern would join in on the spoons. When the war came, Harry went off to fight at Guadalcanal. He returned intact, but he was never the same.
The thing about Chick, he was a good man but he drank hard for many years. He would get a paycheck and go on a bender and just disappear for days. The girls would finally track him down at one of the taverns in North Topeka and they’d try to get him to come home but usually could not. Chick finally swore off booze after one particularly brutal binge in the summer of 1949.
“When a man falls asleep walking, it’s time to quit,” he told Katherine. He had a little ceremony and buried a fifth of Old Crow in the backyard and never drank again.
After Fern’s parents died, her retarded brother, Everett, and retarded sister, Stella, moved into the house on B Street. Everett had been what they called an “instrument baby,” breeched in the birth canal and removed with forceps. It didn’t help that the delivery doctor had been drunk. Stella had polio when she was seven and the fever burned her brain. Everett had a bad temper and he would get violent sometimes. Fern couldn’t handle him unless Chick was around.
In June of ’66, Chick was 62 years old and two months shy of retirement. He’d put in 20 years at Hill’s Packing Company, a dog food factory. He was a cooker, boiling up big vats of horse meat. June 8 was his first day of two weeks’ vacation. At about 6:30 p.m., he drove to Tilton’s Market on Seward Avenue for a couple of loaves of bread. After that, Fern asked him to take some sweet corn to their granddaughter a few blocks away. When he returned around 7:00 p.m., he told Fern he was going to put the car in the garage because it looked like it could hail. The sirens went off, but Chick didn’t hear them. He might have been distracted because there was trouble in the house. Everett was in a rage. He was furious that Lost in Space had been interrupted by a special weather bulletin. He started swearing and stomping around.
So Fern just flipped the TV off.
The tornado blew out of downtown and across Interstate 70 at the 10th Street overpass, then hammered into a working-class neighborhood east of the highway along Madison, Jefferson and Adams streets. Row upon row of lap-sided, two-story, 40- and 50-year-old frame houses were scattered before the wind like wheat before a scythe. Fortunately, the tornado had narrowed somewhat from its initial, half-mile footprint, and the damage path was now just three or four blocks wide versus the six or eight it had been when the twister entered the city. But it was still a monster as it spun out of the neighborhood and into an industrial area adjacent to the Santa Fe yards. Then it crossed the tracks and started moving straight down the Shunganunga Creek.
A half mile to the northeast, 6th Street crossed the rail yards and the Shunga on a long, low viaduct that met Branner Avenue at a major intersection. The crossroads served as the gateway to East Topeka and Oakland. A Dairy Queen was on one corner and a Vickers gas station on another. The local Dr. Pepper bottling plant was across the street, and next to it, Capitol City Pawn Shop.
Inside the pawnshop, Lanny Ellis and his half-brother, Darrell Johnson, co-owners of the business, stood transfixed in front of the television with watch repairman Darius Gray. Bill Kurtis was providing a play-by-play of the tornado’s progress. When Kurtis reported that the tornado had just struck the National Reserve Life building at 10th and Kansas, Ellis said, “We need to get under cover. It’s heading our way.”
Ellis and Johnson ran to a back room and knelt down beside the thick stone wall that butted up to the Dr. Pepper plant.
Then they looked around. “Where’s Darius?” Johnson asked.
“Good Lord!”
Ellis got up and dashed back to the front of the store. Gray was still watching TV, standing in front of the plate glass windows. Ellis gripped his arm and pulled him to the back room.
But now Johnson was getting jumpy.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” he said. “We gotta go! We can’t stay here.” He stood up and was poised to run. But Ellis grabbed his shoulders and pushed him back down.
“We’re not going anywhere. You’ll get yourself killed out there, Darrell. C’mon now, for Christ’s sake, stay down!”
There was a series of loud, concussive bangs, like gunshots, as objects began striking the building. Ellis knelt under a console sewing machine and held tight to the legs. Within seconds, he heard the wrenching, popping, cracking sounds of the roof coming apart. Then all the noises were subsumed in the heavy, bottomless roar of the funnel.
Across the street, 22-year-old Clarence Ginter was working the 2:00–10:00 p.m. shift at the Vickers gasoline station with a young man from Gallatin, Missouri. Ginter heard the sirens go off but didn’t pay them much mind. You heard sirens all the time in the spring. Business would be slow for a while; that was about it. The minutes rolled past as Ginter and his co-worker — a skinny, well-mannered kid with a slow Missouri drawl — waited out the storm in the station’s glass office. But then Ginter happened to glance to the south. A geyser of debris had suddenly appeared near 8th and Adams streets. Sheets of plywood and siding and smaller chunks of God knows what were rocketing into the air, like sparks from a Fourth of July fountain. The whole thing seemed to be moving.
“Whoa! Look there. We gotta get out of here!”
Ginter told the kid. “Come on, we’ll go to the creek.”
The two men dashed out of the station, rounded the building and sprinted for the Shunga Creek 100 feet away. They slipped down the muddy bank and crouched against a concrete pier beneath the Branner Avenue Bridge. Not a minute had passed before the winds came in, crashing down the narrow defile like a tsunami. Suddenly, the air was alive with missiles and the wind howled. Almost immediately the men were lifted off the ground. Ginter and his co-worker were about a foot into the air when, in desperation, they reached out and grabbed one another. Their combined weight was enough to break the wind’s grip and they tumbled back to Earth. But the tornado wasn’t finished with them yet. Like a big cat toying with wounded prey, it began dragging the men up the bank. The two held each other tightly as they were slowly pulled across rocks and mud toward the open, east side of the bridge. At that point, the wind grew so intense that it literally sucked the oxygen from their lungs and they were drowning on land, gasping for air that no longer existed.
Norma Jackson was still on her porch, still pondering the mysterious brown paper shroud, when she heard the strangest noise. It was like a cross between a plane and a train, and yet it was something different. Norma had no idea that a tornado was on the ground or even that the weather was potentially dangerous. She had watched TV earlier but was tuned to a Kansas City station. And she hadn’t heard the sirens. Now there was this ominous, grinding, rumbling sound. She didn’t like it at all. So she went inside to her sleeping sister-in-law’s bedroom and gently called her several times. When Tessa Hale didn’t respond, Norma finally spoke loudly.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 24