"The Indians Were Wrong"

You think the tornadoes that recently hit the Midwest were a Big Deal?  You know, the one that hit Stillwell, Oklahoma a day ago (by the way, I spent a month there one night!)?  Well, Pilgrim, I used to live in Kansas.  Let me tell you a harrowing tale from my storied past. 

I moved there from my home state of Missouri following my return from soldiering and saving the planet from the horrors of communism.  And finally finishing up college and landing my first real, honest-to-goodness, career-type job as a pharmaceutical manufacturer's representative for Pfizer, Inc.

My starter wife and I were dirt poor, so we scraped together our shekels and moved into a trailer.  A nice 12' x 60' trailer, it was, replete with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and not much of anything else.  

We decided to splurge.  We picked the very best place in Salina, our new home town, to park our new metal box.  It was called the "Sundowner East Mobile Home Park."  Classy, huh?  It was clean and new and regally perched upon top of what they euphemistically called a "hill," and we would call a bump (damn few hills in KS!).  

There were about 47 trailers at the park, as I recall, and they were all situated in a circle around the clubhouse and pool area.  You entered through a gate and then followed the driveway around the circumference, with trailers on both sides, and on back to the gate.  It was a nice place.

And I emphasize, "was."

It was the evening of September 25, 1973.  The weather reports were usually pretty nasty around that time of year, being deep into tornado season, so the forecast of tornadic weather wasn't alarming; we lived through it daily.  In fact, everyone in this part of America lives through it daily, as this area is called "tornado alley."  It stretches from New Mexico Northeast through West Texas, and Oklahoma, and Missouri, and Iowa, and Illinois, and up into the Great Lakes region.  And blows like hell all summer long.

In fact, Kansas is so flat, they don't even report the wind speed until it reaches over 25 miles per hour.

Anyway, being quite familiar with tornadoes and their great power to rearrange things, my wife and I heard the sirens announce that a Big One was on the way and quickly joined our neighbors in the storm shelter at the park.  Scary stuff...

The storm shelter was a big basement dug under the clubhouse.  There were about 80 of us there, as I recall.  None of us were too concerned, as this was a part of our normal mid-late summer routine.  Tornado watch?  Go to the shelter.  No big deal.  We busied ourselves with small talk and nervous laughter and jokes and several bottles of beer and wine to keep lubricated.  And then it hit...

Now, I've lived through many tornadoes.  Some peripherally, some directly.  Actually, I was chased by one while driving along I-70 one day.  It's a part of life there.  But this one was nothing like the ones that preceded it.  It was HUGE!  It was later adjudged to be an F-4, almost the biggest and nastiest possible, which means wind speeds of 207 to 260 mph.  

It hit about sundown and rocked the clubhouse for the better part of an hour.  It was loud, like a freight train is loud.  The entire building shook.  And the wind was working its way around through the door seals, making strange, ghostly whispers among the cacophonous tumult.  There for a time it seemed the clubhouse would simply lift off its foundation and spill us into the lap of this giant storm.  

Put simply, we were all terrified!

Within a short time the noise stopped.  It became eerily quiet.  The men among us decided to investigate.  We tried to open the door to the clubhouse storm shelter without success; it was jammed.  We didn't know why until the next morning.  It seems the tornado had picked up a new Ford F-150 red pickup truck and forcibly stuffed it into the entrance way of our storm shelter.  Stuffed!  They actually had to bring in a Caterpillar tractor to drag it out so we could be rescued.  

We, the residents, finally emerged about 10:30 the next morning, more than 19 hours later.  It was pure and total destruction; 44 of the 47 trailers which had been there the night before were now gone.  Gone!  It appeared that the tornado had entered through the gate and circled around the park, slowly destroying each trailer in succession, one at a time, as it progressed.  One by one, it picked trailers up, twisted them in the air like used tissue paper, dumped them of their contents, and smashed them back on the ground.  

One trailer I inspected was completely cleaned of its walls and doors and windows; nothing was left but a toilet - no seat.  That, and about 720 sq. ft. of light green linoleum...

Oh yeah, my trailer had disappeared as well.  Along with my car.  Both were totalled.  So I joined in with the other residents and the local Boy Scout troop and began walking in the tornadoes path, side-by-side, Northeast, picking up eyeglasses and shoes and money and anything else that hadn't been nailed down.  

We found a life insurance policy wedged securely about 10' up and under the bark of one of the few trees still standing.   

I quit after about an hour, having been notified by my company to bring my extra drug samples to the hospital in Clay Center, KS, a small town just up north.  We heard the hospital, one of my client facilities, had been damaged, and I was sent to help in anyway I could...

I filled my trunk with drug samples and hastily made my way to Clay Center, dodging downed trees and power lines as I proceeded.  Since it was on my route, I was very familiar with the town and the hospital and the people.  Upon arrival, the very first thing I noticed was the sign over the car wash I had seen so many times before.  It was one of those gray concrete block, six-bay car washes where you put in a quarter and use the wand to spray down your car.  Above it was a sign in foot-square plastic letters in an aluminum frame that had previously proclaimed "U Wash It - 25 Cents."  

Now, after suffering through the tornado, the front page of the next morning's local paper, read: 

            "U    sh  It - 25 Cents"  

Clay Center was no more.  This quaint old city was known for its 100 foot-tall oak trees which lined Main Street.  They were gone; mowed down to ground level as if cut by a giant circular saw.  Many of the buildings were destroyed, and the hospital was severely damaged.  My drug samples, and those of my other colleagues in the business, truly helped this community and its people survive during the following days.

It turns out this was an E-4 tornado, meaning the next to the worst kind of these boys you can have.  The funnel was reported to be more than 300 yards wide and left tracks more than 150 miles long!  It started, they say, around Lindsborg, KS, and travelled through to Salina, on to Clay Center, and up to Beatrice, Nebraska.  It did an estimated $6,000,000 in damage, and that's in 1973 dollars.  It killed one and wounded 47.  It was a bad, bad storm.  It is still considered the very worst storm to ever hit that part of the country.  

Shortly after this experience I made plans to pick up and beat feet from this neck of the woods and make my way to California.  I'd heard California was a place noted for not having any weather at all, and that's what I needed at that time.  No. Weather. At. All.   

Oh yeah, as a part of their rebuilding process, the good citizens of what was left of Clay Center soon put out a pamphlet for their visitors.  It seems the ancient American Indians came up with the notion way back when that a tornado would not cross the confluence of two bodies of water.  That's why you'll find so many towns and cities in the Midwest situated to the Northeast of two rivers or streams or lakes.  In fact, my home town, Chillicothe, Missouri, and the three other "Chillicothe's" in America, were given that name by the Iroquois Indians.  It means, "Fork in the River."  They thought they'd be protected.  

The name of Clay Centers pamphlet was, by the way,

       "The Indians Were Wrong."