by Lee Sandlin
The general description of Egypt is based on C. William Horrell, Henry Dan Piper, and John W. Voigt, Land Between the Rivers: The Southern Illinois Country (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973). The description of the Tri-state Tornado is based on Alfred J. Henry, “The Tornadoes of March 18, 1925,” Monthly Weather Review, April 1925; on two modern histories, Peter S. Felknor, The Tri-state Tornado: The Story of America’s Greatest Tornado Disaster (iUniverse, 2004), and Wallace Akin, The Forgotten Storm: The Great Tri-state Tornado of 1925 (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2002); and on the oral histories collected in Vickie Frost, ed., When the Whole World Changed: Voices from Murphysboro, Illinois (Murphysboro Pride Group, 1993).
Part IV: The Mystery of Severe Storms
The loss of the Shenandoah is told in Aaron J. Keirns, America’s Forgotten Airship Disaster: The Crash of the USS Shenandoah (Howard, Ohio: Little River, 2010). The account of the civilian Weather Service and its critics is based on two institutional histories: Donald R. Whitnah, A History of the United States Weather Bureau (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961); and Patrick Hughes, A Century of Weather Service: A History of the Birth and Growth of the National Weather Service, 1870–1970 (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1970). The development of military meteorology is described in Weather Training in the AAF, 1937–1945, U.S. Air Force Historical Study No. 56 (Air University, 1952), a declassified report prepared by the USAF Historical Division.
Robert Miller’s life is recounted in John M. Lewis, Robert A. Maddox, and Charlie A. Crisp, “Architect of Severe Storm Forecasting: Colonel Robert C. Miller,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, April 2006. Miller’s own autobiography, “The Unfriendly Sky,” was left unfinished at his death; there are extended excerpts from the unpublished manuscript in the NOAA archive, including a detailed account of his famous operational forecast. A modern reanalysis of the forecast is Robert A. Maddox and Charlie A. Crisp, “The Tinker AFB Tornadoes of March 1848,” Weather and Forecasting 14, no. 4 (1999).
For T. Theodore Fujita, I have used the special memorial issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 82, no. 1 (2001), particularly James R. McDonald, “T. Theodore Fujita: His Contribution to Tornado Knowledge Through Damage Documentation and the Fujita Scale”; Gregory S. Forbes and Howard B. Bluestein, “Tornadoes, Tornadic Thunderstorms, and Photogrammetry: A Review of the Contributions by T. T. Fujita”; and James W. Wilson and Robert M. Wakimoto, “The Discovery of the Downburst: T. T. Fujita’s Contribution”; as well as the memorial page to Fujita by Tim Marshall at stormtrack.org. Fujita’s analysis of the Super Outbreak is collected in Edwin Kessler, ed., The Thunderstorm in Human Affairs (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).
Epilogue: The Wild Hunt
There are countless books and videos now about tornado chasing; the best remains Howard Bluestein, Tornado Alley: Monster Storms of the Great Plains (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). The summary of current thinking about tornadoes is as accurate as I could make it as of the present writing (June 2012), but readers should be aware that tornadoes have a way of turning the established into the ephemeral very quickly.
Acknowledgments
Copious thanks are due to my editor, Tim O’Connell, and everyone at Pantheon who went an extra mile or two on this project—particularly the publicity manager, Michiko Clark, as well as Kate Welsh, Kelly Blair, Altie Karper, Catherine Courtade, and Sheila Klee. Closer to home, I owe thanks to my indefatigable agent, Danielle Egan-Miller, and to Joanna MacKenzie and Shelbey Campbell at Browne & Miller Literary Associates, and also to my invaluable assistant, Molly Walsh.
About the Author:
Lee Sandlin’s essays, most of which were published in the Chicago Reader, received the Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism and an award for Best Arts Criticism from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. His essay “Losing the War” was included in the anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction. He lives in Chicago.
Other titles available in eBook format by Lee Sandlin:
Wicked River • 978-0-307-37951-1
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www.leesandlin.com
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www.pantheonbooks.com
Benjamin Franklin’s conception of a waterspout. (NOAA)
An unusually accurate depiction of Franklin and the kite, from an 1877 book on meteorology. (NOAA)
James Pollard Espy, the Storm King. (NOAA)
William Redfield, Espy’s great antagonist in the storm war. (Popular Science Monthly/Wikimedia Commons)
Robert Hare, chemist and tornado enthusiast. (Popular Science Monthly/Wikimedia Commons)
The Signal Corps headquarters in Washington City, 1880. (NOAA)
Forecast flags of the Signal Corps, a common sight in America until the 1920s. (NOAA)
Whirlwind. A trombe, or spout, from Camille Flammarion’s L’Atmosphère, 1888. (NOAA)
The earliest known tornado photograph, taken in South Dakota in 1884, heavily retouched for sale as a postcard. (NOAA)
Cleveland Abbe, “Acting Probabilities,” in his office. (NOAA)
An early Signal Corps weather map, showing fair weather over the country’s midsection and a major storm in the Atlantic. (NOAA)
Photograph of the havoc wrought by a Louisville, Kentucky, tornado circa 1913. (Library of Congress)
The great cyclone, tornado, and fire at Louisville, Kentucky. Newspaper panorama of the great Louisville tornado of 1890. (Library of Congress)
An automobile left behind by a tornado in Omaha, Nebraska, circa 1913. (Library of Congress)
The great tornado at St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois.
Newspaper panorama of the catastrophic 1896 tornado. (Library of Congress)
John Park Finley in later life.
(Library of Congress)
William Hazen, chief signal officer of the U.S. Army. (NOAA, Wikimedia Commons)
Adolphus Greely, survivor of the polar expedition and successor to Hazen in the Signal Corps.
(Library of Congress)
A pair of early tornado photographs, untypical because they haven’t been heavily retouched. (NOAA)
A sketch of tornado development, from John Park Finley’s 1887 book, Tornadoes.
(Finley’s Tornadoes: What They Are and How to Observe Them, with Practical Suggestions for the Protection of Life and Property [1887], p. 23)
“After the Blow.” In a cartoon by Udo J. Keppler, men emerge from a shelter after weathering the tornado of “November Elections.” (Library of Congress)
Wreckage of the USS Shenandoah. (U.S. Naval Historical Center) (Historical Marker Database, Jessica Tiderman/J. J. Prats)
A Kansas tornado, from a stereoscopic print.
(Kansas Historical Society/Foundation: Kansas Memory)
An exceptionally good early-twentieth-century tornado photograph from Kansas.
(Kansas Historical Society/Foundation: Kansas Memory)
E. J. Fawbush and Robert Miller in the Severe Weather Warning Center at Tinker Air Force Base, early 1950s. (American Meteorological Society, NOAA)
Also by Lee Sandlin
Wicked River:
The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild