It was a dark and stormy afternoon...

Mom, Jerry, Dad, Me

It was a dark and stormy afternoon.  May 1, 1954, a day that changed the trajectory of my family for many years.  We had been in town (Shawnee, Oklahoma) grocery shopping, and on the way home, the weather was awful.  We had the radio on in the car and there were warnings about severe thunderstorms, but no mention of a tornado, although it is taken for granted in Tornado Alley that there is always that possibility during Spring.  The sky looked ominous in the southwest, which is where tornadoes always come from, because in our hemisphere, the spinning monsters always travel from southwest to northeast.  If you look at tornado paths plotted on a map, they are always relatively straight lines going in the same direction.  Fortunately for us, Dad was worried, so as we entered our farm, he drove past the house and pulled up next to the storm cellar in back.  The cellar was just a hole in the ground with a mound of earth over it and a door on a low slant facing away from the path of the storm.  When Dad stopped the car, Mom said she was going into the house to wash her hair in case anything bad happened.  At that moment, Dad decided we needed to get in the cellar and yanked open the door. He told Mom to get in but she didn’t want to because it was full of mud and water and she had her good shoes on.  I don’t remember getting out of the car, but I remember standing on the ground outside the cellar and seeing my baby lamb, Woolly running toward us.  We had been bottle feeding Woolly, I guess because his mother either died or wouldn’t nurse him for some reason.  He was my pet, slept under the house, and always came running to meet us when we came home.  Dad pushed Mom into the cellar, then picked me up and literally threw me in head first.  I slid down the wet dirt slope and landed in the water that had accumulated.  As he threw me in, I was screaming at him to “get Woolly.”  I don’t remember if I knew exactly why we were going into the cellar, but I definitely knew we were in danger and wanted Woolly to be saved as well.  When Dad pushed Mom down into the cellar, she had my little brother in one arm and her purse on the other.  Days later, they found her purse way down in the pasture.  Dad came in after us, pulled the door shut and held onto the rope attached to it.  He couldn’t hold it down and the door went flying off.  I was standing on a little child’s chair in the corner of the small space and Mom was trying to cover me and my brother.  I held on to her.  Apparently my brother and I were both crying.  Dad watched our big Packard go spinning up into the air and come crashing down not too far away.  There were 2x4s rammed through the car including a big one that went through the windshield and was embedded in the front passenger seat. If Mom had been sitting there, she would have been dead for sure.

Little house that blew away

The tornado that hit us was massive, cutting a swath a half-mile wide.  There was no visible funnel, just a huge black cloud on the ground.  I don’t consciously remember the freight-train sound that Dad described afterwards, but for years I had nightmares where I would wake up in terror, but there was no image in my mind, just a feeling of terror.  I’m pretty sure the nightmares were caused by the sound of the tornado.  After things seemed to be over, Dad poked his head out of the cellar, said “Well, the house is gone.”  Turned around and said, “The barn is gone too.”  In fact, pretty much everything was gone.  They had purchased the farm in September of 1951 just before I turned 3.  It had a small wooden house, a Grade-A dairy barn, chicken coops, a rabbit hutch, and a large enclosure for pigs.  We raised goats and a few sheep along with the chickens, rabbits and pigs.  Dad sold goat milk to the local hospital and other folks in town. (I didn’t know I had lactose intolerance until college because I grew up drinking goat milk.)  There was also a wonderful fruit orchard which had been overgrown when my parents bought it.  They had cleaned it up and I have memories of picking cherries and peaches, although I think I ate more cherries than went into the bucket.  All the fruit trees and the pecan trees were torn up, roots and all, with only a couple of pecan trees surviving.  All the fences were gone too, so we couldn’t keep any of the animals that survived.

Dad went off to see if the people who lived down the road were OK.  They were hurt, but not too badly.  Before too long he heard our friend Wanda, the mother of the two boys I grew up with, running down the road in the rain and screaming hysterically.  Their farm, a mile away to the west, had not been hit, but they lost power, so she went looking for a phone to call the power company.  The first two houses she saw were destroyed, and as she came over the low hill, she could see our house was gone as well. There was so much debris in the road that she stopped her car and ran to our place oblivious to the downed electrical lines.  Eventually Mom carried me out of the cellar and put me in Wanda’s car.  I wanted to see what had happened, but there were dead and dying animals all around, so she covered my eyes.  My brother and I were taken away, I don’t remember to where, and somehow Grandmother and Grandpa came to get us and took us to their home in Oklahoma City. 

Dad with Flapper and Fanny

Dad had to borrow a gun from our neighbors to put some of the terribly injured animals down.  A few goats lived and some of the chickens and rabbits as well.  Woolly did not.

Over the next few days, Mom and Dad worked on the property trying to find anything that hadn’t been destroyed.  They put some items in the kitchen sink, but looters came out and took the sink and the stuff in it.  Dad had to sleep on the property with a gun to deter the looters.  Other people came out during the day, sat on their cars or pickups drinking beer and watched while my parents looked for our things.  They thought it was amusing, I guess.  There were other people, friends and acquaintances who came to help.

After a week or two, a moving and storage company parked a moving van on our place and we lived in that for 6 months while my parents constructed a concrete block building which was designed as a garage big enough to fit two cars with some extra space on one side and with a rectangular room in front.  The front room had a bathroom, a very small kitchen, a bar-type table for us to eat at and an area that was our living room.  They didn’t have enough money to build a real house, so the plan was to live in the garage for awhile and then build a house next to it.  We lived in that small space for five years.

I was 5 and 1/2 when the storm hit, but I have a huge number of memories from before the tornado.  I guess the farm was a wondrous place for a kid, which is why I remember so much from before.  I know a lot of people who say they can’t remember anything before age 6 or even 7. That just seems weird to me.

The block house a bit later