by Mark Tabb
“OK,” Jan said. As soon as she reached him, she knew Charles Horan was in trouble. Blood gushed from a gash in his head. Lifting his shirt, she saw severe blunt force trauma injuries across his chest. “I’ve got to get the ambulance. Stay here. I’ll send help,” she said.
Todd and Ed stayed with Chuck as Jan took off running toward the fire station. She hoped the station would still be there when she arrived. As soon as she was gone, Todd looked at his father. “How many others do you think are hurt like this?” he asked.
Ed looked around at what remained of the south side of Parkersburg. It looked like old black-and-white photos of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb had decimated the city, albeit on a much, much smaller scale. He let out a long sigh. “I’m afraid to even guess,” he said.
Rain began to fall again. The rainstorm the farmers predicted had finally arrived.
*For raw footage of the tornado striking Parkersburg, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAPnbzHvIKs&feature=fvsr.
†For on-the-scene news coverage of the aftermath of the tornado, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=lueETqSXcKo&feature=fvw.
CHAPTER 2
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Never forget where you came from.
ED THOMAS
ED DIDN’T GROW UP IN PARKERSBURG, BUT YOU COULDN’T tell it from talking to him. He spoke of the small town of 1,900 in northeast Iowa as second only to the garden of Eden itself. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought he was president of the local Chamber of Commerce rather than the high school football coach. Everywhere he went Ed sang Parkersburg’s praises. “Someday,” he often said, “the word is going to get out about this place.” He never counted on the word getting out quite like this.
A team of storm chasers working with Des Moines television station KCCI pulled into town at 5:03 p.m., less than five minutes after the tornado moved on to the east. They came in on Highway 57, which passes just to the north of the Thomas home. Immediately, the storm chasers called into their contact at the station. “We have pretty much impassable roads out here, massive damage, houses completely obliterated, leaking gas here,” one member of the team said. “I need you to do something for public safety. We have huge gas leaks. I need to have emergency management send everybody they have here. Firefighters. State police. Everyone. We’re talking massive destruction. Large gas leaks. We have possible lots of fatalities. Cars flipped. This is not good.” The storm chasers tried to jump into rescue mode, but the air reeked of natural gas, forcing them out of town in fear of sparking a fire.*
KCCI Channel 8 immediately broadcast their report from Parkersburg. Other television and radio stations across the state repeated it. Wire services all over the country soon picked up the story. Details were still sketchy, but one thing seemed clear: some, if not all, of Parkersburg had been destroyed.
Five miles straight west of town, Ellie Thomas sat glued to the television. The birthday party she had attended that afternoon came to a screeching halt due to the storms rolling across northeast Iowa. As soon as she heard the initial reports coming out of Parkersburg, she grabbed her cell phone and called her husband, Aaron, Ed and Jan’s oldest son.
“Aaron, where are you right now?” Ellie asked.
“I’m still in Dysart at the graduation party. Why? Is the birthday party at your brother’s house over already?”
“Haven’t you heard the news?” Ellie’s voice broke. Try as she might to project a brave front to her husband, her emotions broke through. “A tornado just hit Parkersburg. They say it’s real bad.”
“OK, that just means some farmer’s barn out in the country blew away. Happens every spring. It’s not a big deal,” Aaron said. Ellie calls Aaron E.J., as in Ed Junior, because he looks and acts so much like his father. Yet, in times of crisis, his mother comes out in him—calm, practical, to the point. That’s why news of a tornado hitting his hometown didn’t throw him into a panic. Growing up in Iowa, he had lived through many a storm. A downed barn or a lost mobile home constituted a weather catastrophe in Parkersburg. To Aaron, it wasn’t anything to get too worked up over.
“No, you don’t understand. They just came on the news and reported that a large part of town is completely destroyed. Aaron, I can’t get ahold of your folks.” Panic filled Ellie’s voice. “I’m scared. The people on the news said the storm could be an EF5, the worst there is, and it went right over your parents’ house.”
“I’m sure they’re OK,” Aaron said, trying to calm his wife down. His words were as much a prayer as a statement. “Phone service and electricity are probably out. That’s why you can’t reach them. I’ll leave the graduation party right now and drive over and check everything out.”
“Please do. And be careful.”
“Don’t worry. Stay where you are. I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”
“OK,” Ellie said.
Aaron clicked “end” on his cell phone, then turned to his assistant coach, whose son was celebrating his graduation. Like his father, Aaron always wanted to coach, although he preferred basketball to football. He had been a starter on the Division I basketball team at Drake University and then moved right into coaching as a graduate assistant at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota, after graduating from Drake. One year later, he took over as head basketball coach and athletic director at Union High School in La Porte, Iowa. In his four seasons, he had already started establishing the same reputation as a basketball coach that his father had in football.
“I gotta go,” Aaron said to his friend, knowing he had an hour’s drive ahead of him. “A tornado just hit Parkersburg. I’m going to drive over and make sure my parents are all right.”
“Yeah, uh, OK,” his friend said, his mind trying to grasp what he’d just been told. “Let me know what you find out.”
“Sure. Not a problem,” Aaron said as he headed for the door.
Fifty miles away in Parkersburg, Ed tried to wrap his head around what lay around him. Chuck had been transported to the hospital, but Ed knew he probably wouldn’t survive. Ed and Todd had spent what felt like a very long time helping pull neighbors out of basements. Police officers and firefighters converged on the town, but they were badly undermanned in comparison to the level of destruction.
“I’ve gotta get to the school,” Ed said to Todd once all their neighbors were accounted for.
“I’ll go with you,” Todd said. He was nearly as anxious to get to the school as his father was. Growing up, he had spent nearly as much time at A-P as he had at his home, maybe even more. It was the place where he and his father built a special bond. At the age of seven or eight, Todd started out as the ball boy. He and Aaron hung out at practice and ran special errands for their dad. They didn’t just tag along after their father. Ed made them feel like they belonged, as if running out on the field to pick up the kicking tee after the kickoff was one of the most important jobs anyone could have. Todd and Aaron also helped sort through the team equipment with their dad and mark off the lines on the practice field, just the three of them. Whenever Ed mowed the football field, Todd and Aaron took turns riding on the mower with him. When Todd was thirteen, his dad even handed him the keys to the riding mower and said, “Why don’t you mow the field for me today? I think you can handle it.” That was Todd’s coming-of-age moment.
Todd and Aaron also had the unenviable task of helping their dad drag the irrigation pipes from one side of the field to the other — doing so from the time they were just big enough to pick the pipes up. Ed usually rewarded them on hot summer days by letting them run through the sprinklers as they watered the field. However, he always made them take off their shoes first. Todd never knew if his dad did that so they would keep their shoes dry, or to protect the grass on the field. Once he was old enough to think it through, he decided it was the latter. Afterward, Ed took his sons into the teacher’s lounge and bought them a bottle of pop from the soda machine. Todd never forgot how cold that strawberry pop tasted out of a real glass
bottle, or how much fun he had sitting out on the grass, drinking it down, talking and joking with his dad.
The day of the tornado, the three blocks from his house to the high school never seemed longer. Every few steps, Ed and Todd stopped to check on friends and neighbors, and in Parkersburg, everyone was a friend or neighbor to Ed Thomas. In his years as head football coach and history and economics teacher, he had coached or taught at least one member of nearly every family in town. Even with an enrollment that fluctuated between 220 and 250 students from year to year, Ed regularly had 80, 90, even 100 boys come out for football every season. Whenever a local family had a baby boy, Ed sent the parents a certificate that read, “Congratulations! Upon the recommendation of the Aplington-Parkersburg football staff, your newborn son has been officially drafted to become a Falcon football player in the fall of .” Former players who moved away after high school moved back to town after they settled down and had sons of their own. They returned for one simple reason: they wanted Coach Thomas to impact their sons in the same way he had impacted them.
Parkersburg hadn’t always been so crazy about football. Prior to Ed’s arrival, girls’ basketball was the biggest game in town. Boys played football only to get in shape for basketball season. No one expected much out of the football team — not even the players. Every year they finished near the bottom of their conference. Few people in 1975 thought a new coach could change that. After all, at that time Ed Thomas and Parkersburg had one thing in common: both had trouble winning football games. Ed’s first team at Northeast Hamilton High School lost every game they played. The next year he managed to win two but lost seven. His third team was his first to win more than it lost, finishing the year five and four. That also happened to be the year Ed started dating Jan. She never tired of pointing out to him that he never had a winning record until he met her. Even so, his 7 and 20 overall record didn’t elicit great confidence in him as a football coach. Ed, however, never once doubted his abilities.
Twenty boys came out for football in Ed’s first season at Parkersburg High School. Halfway through the first practice, senior captain Dave Becker knew this season would be unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He looked around at the twenty other guys on the team, their heads hanging down, exhausted. Most of them expected Coach Thomas to blow the whistle at any moment and tell them to hit the showers and head home. Practice had already lasted longer than their previous coach’s practices. Then Dave looked over at Ed. “OK, fellas,” Ed yelled out, “get over here and line up. We’ve got a lot of work yet to do. Remember, all the hard work we put in out here on the practice field will pay off on Friday nights.”
A couple of guys near Dave groaned. Not Dave. He had been waiting for a coach who not only wanted to win but believed this group of twenty farm boys could pull it off. “All right, you guys, you heard the coach. Line up,” Dave yelled. The other seniors hit the line first, and the underclassmen followed.
Ed looked over at Dave and gave him a little smile.
“Coach, we’re sick of getting our butts handed to us every game,” Dave said.
“I’ll tell you what, Becker, if you fellas will work hard and work together, I guarantee you that the sky is the limit on what we can accomplish here. We may not be as talented as some of the teams we’re going to play this season, but, by golly, we’re going to beat them by outworking them.”
“I’m with you,” Dave said. “Let’s do this.”
Ed slapped him on the back. “All right, get down in your stance. Fire off the line on the whistle.”
Parkersburg won their first game of the season, followed by another three wins in a row. When they finally lost a game, Ed didn’t yell at the players for their mistakes. In the locker room he told them how proud he was of their effort and asked them one question: “What did you learn from the mistakes we made out there tonight?” The team finished the year with six wins and only three losses. It was Parkersburg’s first winning season in over twenty years. Ed bought shirts for every young man on the team, with “6 – 3” across the front, and the words “A Tradition Is Born” on the back.
Ed didn’t set out to simply change the culture within the team; he set out to change the culture throughout the school and the entire community. Joan Prohaska decided to go out for the cheerleading squad during Ed’s second season, her senior year. She assumed all she had to do was to make it through the tryouts. Then Ed called all the prospective cheerleaders into his classroom for a meeting. “Please have a seat, ladies,” he said. He then passed out a test they had to pass before they were allowed on the sidelines of Ed’s football field — a test of their basic knowledge of the game of football. He didn’t want anyone leading cheers for his team if they didn’t know the difference between a first down and an incomplete pass.
Dave Becker and Joan started dating and later got married after she graduated from high school. They moved away from Parkersburg, but not for long. They moved back to town after starting a family of their own. Dave wanted his children to be around Ed in the hope that some of Coach would rub off on them and influence their lives in the same way he had influenced his. Eventually, all three of their sons played for Ed. During the parents’ meeting at the start of each season, Ed always pointed to Dave and said, “He was the captain of my first team here. We had a pretty good year that year, didn’t we, Dave?” Dave would smile and say something like, “We sure did, Coach, a great year. And this year is going to be even better.” The longer Ed was in Parkersburg, and the more success his teams had, the more pride Dave felt in being the captain of the team that got everything started.
Dave’s response was exactly what Ed hoped to accomplish as a coach. From the start, his goals went beyond the game of football. He set out to create a winning tradition, but he didn’t measure success in wins and losses. “If all I ever teach you is how to block and tackle, then I have failed you as a coach.” Most coaches on all levels say something like this to their teams, but Ed lived it. He cared for his players and students as people, and that did not change after they graduated. Once someone played for him, they were a part of his team for life. On any given day, when he ran into his former players, he immediately greeted them with a hearty, “Boy, it’s good to see you. How’s your family? Tell me what’s going on in your life right now.” These weren’t rhetorical questions. Ed truly wanted to know what was going on in his players’ lives. If things weren’t going well, he stopped what he was doing and talked with them about how they could move forward. That may be why people all over town thought of “Coach” as their best friend.
Now as Ed and Todd walked down the streets of Parkersburg on their way to the high school, his “team” was in the worst crisis he’d ever seen. Hundreds of his friends had lost everything they owned. “This is just unbelievable, pal,” he said to Todd as they walked along. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think something like this could happen here.”
“Yeah, me either,” Todd said. “And to think that I went outside to take a look when the sirens went off instead of going into the basement with Candice. I thought the storm would turn out to be nothing. Now look at this.”
Ed laughed for the first time since the tornado hit. “I tried to do the same thing, but your mother insisted I go down in the basement instead. I guess it’s a good thing she did.”
“Uh, yeah, Dad.”
Aaron made the drive from Dysart to Parkersburg in record time. Once or twice he glanced down at the speedometer in his truck. When he did, he let off the gas pedal just enough to keep his speed under ninety. Even then, police cars flew past him on their way to Parkersburg.
About a mile south of town, Aaron topped a hill on Highway 14 and slammed on his brakes. The road just ahead was closed to everything but emergency traffic. He noticed a gravel road to his left and took off down it. He kept looking north. Off in the distance he saw the Parkersburg water tower, but he could not see anything else. Eventually the gravel road turned north toward town. His truck fishtailed
around the ninety-degree curve as he pressed hard on the gas pedal. He sped north up a road that eventually becomes Johnson Street in Parkersburg. Any other day, Johnson Street would have taken him within a half block of his parents’ house. This wasn’t any other day.
Aaron came up over a rise that gave him his first view of the place he had always taken for granted as home. He slammed on the brakes and threw his truck into park. Tossing the door open, he jumped out and took off toward his parents’ house, or at least where he thought his parents’ house should be. Even though he was sure he was within a block, maybe two, of their house, nothing looked familiar. “Oh, my gosh,” Aaron said, “it’s gone. Everything is gone.”
Somewhere around the spot where he stood was the yard his dad had turned into the family football stadium on Sunday afternoons for a game they called “touchdown” when Aaron was little. The object of the game was simple enough. Ed played quarterback. Aaron and Todd were the receivers. And Jan was the lone defensive back. Aaron and Todd ran pass patterns around Mom while Dad motioned them to go further. If Aaron and Todd could score a touchdown in four downs, they won. Their mother rarely won the game.
Whenever it was too cold or wet to play football in the yard, Ed put a Nerf ball basketball hoop above one door for a full family game of basketball. Aaron teamed with one parent, Todd with the other, and they went at it. Ed and Jan played on their knees. The games lasted all afternoon, or until Mom and Dad were too exhausted to keep going. The living room also doubled as a football field when Ed came home from work. The moment he walked in the door, Aaron and Todd came running up and tried to tackle him. That game ended once they were big enough not only to tackle him but to hurt him in the process. When the boys were very little, Ed ran practice drills with them right before bedtime. Aaron could still remember doing footfire drills in his footie pajamas when he was maybe four years old.
