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

by Bonar Menninger

  But there was no more room for the Indians. The Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa and Arapaho fought a hit-and-run war to defend their dwindling hunting grounds on the plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado. In fast-growing eastern Kansas, the original inhabitants, the Kansa, were squeezed nearly into the dust. They’d already been forced off a 2-million-acre reservation set aside for them in 1825 and been relocated to a 20-square-mile reserve near Council Grove along the old Santa Fe Trail. But by 1869, the railroad was coming across reservation land and illegal squatters were streaming in, breaking the virgin prairie, cutting down timber and bringing in livestock. Although the Indians protested, nothing was done. Finally, in 1872, the U.S. secretary of the interior came to Council Grove to inform the Kansa that they must relocate yet again, this time to a new reservation in modern-day Oklahoma. The Indians opposed the move. But short of a suicidal war, they could do nothing to prevent it. And so, after a final, government-approved buffalo hunt in western Kansas, 600 remaining Kansa made the trek south to Indian Territory in June of 1873.83

  The eastern nations fared no better. Squatters, speculators, town promoters and railroads tore at their lands like wolves ripping the flanks of a buffalo. The pressure became too great. By 1873, the government had dismantled virtually all the reservations that had been established in Kansas following the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and moved the eastern tribes again, this time to Oklahoma Territory.84 A small group of Potawatomis refused to go, however, and somehow managed to hang onto a portion of their reservation north of Topeka.

  A Kansa chief, Al-le-ga-wa-ho, undoubtedly spoke for thousands when he told a federal official, “You whites treat us Kansa like a flock of turkeys; you chase us to one stream, then you chase us to another stream — soon you will chase us over the mountains and into the ocean . . .”85

  The West couldn’t be wild much longer. Topeka was booming. The city’s population had reached 15,500 by 1880. An iron bridge was built across the Kansas River. Pennsylvanian Cyrus K. Holliday, the leader of the nine pioneers who had founded the town back in the winter of 1854, went on to establish a new railroad company and the first tracks were laid in 1868. By the 1880s, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway was thriving. As track gangs pushed southwest to California, the fortunes of Topeka and the railroad became inexorably linked.

  So rapid was Topeka’s growth and so vibrant its commercial activity that the city for a time became known nationally as “the Boston of the West.”86 Industry prospered, and residential neighborhoods spread south and west from the plateau above the river, slowly filling in the gentle, rolling watershed of the Shunganunga Creek. By 1889, the city boasted 42 miles of electric trolley rails.87 Construction on the state capitol, which had begun 37 years earlier, was finally finished in 1903. The massive limestone building towered over downtown, its stern, copper-clad dome reaching 304 feet into the blue Kansas sky. Nine men died putting the building up.

  The new state had a motto: Ad Astra Per Aspera, or “To the Stars Through Difficulties.” The slogan captured the troubles that habitually afflicted Kansas as well as the inhabitants’ stoic determination to ride them out. In those early days, it almost seemed as if Kansas had become some kind of diabolical laboratory designed to test how much adversity human beings could stand. Along with the bloodshed and anarchy of the war, Mother Nature frequently delivered knockout blows: Drought, flood, blizzard, prairie fire, hail and wind all were regular events. In the 1870s, swarms of grasshoppers swept in from the west and raced down the Kansas River valley, obscuring the sun for hours and stripping every tree, plant and crop in sight.

  Tornadoes also made their presence felt. A tornado struck Tennesseetown, the ex-slave community, in the spring of 1897, and another hit just north of the city in the community of Elmont in 1917, killing nine people and causing extensive damage. The city itself, however, was spared any direct hits. An article in the Topeka Daily State Journal on May 20, 1922, explained the reason. The headline read: “Tornadoes Are Unknown in Topeka and Vicinity Due to Bends in River.”

  According to the story, town father Cyrus Holliday had studied meteorology in college in Pennsylvania and had made a point to learn as much as he could about storms and “wind formations.” Upon scouting out the location for the new town, Holliday “carefully decided that owing to certain bends in the river, the slope of the valley, and the height and location of the surrounding hills, it would be impossible for a tornado to touch the site.”

  Holliday’s theory was, of course, sheer nonsense. A tornado’s formation and trajectory are unaffected by geographic features, be they hills, valleys or even “bends in the river.” But coming at a time when tornado forecasting was officially banned by the Weather Bureau, the article undoubtedly gave comfort to many.

  Topeka continued to grow with the new century. War came in Europe, Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression settled in. A few Topekans gained notoriety in those years: Charles Curtis, a mixed-blood Kansa Indian, became a U.S. senator and eventually vice president under Herbert Hoover. Several years later, in 1936, Kansas governor Alfred M. Landon became the Republican presidential nominee. Running against Roosevelt, he was crushed in the general election and won only Maine and Vermont.

  With the coming of World War II, Topeka gained an institution that would help shape the city’s character and fuel its economy for the next 35 years. Less than a month after Pearl Harbor, the Army began building an airfield on farmland three miles south of the city. By late ’42, aircrews were arriving in Topeka to take possession of B-17s and B-24s fresh off assembly lines in Wichita and Omaha. The airmen would undergo 30 days’ transition training at the base before deploying to Europe and the Pacific. By early 1945, new B-29s and their crews also were converging at the airfield before flying to the Pacific. One of the first aircraft commanders to receive his sleek, silver Superfortress was Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. Tibbets would make history with the “Enola Gay” by dropping the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.88

  The Strategic Air Command (SAC), the Air Force unit charged with America’s bomber- and ballistic-missile-based nuclear defense, took control of the airfield in 1948. The facility was renamed Forbes Air Force Base in honor of Maj. Daniel H. Forbes, a Topeka test pilot killed while test-flying the XB-49 Flying Wing bomber near Muroc Dry Lake, California, in June of that year.89 By 1961, the height of the Cold War, Forbes was home to B-47 nuclear bombers and was the second-largest SAC base in the country behind Westover AFB in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. Nearly 8,000 officers, airmen and employees were assigned to the facility. The total base population, including dependents, was 21,000, and annual payroll reached $20 million.90 Along with a vast number of aircraft, Forbes also supported nine Atlas E intercontinental nuclear missiles dispersed in hardened silos in the countryside around northeast Kansas.91

  One of the airmen who came to Topeka courtesy of the U.S. Air Force was a radar specialist named Tom Noack. The bantam-weight Noack, a native of Antioch, California, was of Italian and German stock and had curly dark hair and a friendly smile. He arrived at Forbes in ’56 and soon after, met a fiery, red-headed, local Scotch-Irish girl, Connie Lee McCall, at Charlie Hall’s dance hall in North Topeka. The two were married in May of 1958 and Noack was discharged that fall. He entered the electrical workers’ apprentice program and was hired on by an electrical contracting company owned by Connie’s dad. There was no shortage of work for the building trades in Topeka. Housing was scarce for returning servicemen and their families. New subdivisions were springing up along the expanding fringe of the city.

  Growth was particularly strong in southwest Topeka. In October 1960, a bypass for through traffic on busy I-70, known as I-470, was opened along Topeka’s southern flank. As it happened, the four-lane passed directly below Burnett’s Mound. Homes quickly filled in around the highway, and Noack found himself wiring houses in the new County Fair Estates subdivision, just north of the interstate. The neighborhood’s three-bedroom ranches — painted in
soft pastels of blue, yellow, green and brown — were nothing fancy: Most were on slabs, some were bi-levels with walkout basements and only a few had full basements. But they were brand-new, attractive and cheap. Tom and Connie had a son by now, and they liked what they saw, paying $14,500 for a ranch on a quiet cul-de-sac. The house, on Southwest Twilight Drive, was near the middle of the subdivision and a long touchdown throw from the interstate.

  Another construction project got under way nearby that year. One early summer day, June 7 to be exact, a startling sight appeared on the shoulder of Burnett’s Mound. Bulldozers, front-end loaders and dump trucks were busily excavating an enormous section of shale and rock from the eastern side of the mound. The city had its needs: To ensure sufficient water supply and pressure for new homes, businesses and motels in the area, the water department had decided to take advantage of the mound’s height to construct a 5-million-gallon water storage tank on the hill.

  Approximately 35,000 cubic yards of dirt were removed to grade a site for the reservoir. In the process, the symmetrical, cone-shaped appearance of the ancient mound was irrevocably destroyed. That Indians supposedly were buried on the mound was well known locally, and officials took pains to assure Topekans that no bones, human or otherwise, had been found during excavation. Even so, rumors swirled that human remains had in fact been recovered but that the city had hushed it up to quell controversy.

  The water tank itself was designed by a Topeka engineering firm, Servis, Van Doren & Hazard. It was a low, circular affair — 184 feet in diameter and about 25 feet tall — and assembled from reinforced steel plates. When work on the reservoir was finished in the spring of ’61, the tank was not exactly an aesthetic marvel, despite a finish coat of light blue paint. Vaguely resembling a ribbed hockey puck, the squat, brooding giant frowned down on the city like a cold and indifferent monument to progress.

  Aesthetic issues, of course, were not a primary concern for city officials. The tank served an important purpose by ensuring adequate fire protection for the growing subdivisions in the southwest part of town. Even so, the reservoir didn’t sit well with many Topekans. Tom Noack, for one, didn’t like the idea of anything being built on Burnett’s Mound. Though a newcomer to Topeka, he was aware of the legend surrounding the mound, about how Indians were supposedly buried there and how the hill would protect the city from tornadoes, as long as it was not disturbed. Noack had no special affinity for Native Americans. But it seemed disrespectful to erect the mammoth tank on sacred ground. In the back of his mind, Noack wondered if the city wasn’t tempting fate.

  He was not alone. Ted Mize grew up in Topeka and was in the construction business with his father. He lived far from Burnett’s Mound at the city’s eastern edge, along 6th Street or Highway 40, which was the old Oregon Trail. Mize had heard the legend of the mound since he was a boy. After the tank went up, he said, there was considerable talk among locals about the wisdom of the project.

  “People made comments. There were a lot of nervous jokes about how the powers that be had fouled up, that they’d violated the mound and that we were in for it now,’’ he said. Like Noack, Mize didn’t think it was right to build on the hill. “It was sacred, like a cemetery,” he said. “We weren’t supposed to bother the mound.’’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Guardian

  Despite the misgivings of some about the wisdom of erecting a massive steel reservoir on Burnett’s Mound, most Topekans didn’t give the city’s austere new landmark a second thought. For many, the tank’s presence did nothing to diminish the belief — or at least the hope — that the mound would protect Topeka from tornadoes. This conviction was more widely held than ever by 1966, although the legend of the mound had morphed somewhat with retelling through successive generations. Most now assumed it was Chief Burnett who was buried on the mound, not a group of Potawatomis, and that it was Burnett’s spirit that guarded the city, not the Great Spirit. Others believed the hill itself would physically deflect tornadoes away from Topeka, like some kind of giant shield. This view was akin to the cockeyed meteorological assertions made in the 1922 newspaper article about “bends in the river” protecting the city from tornadoes. Like that claim, this one had no basis in fact.

  Still, Topeka was far better equipped to deal with tornadoes than most other communities across the plains. For that, the city could thank one man: Richard Albert Garrett, meteorologist-in-charge of the Topeka office of the U.S. Weather Bureau. Lean, angular and sporting a rakish, Errol Flynn–style mustache, the balding, bespectacled, pipe-smoking Garrett looked every inch the career government scientist that he was. In the summer of 1949, the 43-year-old had arrived to take charge of the Topeka Weather Bureau office, which was responsible for providing forecasts for a 17-county region in the northeastern part of the state.

  Garrett had big shoes to fill: He replaced Snowden “Frosty” Flora, a legend in Kansas weather circles. Flora had held the top post in Topeka for more than 40 years and was well known for his radio weather reports to farmers across the state. In 1953, Flora even authored a landmark book, Tornadoes of the United States. It was the first general interest book on tornadoes since John Park Finley’s groundbreaking work in the late 19th century.

  But Garrett was formidable in his own right. He’d attended the University of Colorado before joining the Weather Bureau in 1927. And except for a brief hitch as a forecaster with Trans World Airlines in the mid-1930s, he’d been with the organization ever since. Garrett had seen just about every kind of weather the United States could dish out, with stints in Santa Fe, Denver, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland and Cleveland. Before transferring to Topeka, Garrett spent six years as supervisor of the international aviation division at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. He was an expert on aviation forecasting and had even briefed aviator Amelia Earhart once. A photograph of the two together was one of his prize possessions.

  Transferring to a relative backwater like Topeka at the apex of his working years didn’t seem like the wisest career move, and Garrett initially was reluctant to leave New York. But the people of Kansas were clamoring for a native Kansan to replace Flora and Garrett fit the bill. He was born in 1906 on a farm in Osborne County near the community of Downs, about 200 miles west of Topeka. At age 15, he’d moved to Canon City, Colorado. Garrett worked on the family farm, and then, after high school, he became something of a roustabout, finding employment at a dairy farm, at a cement factory and in the rough Colorado silver camps. Evidence of his rural, hardscrabble youth was hard to find, though, in the urbane, articulate and sometimes acerbic scientist he became.

  Garrett’s early years in the Topeka office were uneventful, so much so that his initial doubts about returning to Kansas seemed to be confirmed. But then, in the spring of 1951, the rains began. The precipitation was a blessing at first, as areas of Kansas had suffered through a period of drought in 1950 and many hard-pressed farmers were hungry for a good year. As May and June wore on, however, heavy storms continued to roll across eastern Kansas. The ground was saturated by early July, and creeks and rivers were filled to their banks. After a brief pause, the rain returned on July 9 and over the next five days, a deluge of between 5 and 17 inches swamped the eastern third of the state. The Kansas and its tributaries, the Big Blue, the Wakarusa and the Black Vermillion, as well as the other major rivers that drained eastern Kansas, all jumped their banks and spread into the surrounding lowlands. From west to east, rising water poured into Manhattan, Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City as well as dozens of smaller towns and countless farms across the broad river valleys.

  Before the flood receded, 40 people had lost their lives, 87,000 were forced from their homes, 186 towns in Kansas and Missouri were inundated, and nearly $1 billion in losses had been tallied in Kansas and surrounding states. The Kansas River flooded virtually all of North Topeka in a repeat of a major 1903 flood and brought much of the city’s rail and industrial power to a standstill.

  For Garrett, the flood underscored
the need for more effective flood prediction and warning systems. His predecessor, in addition to being an expert on tornadoes, was a pioneer in the science of river hydrology, and Garrett quickly picked up where Flora left off. In time, the Topeka office emerged as a national leader in the science of calculating watershed capacity and the stages of rising rivers and streams. Garrett also developed a network of river watchers to monitor and report rising water in times of heavy rain.

  Yet it would be the struggle against wind, not water, that ultimately would define Garrett’s legacy. Over time, his foresight and determination in this arena would save countless lives across Kansas. And the fruits of these labors were never more evident than in Topeka on June 8, 1966.

  After the U.S. Weather Bureau’s 60-year ban on tornado forecasting was lifted in 1952, Garrett set to work devising a viable tornado warning system for the city. One of his first steps was to enlist citizens in rural areas outside Topeka to become weather spotters. The spotters were instructed to note the tornado’s location, its distance, the time of the sighting and the direction the twister was headed, and then relay the information via collect call to the Weather Bureau office. Weather personnel would alert local radio stations for immediate broadcast to the public. Garrett also convinced two of the city’s largest employers — the Santa Fe shops and Beatrice Foods Company — to blow their shift-change whistles if a tornado was approaching.

  Those who were inclined to dismiss Garrett’s preparedness efforts as unnecessary or alarmist received a savage wake-up call on May 25, 1955. The events of that day would lay bare the primitive state of tornado readiness on the plains and, for Garrett, would energize his work for years to come. It was a stormy Wednesday evening and tornadoes already had dropped in central Oklahoma. Shortly after 9:00 p.m., a massive tornado emerged from the clouds and sliced through the town of Blackwell in far northern Oklahoma near the Kansas line. The twister killed 20 and injured about 250. Earlier, the Severe Local Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City had issued a tornado forecast, the equivalent of a modern-day tornado watch, for a wide swath of Oklahoma and south-central Kansas. But the forecast was set to expire at 10:00 p.m. As a result, the ten o’clock news programs out of Wichita, both television and radio, reported that the danger for southern Kansas had passed.