And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado

by Bonar Menninger

  In front of the Nicely place were half a dozen white pines Glenn’s grandfather had planted when he’d built the original family homestead in the late 19th century. Now the pines were mighty giants, 60- to 80-feet tall and three and a half to four feet in diameter at the butt. After the horses flew over, the men watched in astonishment as the massive trees violently corkscrewed in the wind and then shot out of the ground, one after another — “like carrots,’’ the man from Maine said — and soared off to the northeast.

  Not a bough or branch was ever found.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Severe Weather Watch No. 201

  The night of June 7 had been a wild one across Kansas. Severe thunderstorms pounded the state all evening. West of Hays, a five-inch deluge brought flash floods that swamped the creeks and draws. In Emporia, 200 miles to the east, 100-mile-an-hour, straight-line winds ripped across the airport just before midnight and hail piled up an inch deep. Golf ball–size hail was reported in Great Bend. And funnel clouds danced in the sky from Sharon Springs, near the Colorado line, all the way to Lebo, 300 miles to the east. But only a few touched down and no damage was reported.

  The culprit behind the severe weather outbreak that struck during the overnight hours of June 7–8, 1966, was a powerful low-pressure system churning northeast out of the Oklahoma panhandle. Like a hungry bear, the low was devouring warm, moist air for hundreds of miles around, pulling the fuel toward its maw in a massive, counterclockwise spiral. As the warm air slipped into the area of low pressure, it twisted upward into the cold, dry currents aloft. The vapor condensed and the storms exploded.

  And it wasn’t over yet. The jet stream was racing northeast at 50 miles an hour and dragging the low beneath it. On the stream’s present course, the upper-level winds would carry the low’s center — the most potent part of the storm — over Dodge City and eventually into northeast Kansas. At 2:40 a.m. on June 8, the Severe Local Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City issued a brief statement indicating that severe thunderstorms likely would redevelop across Kansas by afternoon, once the sun reheated and recharged the atmosphere.

  So it would be a stormy Wednesday. But what worried forecasters most was the tongue of hot, saturated air bottled up behind a warm front in southeast Kansas. The air was tropical, pushing up from the Gulf of Mexico. With a dew point of 72 degrees (the temperature at which vapor will condense to liquid), it nearly dripped with moisture. If the low continued moving east and the warm front kept creeping north, the ensuing collision could make the storms of the night before look tame by comparison.

  In Topeka, the rain stopped around 3:00 a.m., although a few showers lingered as dawn slipped in under a heavy blanket of fog. At the city’s U.S. Weather Bureau office, the day shift was beginning its morning routine. The office was located in a single-story building adjacent to the main terminal at Topeka’s Billard Municipal Airport. The airport itself was a modest affair with three runways and a few commercial flights a day. It sat at the city’s far northeastern corner, on bottomland close to the river, a few miles from downtown. Next to the airport were the working-class homes of the Oakland district.

  Two weather technicians walked briskly toward a cinder-block building just west of the Weather Bureau office. They rolled up a tall, overhead door and entered a garagelike room, then attached a hose from a hydrogen tank to a large, gold-colored, latex balloon. The regulator was opened, the gas hissed and the balloon expanded to 10 feet in diameter. The men then tied the balloon off and attached a white metal container about the size of a large shoebox. The box held a battery, a small, cone-shaped antenna and an expendable instrument pack. The device was called a radiosonde. It would record and transmit a continuous stream of data on air pressure, temperature, humidity and wind speed as the balloon lifted into the sky.

  These unmanned reconnaissance flights, known as upper air soundings, were a vital tool in providing forecasters with a real-time look at what was happening in the atmosphere. The soundings, or “runs,” as the forecasters called them, were launched twice a day, every day, at 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., from nearly 100 Weather Bureau offices nationwide. Once the balloon was aloft, a receiver in the office would pull down the radiosonde’s signals and spit the information out on a paper feed. Meteorologists would tear the paper off and then, wielding slide rules the way carpenters swing hammers, they’d construct a data set. The information was transmitted to the regional office in Kansas City and also plotted on a large table chart nearby.

  It took the balloons just under two hours to rise to the edge of space, ascending at a rate of about 1,000 feet per minute. Above 100,000 feet, the balloons — now swollen in the thin air to 10 times their launch size — would burst, and the radiosondes would gently descend back to Earth on small, brightly colored red or yellow parachutes, the better to warn aircraft. The boxes were labeled with instructions to return them to the Weather Bureau office if found but few ever were.

  Today’s sounding would help meteorologists get a handle on the approaching weather. The two technicians flipped a switch on the data transmitter, synchronized the receiver and started a 60-second timer. The timer buzzed and, with a jerk, the balloon shot free and rose like a miniature moon against the metallic dawn.

  Across Topeka on that gloomy Wednesday morning, thousands of people made ready for the new day. They showered and shaved, gulped coffee and scanned the headlines. They also walked, unwittingly, along the threshold of a great divide, moving through that fleeting moment between all that was and all that will be. Behind them was the past: familiar and comforting and probably not a lot different, they assumed, from what lay ahead. But fate can be a capricious thing. In truth, the lives of many were about to swerve sharply and inexorably down a different path. This day would mark the change. The transition for some would be difficult but manageable. For others, the scars — physical, emotional and financial — would linger for years. Still others would not survive the turn.

  Human beings, of course, have always faced events that promised to alter them profoundly and, usually, not for the better: the looming prospect of combat. A long and difficult journey through a strange land. A debilitating illness, perhaps. But at least with those kinds of experiences, the human mind has a little time to adjust, to prepare, to make the necessary arrangements. What was different here was that so many did not know — could never have known — that the world they’d grown accustomed to was about to change forever, literally in the blink of an eye. For men and women, young and old, rich and poor, memories of all that preceded June 8 soon would be locked behind a barrier of new recollections: images, sounds and emotions shot through with unimaginable violence and terror.

  Rick Douglass greeted the day with the confidence of a young man on his way up. Just 19 years old, Douglass already was one of Topeka’s best-known citizens. You couldn’t miss him in a crowd, with his helmet of wiry black hair, oddly serious features set against a wide, cherub face and a bowling pin body that tipped the scales at 270 pounds. It was his voice, though, that people knew. In the summer of ’66, Douglass was one of Topeka’s top disc jockeys. The voice was authoritative: a rich, deep tenor with just the right timbre for radio. And his elocution was precise. Douglass had worked hard to wring out any Kansas drawl or twang.

  He was a heavy man, sure. But he always dressed exceedingly well. Jackets, pressed shirts, sharp ties and crisp trousers were the order of the day. Sometimes, with one of his pipes, he’d affect the thoughtful, pensive pose of an intellectual. But mostly, he was affable and down-to-earth. And always supremely self-confident. He seemed a lot older than 19. And in many ways, he was, for he’d been performing publicly since boyhood, and he had worked in radio since junior high. These days, Douglass was the afternoon drive-time voice of WREN 1250 AM, one of Topeka’s top radio stations.

  It had been a swift rise for the Topeka native. Douglass’s father died before Rick was born, and the boy was raised by his mother, Lucille, and his maternal grandmother. The latter, Mrs. Byron Will
cuts, was known locally as the Horseradish Queen due to the family business she’d taken over after her husband died. Byron Willcuts’ Horseradish Sauce XXXX was sold at finer grocery establishments throughout the Midwest. Rick’s mom was the company’s bookkeeper but effectively ran the operation. The business did well.

  As an only child, Rick enjoyed the undivided attention of his mother and grandmother. He was a precocious kid. In the early ’50s, he put together a mini-vaudeville act. His mom would play some of the more well-known comedy monologues of the day on a record player, and the little guy would pantomime the acts, including Andy Griffith’s famous “What It Was, Was Football,” and Charlie Weaver’s “A Letter from Mama.” He had costumes for each character and would put on his show at school assemblies, church groups and the women’s club downtown.

  By junior high, Douglass’s love of performance had sparked an interest in radio. In the ninth grade, he landed a part-time job at K-TOP, another local AM station. He started out ripping and sorting news stories as they rolled off the AP wire. But before long, he’d actually snagged his own show. Granted, it was on the virtually unused FM portion of the radio spectrum. Few people knew about FM and fewer still had receivers to pick it up. Nonetheless, every weekday evening, from 5:30 until 7:00 p.m., the Topeka High School sophomore hosted “Dinner Date with Rick,’’ a mix of news, sports and dinner music.

  Douglass learned quickly. So when a Sunday morning slot opened on the AM side, he stepped right into it. K-TOP was run by an old-time radio guy named Bailey Axton. His son, Charlie, had recently returned from the service, and he’d learned a thing or two out in the world. He urged his dad to lose the hymns and elevator music and adopt the new Top 40, rock-and-roll format. It was a can’t-miss deal. The old man mulled it over and figured what the hell — why not?

  K-TOP soon was the most popular station in Topeka and Rick “Fat Daddy” Douglass was the hippest DJ in town. He had his own beatnik shtick, kind of a Wolfman Jack–type act. He played Elvis and the Beach Boys and Little Richard and Chuck Berry. His popularity soared, and Axton quickly moved him to the 7:00–10:00 p.m. slot, Monday through Friday. The evening hours didn’t help Rick’s grades, but he couldn’t have cared less. Old Axton worried sometimes, though, that the station might get in trouble for employing a kid under the age of 18 full-time. Consequently, he’d ask Rick to make jokes on the air about his wife and kids, which, of course, he didn’t have, and Douglass often wore a fedora in public to shield his baby face.

  Douglass graduated in May of 1964 and turned 18 that August. Throughout ’64, the music of the Beatles and the other bands of the British Invasion poured into Kansas. Overnight, it seemed as if the air itself had changed. To kids, anyway, the world was electric and alive in a way it had never been before. And Rick was right in the middle of it. He spun the records. He was popular with the girls. He was making some money. Not bad for a first job out of school. And maybe it could have gone on that way forever, except that in March of ’65, old Axton decided he’d had enough. He sold K-TOP to a company from western Kansas. The new owners wanted to switch to an adult-oriented format and they didn’t think “Fat Daddy” fit the bill. So just like that, it was over.

  But Douglass didn’t miss a step. After a brief stint at a Kansas City station, Douglass landed a job with WREN in Topeka. The station was owned by the venerable Alf Landon, a former governor and the 1936 Republican presidential candidate. For many older residents, WREN was the voice of Topeka: the go-to source for news, weather, sports and entertainment. Paul Harvey’s commentary was on every weekday. The station played a lot of Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Tony Bennett. Five thousand watts of nighttime power pushed the signal 450 miles west, all the way into eastern Colorado. Rick’s mom was a big WREN fan and was thrilled her son was going to work for such a prestigious local institution. The station’s management, for their part, hyped Douglass’s return to the Topeka airwaves just about every way they could. For a week solid, advertisements in the local newspaper proclaimed: “Fat Daddy is making the big move to WREN!”

  Douglass started as the station’s morning man in the summer of ’65, then moved to the afternoon slot a couple of months later. He soon settled into the job and picked up the additional duties of music director. In that role, he reinvigorated the station’s moribund playlists with new, if safe, artists like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and Wayne Newton. WREN’s ratings climbed.

  Because WREN prided itself on spot news coverage, Douglass often found himself in the field, reporting on car wrecks, fires, shootings and robberies. If severe weather threatened, WREN disc jockeys, engineers and news directors alike deployed to various vantage points around the city to watch and report on the dangerous skies. More often than not, Douglass would be behind the wheel of the WREN-mobile, a cherry red 1962 Chevy II wagon with WREN-Mobile splashed in big white letters on the side. Bristling with two-way radio antennas and sporting a tall, red emergency light on the roof, the little family car looked like a circus wagon trundling down the street. But it was a reassuring sight for many to see the WREN-mobile motoring into the teeth of an oncoming storm.

  When it came to severe weather, WREN did something else that earned the respect and appreciation of listeners. An engineer had come up with a novel idea for providing a reliable warning if nasty weather threatened. He’d taken the puck off of an old turntable and mounted it on a motor, then put a little notch in the puck and added a tone generator. The puck had a two-minute rotation, so with every complete turn, the tone generator was hit and a shrill beep-beep-beep-beep produced. Every time a tornado or severe thunderstorm watch was issued, the device would be activated and the beeps would go out every two minutes over the top of whatever was being broadcast, be it a baseball game, music, news or commentary. The beeps were remarkably effective at raising the public’s awareness about the risk of severe weather.

  On June 8, Douglass planned to head into the station early to sort through the newly arrived records and update the playlists before starting his 3:00–7:00 p.m. stint at the microphone.

  There was another young man in Topeka on that Wednesday who likewise was preparing for an evening broadcast. Like Rick Douglass, Bill Kurtis started in radio at a young age, working as a part-time announcer at an AM station while attending junior college in southeast Kansas. Like Douglass, Kurtis had a deep, stentorian voice that seemed genetically engineered for broadcasting. But rather than sticking with radio, Kurtis had followed the television path. He’d been pulled toward the profession by the dramatic reporting network newsmen had done across the South during the civil rights movement in the ’50s and early ’60s. Kurtis was convinced that the networks’ stories had played a decisive role in forcing America to confront the racism at its core. He wanted to be a part of a big story like that. His convictions about television’s power were confirmed during the historic four days of round-the-clock coverage that had followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite was one of his heroes.

  Fortunately for Kurtis, he had not only the voice for television but also the looks. He was all-American, frat-boy handsome, with a broad forehead, a cut jaw, large, dark eyes and a ready-for-TV smile. He had the build of a quarterback, which he was in high school. Born Bill Kuretich, in Pensacola, Florida, he was the son of Kansans: His mother, Wilma Horton, was from Independence in southeast Kansas. His father, William, was a Marine Corps brigadier general who’d fought on Okinawa. He was of Croatian decent. The family had moved around quite a bit before Bill’s father retired in 1954 to Independence, where young Bill attended junior high and high school.

  Kurtis earned a degree in journalism from the University of Kansas in 1963, and three years later — after a hitch in the Marine Corps reserve and a stint as a weatherman — he’d been promoted to part-time news anchor for WIBW Channel 13, Topeka’s only TV station. He was 25 years old.

  Yet even with the success he’d enjoyed and the passion he had for broadcasting, Kurti
s was under no illusions about his long-term career prospects. The big television markets — New York, Chicago and L.A. — were the real launchpads for network jobs, and they might as well have been on the moon to a kid from southeast Kansas. Being the cautious and practical fellow that he was, Kurtis consequently hedged his bets when he began his broadcast career by enrolling in the Washburn University School of Law. Now, three years later, with graduation upon him, the decision that would shape the rest of his working life was front and center: Would it be TV or the law?

  He chewed on the dilemma for months. There was his family to think about. Kurtis had married his high school sweetheart, Helen Scott, in 1963, and the couple’s first child, Mary Kristin, was six months old in June of ’66. Building a good life required money and you could make a lot of it as an attorney. Nor was Kurtis bereft of talent when it came to the law. At Washburn, he’d gotten involved in moot court, a competition that simulated trials and appellate work, and he’d been named outstanding advocate after one event at Washington University in St. Louis.