Janifer Wallace lived in a second-floor apartment at the Embassy apartment complex. She never heard the sirens because she was under one of those large, old-style hair dryers at the time. A friend who wasn’t supposed to arrive until 8:00 p.m. showed up early and warned Wallace of the approaching tornado, and together they fled to the basement. After the tornado passed, Wallace emerged to find the roof of her apartment building gone and a Chevy Corvair parked in her second-floor living room, exactly where the hair dryer had been. At first, she told a reporter, she was mad to see a car in her living room. But then she realized how lucky she’d been and started to shake.
At Francis Clay’s home on 33rd Street, ripe tomatoes blew out of Clay’s garden and were strained through a window screen, coating the pale green bathroom walls in bright red. A stack of 12 dish towels was carried from an open drawer in the kitchen down a hallway to the bedroom. The towels landed on the bed, still neatly stacked.
J. B. Hart lost the roof of his home on 17th Street, although lamps and glassware in the attic were untouched. A pickup truck near Washburn University was wrapped around a tree so tightly that tailgate and front bumper overlapped.
Heavy crane operator Ted Mize (the man who’d carefully hoisted the potentially deadly bacteria incubator from the seventh floor of the wrecked National Reserve Life building) was also called in to recover a 20-foot steel I beam that had been ripped from a gas station in the College Hill area. The 1,000-pound beam had come to rest two blocks away. Somehow, it had dropped down in the narrow gap between adjacent, two-story houses and then turned horizontally to shoot through a second-floor bedroom window. The beam had swept across a bed, gathered up the linens, and rammed them through the plaster and into the studs of an interior wall. Half the beam stuck out the window; half was in the house. Even stranger, an eight-foot fluorescent light fixture was still attached to the beam, and the bulbs were unbroken.
While working late at Pelletier’s Department Store downtown, employees thought their building was on fire when the tornado rolled through. They reported the store filled with a “white wind” that looked like smoke.
The tornado’s black magic was particularly evident at Joe Smith’s car lot on Kansas Avenue. Salesman Jerry Estes returned to the lot the next morning. There was a ’65 Covair with the rear hood completely crushed down, concaved against the motor, with both rear tires flattened and both rear springs broken. Something huge had struck the car with enormous force, but whatever it was, was long gone. Nearby, a brickbat — a brick-sized piece of soft masonry — had shot through the passenger-side window of a 1962 Pontiac Catalina and struck the interior door panel just below the driver’s-side armrest. The missile then continued through the panel and punched out through the steel exterior like a cannon shot. And it was there still, sticking partly out of the torn door. But when Estes pulled it out and dropped it on the ground, the brickbat shattered. Why the soft material didn’t disintegrate when it was slammed against the interior door, who could say? Two cars over, a ’63 Galaxy had a two-by-four driven straight through the grill and radiator like an arrow. The thing was that the two-by-four had come from the west, while the brickbat that hit the Covair two cars down had come from the northeast.
As Estes and Smith worked to salvage what they could that morning, a truckload of Mennonites pulled up. The men, dressed in their plain garb, suspenders and straw hats, piled off the truck and offered to help clean up the lot. Old Joe was grateful and told them by all means. He happened to notice that one of the men was the fellow who’d come in the day before trying to buy the blue ’64 Impala. Estes and the man had been unable to agree on price and there’d been no sale. Now the car was flattened, crushed by a fallen brick wall.
Smith called Estes aside.
“Hey, Jerry,” he whispered. “Go tell that guy we’ll take his offer for the Impala.”
Estes approached the man and informed him that, after careful consideration, Mr. Smith had elected to accept his price for the Chevy after all. Everyone laughed, the Mennonite hardest of all.
In the late afternoon of June 9, after a fitful day at work, banker John Fernstrom walked from his home back over to the Washburn campus. He managed to avoid the National Guard patrols and found himself standing outside the ruins of Carnegie Hall, the building where he’d been taking the banking test when the tornado struck. With no one around, Fernstrom climbed through a window and made his way up the rubble-covered stairs. He wanted to retrieve the raincoat he’d left in the classroom the night before. Now the room was open to the sky and chairs and desks were scattered in heaps. Eerily, the teacher’s written instructions for the test still stood unmarred on the blackboard.
My God, we were here. We would have all been killed if we had stayed. We would have been carried off toward downtown. I still can’t believe this happened . . .
Fernstrom looked at the chair he’d been sitting in. A two-by-six was driven through the seat like a dagger. Then he spotted his raincoat wrapped tightly around the legs of a nearby desk. He untangled it, took one last look around and departed. When he got home, Fernstrom realized that the coat was riddled with glass and splinters. So he tossed it in the corner of his garage and never wore it again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
To the Stars Through Difficulties
On Saturday, June 11, U.S. armed forces in Vietnam awoke to news of the Topeka tornado plastered above the fold on page one of Stars and Stripes, the official military newspaper. The United Press International story didn’t quite get the facts right: The headline and opening paragraph claimed that a barrage of 15 twisters had struck Topeka, killing 13. Evidently, the reporter or editor had been confused by the fact that while 15 tornadoes hit the state as a whole on June 8, only one had gone through Topeka.
But the story otherwise was accurate, and included on the inside page was a small map of the tornado’s damage path. Among those who studied the map with growing alarm was 35-year-old Captain Edward (Ted) Marvin. The tall, soft-spoken Virginian was a C-130 pilot assigned to the 29th Squadron of the 463rd Troop Carrier Wing, based at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The unit had deployed from Forbes Air Force Base the previous January. The squadron’s mission was to fly men and materiels up and down the length of Vietnam for two-week rotations, return to Clark for a few days, then head back to Vietnam. And that’s where Marvin was — at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon — when he picked up the newspaper. He was worried because it looked from the map as if the tornado had passed very close to, if not right over, his home near Washburn University. Marvin feared for his wife and two daughters.
Are they alive? Are they dead? Injured? Did we lose our house?
There were no cell phones or satellite phones in 1966, of course, nor was there an Internet. Radio telephones did exist, but they were hard to come by in Vietnam. In any case, most phone service in Topeka was down. So Marvin and others in his 15-plane squadron had no way of knowing the fate of loved ones at home. The hours turned to days, and the worry metastasized into a hard, ever-present knot of dread.
Still, Marvin had a job to do. So he pushed aside the uncertainty and stayed on task, continuing to fly missions to forward combat bases along the DMZ. Aircraft cargo could include anything from 105-mm howitzer shells to 30,000 pounds of Velveeta cheese. Most of the landing strips in country were cut from the jungle and were sometimes no more than 3,000 feet long. It took guts and skill to stick a fully loaded, 130,000-pound C-130 down on a short, dirt or steel-planked runway. The grunts called the C-130s “mortar magnets” due to the plane’s propensity to attract incoming rounds once on the ground.
For most of that week Marvin and his crew flew at 5,000 to 10,000 feet above the vast, green canopy of South Vietnam. After four or five days of grinding worry, word finally came through the chain of command that all the squadron’s families in Topeka had been physically located and all were okay. None had suffered property damage. Marvin was overjoyed. But the anxiety he experienced no doubt was replicated hundreds of times
over in the tornado’s aftermath among servicemen and women in Vietnam with family or friends in Topeka.
Back in the city, recovery efforts received a major leg up on June 10, thanks to nearby Kansas City, Missouri. Topeka mayor Chuck Wright had appealed to area communities for assistance the day after the storm, and at around 5:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon, a mile-long convoy of heavy equipment rolled in from the east like a mechanized army. The machinery was manned by 160 employees of the Kansas City Parks and Recreation, Water, and Public Works departments. The convoy included 40-plus dump trucks, two Cat D-7 dozers, low-boy trailers, front-end loaders, cherry pickers, chippers, winch trucks, street sweepers, pickup trucks and dozens of chain saws. The fleet represented just about every construction and maintenance asset K.C. had.
For the next five days, the Kansas City crews worked in shifts around the clock to clear the streets from Washburn University to downtown. Rubble and tree limbs were loaded into dump trucks or dozed into burn piles around the city. Smoke from the fires lifted into the blue summer sky as the bulldozers clanked and dump trucks rumbled in. George Eib was the K.C. Parks and Recreation Department superintendent in charge of the operation. He recalled that flat tires were a huge problem that week, due to the enormous amount of glass, metal and nails littering the streets. To meet the challenge, tire trucks and repair crews raced back to the shops in Kansas City every night to repair flats and bring up additional spares. It was all they could do just to keep up.
Supporting the Kansas City workers themselves was no small feat, either: Lunches were carried to the field; breakfast and dinner were served from a mobile kitchen at the Shawnee County garage near the fairgrounds. Much of the food was donated by Topeka restaurants, families and individuals after appeals were made on radio and TV. The men slept at the city’s municipal auditorium and at Topeka High School.
Although the Kansas City workers were on the clock in Topeka, it was clear the effort became more than just a job for many. One hi-loader operator worked 24 hours straight and wouldn’t stop until a supervisor finally showed up and basically ordered him off the machine. According to the newspaper, the man became “extremely emotional” about his desire to continue working. All told, the assistance provided to Topeka for those five days cost Kansas City $37,000 (about $245,000 in today’s dollars). It was a selfless act. But it wasn’t isolated.
Thousands of men from municipalities and utilities across the Midwest descended on the city and worked 16-hour days until the streets were cleared and basic services restored. Many of the cleanup crews were volunteers. On the utility side, Southwestern Bell had more than 800 men in the city, replacing cables that served 18,000, or about 25 percent, of Topeka’s 73,700 telephones. The job required 20 miles of cable and 1,100 poles. Kansas Power and Light likewise deployed more than 500 men from towns across Kansas to restore power along the damage path. Within four days, 80 percent of the homes and businesses capable of receiving power were back up and running.
The level of federal involvement in the aftermath of the Topeka tornado was relatively modest, unlike many future American disasters. The morning after the tornado, Mayor Wright received a telephone call from President Lyndon B. Johnson. According to Wright, the conversation went something like this:
“Mayor Wright, this is President Lyndon Johnson in Washington. I just want to tell you how sorry we are to hear what happened to your wonderful city, and we’re here to do everything we can to help.”
I said, “Mr. President, I certainly appreciate that. I know our people do. We’re Republicans out here.” And the president said, “Well, this is a catastrophe, and it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s Democrat or Republican.” I said, “As soon as I know what we need, I’ll get back to you.”
Wright and other city officials quickly concluded that temporary housing was Topeka’s most pressing requirement. And sure enough, by the end of June, the first of more than 500 mobile trailers provided by the General Services Administration began arriving in the city. Temporary communities were laid out in parks, at the airport and on the grounds of the veterans hospital. The trailers were hot, smelly and cramped. But they provided essential shelter — in some cases for a year or more — for those fighting to get back on their feet.
Donations of clothes and other materials poured in from around the country. Central Airlines set up an airlift to bring the donations in from several eastern cities. Truckloads of clothing, bedding and other supplies arrived from surrounding states. Everyone gave what they could. Even the inmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing set up a relief fund.
Throughout the city, a powerful spirit of sacrifice, cooperation and hard work was pervasive in those first days after the storm. It was a unique period, to say the least. As a result, three psychologists on staff at the Menninger Foundation seized on the opportunity to conduct an in-depth psychological study of how a community reacts to disaster. The three — James B. Taylor, Louis A. Zurcher and William H. Key — all had volunteered in the cleanup operations, and as the work wound down, they fanned out to interview more than 100 victims, volunteers, city officials and others. The effort resulted in a book titled Tornado: A Community Responds to Disaster, which was published in 1970.96
Because the book was written by, and largely for, mental health clinicians, the content reflected the heavily academic, often densely analytical mind-set associated with the profession. But the effort was sincere, the research comprehensive and the writing clear. In detail, the book described the psychological journey that many individuals and the community as a whole experienced, from the shock and trauma of the event through adaptation and recovery. According to the authors, a “post-disaster utopia” fleetingly reigned in the wake of the tornado:
For a period after the disaster, ordinary cares and concerns seemed laid aside. The city was caught up in a collective excitement and a profound sense of shared destiny, wherein the fate of one’s neighbor was as important as one’s own. The result, for a brief moment, was a kind of community coherence seldom encountered outside of war or the transcendental states of mass religious excitement. For a while the city became a different organism and functioned by different rules.97
The book included many keen observations and anecdotes. One tornado victim described the cognitive dissonance he experienced when confronted with the eerie normalcy that existed just beyond the tornado’s path:
I have a truck drop me off at the edge of Westboro, where I am to have dinner with friends. And as I walk into Westboro I have as great a sense of disorientation, of unreality, as anything I’ve experienced all day. Here the lawns are carefully manicured, birds are singing in the confident stately trees, children are laughing, discreetly it seems, and I envy them. A woman is talking with her gardener about begonias, in a quiet voice, but it is so peaceful here that I can hear every word of the conversation as I walk by the house. It would appear that all was not well with the begonias. I am dead tired, the contrasts of the day have been so great that I feel I’ve gone from one side of the moon to the other — but where is the Earth?98
Another report described a humorous collision of cultures that occurred during the storm cleanup:
He had to laugh about some of the things that happened. The helpers were so anxious to help, and yet they made for difficulties. The men who were trying to salvage the things came from a farm background and had different values than his. They would pull out some half-destroyed article, and tell him, “If you take a hammer to that, you can fix it up okay” — and then they would put it on the truck. The informant didn’t want to discourage them, because they were being so helpful, but he was quite sure he would never fix up the article. So, surreptitiously, after the helpers had put it on the truck, he would sneak up behind them and throw it away again. They caught him at this late in the afternoon, and he had a difficult time explaining what he was up to. When they did finish loading up the truck at the end of the day and moved everything to his new house, he had to phone the Salvatio
n Army so that he could give away the useless junk.99
Yet another individual interviewed by the psychologists was an elderly Mexican man who’d fought under the Mexican rebel leader Pancho Villa as a youth. The old man had refused to seek cover when the tornado approached. Shelters, he explained, were for women and children.
Instead, he’d gone outside to see “the face of God.”100
Despite the spirit of selflessness that dominated the city in the tornado’s aftermath, not everyone subscribed. Sightseers had been a major problem from virtually the minute the tornado lifted. For days, streets around the damage path were choked with motorists trolling slowly through to take in the epic destruction. The problem got so bad that one fed-up individual whose home near Washburn had been jacked open like a dollhouse erected a large sign in his yard that read: GAWK, YOU BASTARDS! YOU’RE A LOT OF HELP.
Volunteers from both the Red Cross and the Salvation Army were ubiquitous. They operated mobile canteens, fanning out to provide food and clothing. Shelters were established, kitchens were stocked and for weeks, both organizations continued to play a vital role in pulling the city back from the abyss. Yet very different perceptions emerged about the value of the respective charities among some storm survivors. Tom Noack, the electrician who lived near Burnett’s Mound, remembers Red Cross canteens demanding monetary donations before they would provide food or drink. In contrast, he said, the Salvation Army handed out food, drink and even hand tools, free of charge and no questions asked.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 29