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

by Bonar Menninger

  The brothers went outside and helped free an elderly couple trapped in a basement a half block to the south. Then they returned to the pawnshop to find people gathering outside, milling aimlessly in front of the shattered windows. There was menace in the air.

  “You all need to get out of here! We’re not open.”

  Several regular customers appeared, desperate to pawn items for cash. Ellis and Johnson made them loans out of their pockets. But others were looking for different opportunities as the sun slipped lower in the west.

  The men strapped on .38-caliber revolvers and awaited the night.

  Norma Jackson, the young woman from Nicodemus, Kansas, and her sister-in-law, Tessa Hale, pushed away the mattress they’d sought shelter beneath and slowly climbed to their feet. Norma carefully placed her still-sleeping, 16-day-old son, Paul Frederick, on the bed. She took stock. She was itching from the many tiny pieces of fiberglass insulation that had lit on her body. But she wasn’t hurt. Nor was the baby or Tessa. The house was gutted. As they looked around, the women heard a female voice outside.

  “Tessa! Are you in there? Are you all right?”

  Norma and Tessa went to the porch. A middle-aged white woman stood in front of the house. It was Jean from across the street. She was plastered from head to toe with mud and her clothes were ripped. Norma could see Jean’s home in the background, reduced to a pile of kindling. Jean said she’d ridden out the storm in an overstuffed chair in her living room. As she spoke, Norma noticed something that made her gasp: The woman had a compound fracture of the lower leg. Jutting bone glistened through torn, bloody skin.

  “Jean, your leg’s broke!”

  The woman slowly looked down. She had no idea. The color drained from her face. Norma and Tessa rushed to support her and then gently eased her down to the steps. Soon after, other neighbors arrived, brought a car and transported Jean to the hospital.

  “We need to get out of here before dark,” Norma said to Tessa. “I’m going to see what’s left upstairs. Get some things together. We can go to my aunt’s.”

  The 19-year-old ascended the stairs to catastrophe. The roof hadn’t come off, but the kitchen wall was blown out and all the windows, too. Virtually every one of the young couple’s possessions, modest though they were, was scattered and despoiled like trash. Norma did find some fresh diapers lying undisturbed on the dresser, and she pulled some bottles of formula from the darkened refrigerator. Then she threw some clothes in a sack and went back down the stairs.

  Twilight was settling in as Norma and Tessa set off down Lime Street. Every house they passed was badly damaged or destroyed. People were milling and moving in the streets. Norma saw the body of a man, wearing overalls, lying in an odd, unnatural position on the floor of a destroyed house. A little further on, a huge, downed tree blocked the street, and Norma found herself struggling to get through the branches with Paul Frederick in her arms. She was nearly trapped by the brush when a set of hands appeared from the far side. She could see the face of a tall, slender black man through the limbs.

  “I’ll take your baby for you.”

  Norma smelled liquor on his breath.

  “You better not drop him . . .”

  “I won’t. You can trust me.”

  So she did. Then she quickly fought her way through the branches, took her baby back, thanked the man and kept moving.

  The scene became chaotic as the women approached 6th Street, the main drag through East Topeka. Looters were out in force and ravaging stores along the thoroughfare. A liquor store was hard hit and a drugstore, too. Cars screeched to a halt, and people jumped out and dashed into the buildings. A man ran past with a television. There were screams and shouts and curses and laughter. And all the while, the newly homeless, some bloodied and bandaged, streamed out of the damage path like an army in retreat, making for the bridge.

  This looks like a war zone . . ., thought Norma.

  Norma and Tessa crossed the 6th Street viaduct with many others, reached downtown and eventually spotted some friends in traffic and were able to get a roundabout ride to Norma’s aunt’s house in central Topeka. Her aunt’s home, in fact, had been missed by the tornado but not by much. Lights were blazing like a beacon as they walked up the driveway. It had been two hours since the tornado hit. Norma handed the baby to her teary but relieved aunt, Lorene Powell, and then collapsed in a chair.

  She didn’t speak. She didn’t cry. She just started shaking violently. Her teeth chattered and she couldn’t hold a drink in her hand.

  After the roar faded, Olen Robbins, the wheel shop foreman at the Santa Fe rail car shops, emerged from the small refinery building with his co-workers. The coal-black darkness that had engulfed the shops had lifted and the late-day sun still gave warmth. Devastation was everywhere. Cars were crushed, sheet metal torn and twisted; the roof of the sprawling car barn was entirely gone. A deafening silence settled in. But the quiet was soon broken by cries for help coming from nearby Ripley Park. Robbins and several others ran over. Tree limbs had come down on a ’55 Buick and an elderly man was trapped inside. He had tiny cuts all over his face. Robbins and his companions struggled to remove the limbs but couldn’t get the man out. An ambulance is coming, someone said. A couple of men waited with the trapped driver until help arrived.

  Robbins could tell the tornado had moved into Oakland and he was worried about his family and home. He found his car, upside down, a half block from where he’d parked it. A co-worker, Gaylord Richardson, had parked farther from the shop, and although all the glass was out of the car, it was still serviceable. So Richardson offered Robbins a ride to his house. They battled down Seward and along side streets, frequently getting out to move limbs and debris.

  When they finally reached his street, Robbins craned his neck to look ahead.

  “Shit, Gaylord, it’s gone . . .”

  He jumped out and ran to the wreckage. Robbins’s wife and children were nowhere to be found. He shouted their names.

  “Bonnie! Randy! Connie! Where are you?”

  Then he looked off to the west, toward the street behind the house where homes still stood. And against the setting sun, he spotted his wife and kids. They’d gone to a nearby relative’s basement.

  He ran to them, laughing and crying at the same time.

  When Steph Esquivel saw the floor disintegrating overhead, she was certain death was seconds away. Now people were moving cautiously up the stairs in the silence of the Chavez home. The house was sheared away above the basement. Steph heard gasps as people filed into the yard. Every home in the immediate area was destroyed, including her own across the street. Women wailed and keened, clasping their hands to their faces as they looked around in shock and despair. Steph’s mother was hysterical. Steph tried to comfort her as they walked through the wreckage of their home. The place was gutted. But in the living room, an 8x10 picture of Steph’s older brother Greg — in his Navy uniform, just before he shipped out to Vietnam — still stood on a stereo speaker. Steph looked in the bathroom. A piece of wood the size of a ruler was driven through the porcelain tub, like a toothpick through cotton.

  Steph’s brother Ramon, the one who’d ridden out the tornado with his other sisters and father at the 10th Street underpass, arrived soon after. He’d been forced to abandon his motorcycle a block from his parents’ home. He spotted Steph and his mother amid the wreckage. He let them know everyone else was okay. Then he checked the property. The family’s Buick LeSabre was lying behind the house in a creek bed. Ramon also found one of his father’s hunting dogs, a Brittany named Mister, laid open along the creek bank, dead. The other Brittany, Lady, was nowhere to be found.

  Just before dark, Ramon Sr. walked up with daughters Marcia and Sylvia. He surveyed the destruction, pursed his lips and silently shook his head. He’d already lost all the equipment for his business. Now this. Then he spotted a tray of taco shells, five or six, lying in the rubble. The shells were unbroken, but each was packed solid with wood chips and bi
ts of insulation.

  “Hey, kids. Look at this! Here’s our dinner!”

  The children laughed.

  The next day, a stranger pulled up as the Esquivels worked to salvage what they could. Much to their amazement, the man was carrying Lady, their second Brittany pup. He said he found her in his farm fields 15 miles northeast of Topeka. The wind evidently had carried her there. The little dog was unhurt, but for the rest of her life — whenever storms threatened — Lady would cower in her doghouse, quivering with fear.

  Fern Taylor slowly regained consciousness in the middle of her bedroom floor. The concrete block house around her had been reduced in height to a single row of blocks. She could hear people coming to help. She could see Chick lying in the corner beneath the culvert. The man who owned the Miami Tavern on Seward arrived with several others and lifted the heavy pipe off Chick. Chick’s eyes opened once and then closed. The man took Chick’s pulse.

  “He’s dead, Fern. I think his eyes opening was just a reflex.”

  Fern didn’t want to believe it, of course. The men put Chick’s body on some bedsprings, and Fern stayed with him; eventually a car was found to carry him to the hospital. The coroner pronounced him dead later that night. His skull was fractured.

  Carol Laird dashed up the stairs after the tornado passed, then reappeared just a few moments later. The neighbors and family waiting in the basement looked up as he came back down the stairs. Mrs. Sims, the neighbor lady who’d just lost her husband the week before, was still screaming. The children sobbed.

  Laird looked directly at Linda Jones’s 80-year-old grandfather, John Goodall.

  “John, I hate to tell you this, but your house is gone. And I don’t think we’ve got a whole lot left up there, either.”

  The group made their way up the stairs and found the home’s first floor battered and torn; Sheetrock was cracked and marred with black marks from flying shingles, doors were blown off, windows broken, furniture smashed, all manner of trash scattered everywhere. The Joneses’ house across the street was blown in chunks against Mrs. Sims’s home one lot to the north. The two young men who’d sought shelter in the Joneses’ cellar emerged, dazed but unhurt.

  As Laird walked through the yard and took in the arc of destruction that had swept the neighborhood, he noticed something odd. Earlier that spring, he’d planted a sycamore tree in the front yard. The sapling was maybe 15 feet tall and six inches in diameter. The tree still stood, but all around it, in a perfect circle, a trench had been carved a foot-and-a-half deep. Evidently the tornado had bowed the tree over and then spun it around like a corkscrew with so much torque that the branches had opened the trench at the base. Yet the tree’s trunk didn’t snap.

  There were other oddities. A pair of shorts and a pair of pants had been hanging on a chair in the Lairds’ bedroom before the tornado hit. Afterward, the pants were twisted tightly around the legs of the chair, but the shorts somehow made it outside and had come to rest under the family car. A box of Kleenex facial tissues that had been on the headboard in the master bedroom was now empty and sitting on the living room divan. Later, when Laird climbed up to the attic to survey the damage to the roof (22 rafters were split lengthwise, but the roof held), he found facial tissues plastered all over the attic space. And all the family’s framed pictures from the living room were coated with mud, like it was sprayed on. All except one: The picture of Jesus was virtually untouched.

  Something else. The lady who’d lost her husband a few days before, Mrs. Sims? The Joneses’ house had plowed into hers and completely wrecked the place. But the flowers from her husband’s funeral the previous Monday still stood on a table.

  Much to Wanda Idlet’s everlasting amazement, she and her mother survived the tornado in the narrow bedroom closet behind the accordion door. When the world finally grew silent, the two stepped gingerly out of the closet and peered out the bedroom window to the south. The house on the corner was gone.

  Where is Dad? Is Dad dead?

  Wanda pulled at the bedroom door, dreading what she might find on the other side. But the door was jammed. She was still fighting it when she heard a familiar voice. Her father popped the door free and the family embraced. No one was hurt.

  Wanda’s mother turned to her daughter. Her eyes were brimming. Her voice overflowed with regret.

  “I’m so sorry we didn’t go to the shelter, Wanda. You were right. You were right all along.”

  But Wanda was overjoyed.

  I’ve beaten the monster. I’ve beaten the thing I feared most. I’m alive!

  As for that bargain she made with God, Wanda kept her end of it as the years rolled on.

  The Tornado’s Path

  Total distance: 22 miles.

  Distance through Topeka: Approximately 8 miles.

  Touchdown occurred at about 6:50 p.m., four miles south and a half mile east of Dover, Kansas.

  The tornado lifted just east of Billard Airport at 7:31 p.m.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Awaiting the Dawn

  The still-white twister continued to lift as it cleared the Kansas River. The storm was committing suicide. The cascade of cooler air that helped create the funnel in the first place, the rear-flank downdraft, was swamping the tornado’s base and choking off the supply of warm, moist air that fed the maelstrom. As the tornado strangled itself, it elongated and narrowed, or roped out, as if struggling to maintain contact with the earth. The winds of the parent thunderstorm then reasserted themselves and bent the weakened appendage into a fantastical serpentine shape that, ever so slowly, retracted into the sky. No longer the great, debris-choked wedge that had smashed through the city, the tornado in its dying moments became soft and ethereal, an attenuated, receding apparition that lingered in the eastern sky.

  It was 7:31 p.m.

  Almost 45 minutes had passed since the funnel touched down four miles south of Dover, Kansas. It had traveled 22 miles during that time — the last eight, through the city. If maximum destruction was the aim, the twister’s route couldn’t have been more effective. The storm followed the long axis across Topeka by slicing diagonally from southwest to northeast. Now a path of ruin one-eighth to one-half mile wide extended, block after block, from Burnett’s Mound to the river.

  The city was cut in half.

  The sun wouldn’t set until 7:47 p.m. and twilight would linger for 30 minutes after that. In the dead stillness and pale blue light of evening, thousands of stunned survivors emerged to confront a world remade. Then they tried to figure out what to do next.

  Tom Noack, the electrician who lived near the base of Burnett’s Mound (the one who’d started up the street, shutting off gas meters, immediately after the tornado passed), was still angry about the looters he’d seen come down from the nearby interstate. A police officer cruised slowly through the destroyed neighborhood sometime before dark, and Noack and a neighbor approached and told him what they’d seen.

  “Do you have firearms?” the officer asked.

  That was affirmative.

  “Then get them out, load them and if anybody comes into the neighborhood that doesn’t belong here and starts grabbing stuff, you holler ‘Halt’ twice, and then you shoot them, because that’s what they deserve.”

  Noack and his neighbor glanced at each other and laughed nervously.

  “No, that’s what you do,” the policeman reiterated. “Because that’s what they deserve.”

  So they got their guns and loaded them.

  Soon after, Noack spotted a familiar truck pulling to the shoulder of I-470. It was his boss, O. K. Johnson, owner of O. K. Electric. Johnson’s shop man, John Powell, jogged down from the highway.

  “Everybody all right, Tom?”

  “Yeah, we’re in good shape. We got lucky. But we could really use a generator.”

  Within 30 minutes, Johnson and Powell had returned with a 4,000-watt industrial generator. The men made quick work of tying it into the service of Noack’s battered-but-still-intact house, and so
on the generator puttered steadily against the gathering gloom. Lights blazed and appliances came back to life. Noack’s wife, Connie, made coffee and sandwiches. Neighbors drifted in. Some brought stray dogs they’d rounded up, and the Noacks’ garage was soon pressed into service as a temporary kennel.

  At dusk, Noack walked down through the damage zone toward Gage Boulevard to let others know they were welcome to stop by for coffee and sandwiches. He found one elderly woman standing alone amid the wreckage of her home.

  “Why don’t you come up, ma’am? We’ve still got a house standing. We’ve got power.”

  The woman looked at him with angry, distant eyes.

  “Well, aren’t you a lucky son of a bitch . . .” she muttered.

  Then she turned and walked away.

  A chill settled in as night fell. The unseasonable weather seemed to accentuate the air of desolation that draped over the city. But wheels were turning. Kansas governor William Avery had immediately requested help from nearby Forbes Air Force Base, and by dark more than 400 airmen and Air Police, along with heavy equipment, searchlights and ambulances, were fanning out across the damaged areas. Avery also called out the National Guard and convoys of troop-laden trucks were rumbling into the city by 11:00 p.m. A total of more than 1,000 airmen and 600 guardsmen would be in Topeka within 24 hours. Law enforcement officers from across the state likewise converged.