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

by Bonar Menninger

  So while his heart was still in broadcasting, his mind insisted that he follow a more prudent path. Kurtis sent out his résumé and interviewed with a law firm in Wichita, and they soon offered him a job, assuming he passed the bar. Thus, by early June, Kurtis was spending most of his free time prepping for the bar exam. He was still working at WIBW, but his broadcast days were numbered. On June 8, Kurtis agreed to do the six o’clock news for a fellow broadcaster who wanted to get out of town for vacation a day early.

  At the Weather Bureau office, forecaster P. N. Eland studied the data streaming in from the dawn balloon launch. It was late morning. Eland was in charge for the day; chief meteorologist Richard Garrett had gone to a two-day conference at the Weather Bureau regional office in Kansas City. Eland pored over the readings. It didn’t look good. Although the wind at the surface was out of the south at five knots, the breezes stiffened and changed direction with altitude, swinging first out of the east at 20 knots around 2,000 feet and then, at 6,000 feet, shifting to the west-southwest at a steady 35 knots. Even higher, at 25,000 feet, the jet stream was racing west to east at 55 knots. These countervailing winds aloft, or shear, could set the stage for atmospheric rotation — a primary ingredient in a severe thunderstorm formation — as the day wore on.

  Forecasters at the Severe Local Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City were aware of the reports from the Topeka station and from other offices across Kansas. They also were watching the powerful low-pressure system as it churned ever closer to the warm front crawling north over the eastern part of the state. No getting around it: The air masses in all likelihood would collide by evening and spark another round of severe weather.

  At 11:00 a.m. on June 8, weather Teletype machines in law enforcement offices and newsrooms in Kansas and western Missouri snapped to life, and Severe Weather Watch No. 201 clattered across the wire at the rate of 80 words per minute:

  THE U.S. WEATHER BUREAU HAS ISSUED A TORNADO WATCH FOR PORTIONS OF SOUTH-CENTRAL AND EASTERN KANSAS AND WEST-CENTRAL MISSOURI. THE THREAT OF ONE OR TWO TORNADOES WILL EXIST FROM 2 PM UNTIL 8 PM THIS WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON AND EVENING. SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS WITH LARGE HAIL AND LOCALLY DAMAGING WINDS ALSO ARE FORECAST.

  THE GREATEST THREAT OF TORNADOES AND SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS IS IN AN AREA ALONG AND 60 MILES EITHER SIDE OF A LINE FROM 20 MILES SOUTHWEST OF HUTCHINSON, KANSAS, TO 60 MILES EAST OF KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI.

  PERSONS IN OR CLOSE TO THE TORNADO WATCH AREA ARE ADVISED BY THE WEATHER BUREAU TO BE ON THE WATCH FOR LOCAL WEATHER DEVELOPMENTS AND FOR LATER WEATHER STATEMENTS AND WARNINGS.

  It was odd; it didn’t seem like tornado weather. Typically, tornadoes are ushered in by a particular kind of day. The wind blows out of the south — hard, steady or in fluttering, desultory bursts — the temperature climbs to 80 degrees or more under a milky sky, and the air itself seems to sweat with humidity. Then the atmosphere becomes very still. But today, it had drizzled sporadically all morning, the sky remained overcast and by noon, the temperature was still in the mid-60s. The weather seemed more like September than early June. Nonetheless, Topekans heard the beep-beep-beep-beep on WREN and made a mental note. Most did, at least.

  But Carol Martin was a kid. If she knew about the tornado watch, she didn’t give it a thought. The 16-year-old had other things on her mind. She had just gotten her driver’s license and was enjoying tooling around town in her own car: a baby-blue 1960 Dodge Dart with a white vinyl top and a push-button automatic transmission. She also looked forward to a trip out to Hutchinson, Kansas, on Thursday with Job’s Daughters, a singing group affiliated with the Masons. The group was going to the central Kansas city to participate in a singing competition. One more practice was slated for tonight at the Masonic Temple downtown before the girls hit the road in the morning.

  It would be good to get away.

  Carol was tall and slender, with fine, straight, shoulder-length brown hair and bangs that touched her eyebrows. She had a narrow face and a big, open smile. She seldom removed her tortoise-shell, cat-eyed glasses, and they changed her appearance, as glasses will do. Carol was the only child of Cleve and Hazel Martin. Cleve was a barber at the sprawling Winter Veterans Administration Hospital near 21st Street and Gage Boulevard. The family lived within walking distance of the VA, at the edge of a blue-collar neighborhood adjacent to the grounds of the Kansas Neurological Institute.

  Her father’s people had homesteaded near Topeka before the Civil War and her great-grandfather had fought for the South. When Carol was a one-year-old, the Martins moved in from the country because her mom needed to be committed to the Topeka State Hospital. Hazel was a paranoid schizophrenic; she was not a happy person, and she was hospitalized on and off all through Carol’s growing-up years. But Carol’s dad was patient and kind, and he and Carol worked as a team. They took care of Hazel and the little family managed as best they could.

  Carol, though, could always close her door and close her eyes and escape into her music. She enjoyed the stirring religious hymns she sang with Job’s Daughters. But she loved rock and pop more. She probably listened to Rubber Soul every day that year. It was the Beatles’ sixth album, released in December of ’65, just in time for Christmas. So incredibly vivid: It was filled with light and shadow and a fleeting darkness that raced across the landscape like summer clouds and shined with a melancholy beauty that Carol was convinced could only have come from God.

  And it wasn’t just the Beatles. All the music that summer was amazing. The Rolling Stones’ menacing incantation on the bleakness of life, “Paint It Black,” became the new No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 that Wednesday. The rest of the top 20 had something for everyone:

  2. “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” — Lovin’ Spoonful

  3. “I Am a Rock” — Simon and Garfunkel

  4. “When a Man Loves a Woman” — Percy Sledge

  5. “A Groovy Kind of Love” — The Mindbenders

  6. “Strangers in the Night” — Frank Sinatra

  7. “Monday, Monday” — The Mamas and the Papas

  8. “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” — James Brown

  9. “Green Grass” — Gary Lewis & the Playboys

  10. “Barefootin’” — Robert Parker

  11. “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” — The Chiffons

  12. “Cool Jerk” — The Capitols

  13. “Oh How Happy” — Shades of Blue

  14. “Opus 17 (Don’t You Worry ’Bout Me)” — The Four Seasons

  15. “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” — Bob Dylan

  16. “The More I See You” — Chris Montez

  17. “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” — Dusty Springfield

  18. “Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart” — The Supremes

  19. “Red Rubber Ball” — Cyrkle

  20. “(I’m a) Road Runner” — Junior Walker and the All Stars

  For Beatles fans, the new single, “Paperback Writer,” debuted at No. 28.

  Throughout Topeka that Wednesday, all kinds of people were looking ahead as summer gathered momentum. Jim Ward didn’t like what he saw. The 28-year-old assistant U.S. district attorney was waist-deep in a major case and the trial date was closing in. With his slow drawl and steady gaze, the Topekan seemed more like a farmer or rancher than a lawyer. But his laid-back style belied a sharp and ambitious mind, and the way he’d won the U.S. attorney’s office job said a lot about the young man. Back in 1959, Ward had earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Denver and returned to Topeka to attend law school at Washburn. After graduation, Ward went to work for one of the city’s big firms, Rooney & Rooney, doing divorces, plaintiff work, financial claims and the like.

  Rooney & Rooney was a major player in the Kansas Democratic Party. So when the state chairman asked the senior Mr. Rooney if he knew of any bright young prospects who might want to run for the U.S. House, Ward’s name came up. Finding Democrats willing to take on incumbent Republicans in Kansas was never easy, given the state�
��s hard conservative bent. But Ward gamely accepted the challenge. He ran an earnest and energetic campaign, and, to no one’s surprise, he was soundly defeated. Still, the effort didn’t go unnoticed. In 1964, U.S. Attorney and Kennedy appointee Newell George asked Ward to come to work in the federal prosecutor’s office. The young lawyer jumped at the chance.

  Now, two years into it, Ward was scrambling to assemble a complex and difficult criminal prosecution. The case involved a couple of con men who had allegedly bilked ranchers by promising them expensive, purebred cattle but instead delivering run-of-the-mill crossbreeds. A large number of Kansas cattlemen were caught in the scam and the dollar loss was huge. Ward was on his own pulling the case together. He’d been traveling the state for weeks, interviewing victims and gathering evidence. It was a heavy load for a young, relatively inexperienced attorney, and the clock was ticking. There was much to sort out before trial. So Ward was glad to be off the road on June 8, and he looked forward to forgetting about the case and perhaps shooting some home movies of his seven-year-old son, Greg, at the boy’s little league game that night.

  Like most of the kids around town, teachers also were downshifting with the end of the school year. Peg Griebat Marmet had kicked it into neutral. A few weeks earlier, the 26-year-old had submitted her resignation as girls’ physical education instructor and gymnastics coach at Topeka West High School. Back in ’61, winning the job had been a major coup for the plucky California native. Fresh out of Kansas State University and armed with a degree in physical education, Peg had gambled when she told board of education administrators she wasn’t interested in teaching at the junior-high level. Instead, she wanted to work at Topeka West, the big new city high school scheduled to open that fall. First-year teachers typically started at a junior high school and worked their way up. But the woman slated for the Topeka West job had abruptly left town and a confident Peg stepped into the breach. Thus, at 22, she became one of the 35 original teachers at “West” when the doors opened in the fall of ’61.

  Despite her youth, Peg did have some teaching experience. She’d come to Kansas in 1954, her sophomore year in high school. Her parents ran a grocery store near Lodi, California, but were forced to close it when the state expanded the nearby highway. Rather than try again in the Central Valley, the family returned to her mother’s hometown of Morrill, in extreme northeast Kansas. The Griebats purchased a 42-acre resort called Sun Springs, replete with campsites, picnic areas, a swimming pool, a skating rink and artesian mineral wells. The place did well and provided Peg and her three brothers with an opportunity to teach swimming, become lifeguards and generally help out running the business.

  On the job at Topeka West, Peg’s age — just four years older than the seniors when she started — along with her pretty smile and upbeat personality, made her popular with kids and faculty alike. Her coaching prowess didn’t hurt either. She built a girls’ gymnastics program from scratch and proceeded to coach the team to four straight undefeated seasons.

  But all that was over now. Peg and her husband, Paul, a supervisory meat cutter at Falley’s supermarket, wanted to start a family. Peg was worried that the Topeka school system would frown on a pregnant physical education teacher. So she decided it was time to move on.

  Fortunately, when word got out that she was leaving, the PE department chair at Washburn University made her an offer to teach physical education in the fall, pregnant or not. Peg accepted and was looking forward to a summer off before stepping up to the big leagues, so to speak, in September. As for today, she and her husband planned to do some shopping before she headed out for the evening to a friend’s wedding shower on the city’s southwest side.

  The intermittent sprinkles stopped as the afternoon wore on and the low clouds gradually started to lift. A little after 2:00 p.m., Dave Hathaway stepped outside. He felt the humidity rising and decided it was too hot for Baron. The big German shepherd looked up from the cool concrete slab in the shade of his backyard kennel and wagged his tail. He could stay home.

  Hathaway went inside, put on his pressed blue shirt and badge, strapped on his Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, grabbed his hat and walked out the door to the black-and-white K9 wagon parked in the driveway of his west-side home. Hathaway was 29. He was divorced. He looked like John Glenn. He had the same cocky grin, the same crew cut, the same aura of badass invincibility. He was five feet 10 inches and wiry, and this was his fifth year as a patrolman with the Topeka Police Department. As he drove in for roll call for the 3:00–10:00 p.m. shift, he felt the knot of anticipation that always surfaced about now. He hoped it would be a quiet night.

  But you never really knew. Just the day before, Hathaway and a partner had disarmed a deranged woman. She was ranting and waving a cocked, loaded pistol. When she looked away for a moment, Hathaway grabbed the gun. Problem solved. Nobody hurt. If he was assigned to North Topeka tonight, there was a good chance he’d get called to a bar fight. Once, he’d rolled up on a disturbance at a tavern in North Topeka. There were four Indians inside, drunk and raising hell. Hathaway walked in. The Indians took one look at him and just laughed. So he cracked two of them across the shins with his nightstick. That’s the best place to hit a man with a nightstick: He’ll jump up and down from the pain and won’t have much fight left in him. If you hit him in the head, he’ll likely bleed and just get mean.

  Hathaway’s quick show of force convinced the Indians they needed to come downtown. The thing was, Hathaway only had one set of handcuffs. So he asked all four to get in the car voluntarily. And they did, with the biggest one riding shotgun up front. Hathaway took the men to the station and booked them on disorderly conduct charges. His major reprimanded him the next day for bringing the Indians in by himself. Should have waited for backup, the major said. Should have cuffed them. But most everyone else on the 140-member department thought it was funny.

  Typical Hathaway, they said.

  Hathaway arrived at the old, limestone, two-story stationhouse at 5th and Jackson Street just before 3:00 p.m. and went inside as the sergeant prepared for evening roll call. Topeka P.D. divided the city into a dozen numbered quadrants for patrol purposes. Tonight, Hathaway was assigned to 45, a section of southwest Topeka that consisted of suburban homes, occasional strip malls and a handful of bars. Nothing wrong with that, he thought. Should be a quiet evening. He pulled a cold, eight-ounce bottle of RC Cola from the lobby machine, stepped out into the thick afternoon, climbed into the K9 wagon and headed south for 29th Street.

  A few blocks away, up on Kansas Avenue in the heart of downtown, 48-year-old Mary Hatke was walking north from her husband’s art supply store to make the daily deposit at Merchant’s National Bank. An odd sensation struck her as she walked: The air was so terribly still. Not a bird sang. Not a leaf fluttered. Even the sunlight beginning to filter through the clouds seemed strange. It didn’t look right. Mary made her deposit and met Wilma Gilmore leaving the bank. Wilma and her husband ran Nightingale’s Ladies Ready-to-Wear across the street from the Hatkes’ shop.

  “Isn’t it a strange day?’’ Wilma said as the women walked along the busy avenue.

  “Why, yes. I was just thinking that same thing,” Mary replied. “Much too strange. But you know, at this time of year, you can get most anything in Kansas.”

  The tone of Wilma’s voice changed. “I feel so apprehensive, Mary,” she confided. “It just doesn’t feel natural.”

  Mary smiled and said, “I’m sure we’ll be all right.”

  P. N. Eland didn’t have a degree in meteorology like most of the younger fellows who joined the Weather Bureau after World War II. In fact, he’d been a schoolteacher before going to work for the bureau. But he’d learned from practical experience over many years, and in that way, he was typical of his generation of forecasters. A tall man with gentle eyes and gray hair, Eland was quiet in manner, steady under pressure and unfailing in his attention to detail. Thus, in mid-afternoon, he put in a call to Jean Meinholdt, the dispatcher of the
Volunteer Emergency Services Team (VEST). He advised her that the group’s services probably would be needed later on. VEST was made up of citizens band radio enthusiasts and the unpaid group was an integral piece of Topeka’s severe weather spotter network. If heavy weather threatened, members would take up positions at various vantage points around the city’s perimeter and report their observations to the Weather Bureau office.

  Eland mentally checked another item from his list and stepped into the darkened radar room at the bureau office. Operators Paul Odell and Gordon Brokaw were staring into the circular screen of the WSR-3 radar console. The screen’s green light cast an eerie glow as the men scanned the counties south and west of Topeka for any sign of developing thunderstorms.

  Nothing yet.

  Even in ’66, the bulky WSR-3 radar set was a vintage piece of equipment, originally designed for the Navy. But after World War II, the Weather Bureau acquired surplus units and began deploying them at weather stations across the country. Though primitive by modern standards, the WSR-3 was a vital tool for the severe weather forecasters of its day. Like all radar, the unit fired electromagnetic pulses, or radio waves, in continuous bursts separated by millionths of a second. The pulses traveled at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. If they encountered an object of any density, such as a rain-filled cloud, a portion of the radio waves would bounce back to a receiver antenna. The returning pulses were amplified and the ensuing echo displayed on a cathode-ray tube.