Goodin was a serious, thoughtful young woman. Her parents — particularly her dad, a World War II vet — had imprinted on her that iron work ethic so prevalent on the plains: a relentless, almost savage determination to complete the task, whatever it was, no matter what it took — to adapt, survive and prevail.
But work wasn’t the only thing in Goodin’s life. She was part of an eclectic group of Embassy residents who frequently socialized together. Some were soldiers or soon to be, bound for Vietnam or just returning. Others were college students at Washburn or young professionals like herself. Over bottles of wine, they’d discuss and debate the war, civil rights, LBJ, the Kennedy assassination, rock music and whether God, as some claimed, really was dead.
Tonight, Goodin was supposed to be having dinner with a sister who lived at Lake Sherwood Estates, an upscale community on a man-made lake a few miles west of Burnett’s Mound. But an odd thing had happened. Goodin had driven out to her sister’s at about 5:30 p.m. She was early, so she sat in the driveway in her ’63 Dart and waited for her sister and family to return. She watched the lake and the sky as low, menacing clouds raced past.
Then Goodin saw a white cloud — not a tornado, but just a small white cloud — separate from the churning mass above and dip down toward the water. The little cloud moved silently like a sprite across the lake’s surface and the water parted before it as if a small boat were passing. Then, just as quickly as it came down, the cloud lifted back up and melted into the sky. It was such a strange sight, like nothing Goodin had ever witnessed before. What to make of it? She had no idea. But it seemed like an apparition and it filled her with dread. She decided to skip dinner with her sister and head home. Back at the apartment, Goodin put the event out of her mind. The hamburgers were almost ready. She chatted with friends.
Meinholdt watched the funnel slowly grow larger in the distance. He again radioed the sighting and estimated the tornado’s location, path and speed. “If this thing continues its present course, it will go right through South Topeka,” he warned. “Sound the sirens.” But as yet there was no radar confirmation, no hook echo. The bureau waited. Meinholdt, though, knew what he was seeing. In spotter training, volunteers were taught that if a tornado appears to be stationary but seems to be increasing in size, then it’s probably heading straight for you.
Meinholdt remembered something else an instructor had said: Do not become mesmerized by a tornado. So awesome and unusual is the sight that many people become transfixed when confronted by one. From a distance, the tornado’s roar is imperceptible and the damage it’s causing is largely invisible, particularly in open country. People consequently tend to linger too long and only awaken to the danger when they realize the twister is much closer than they’d previously thought. But by then, it can be too late to get away. Meinholdt wasn’t going to make that mistake.
Officer Hathaway pulled to the top of the mound. He got out of the patrol car and looked to the southwest. He was a native of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. He’d never seen a tornado before. Like many others, he’d come to Topeka through the Air Force. Hathaway had worked as an engine mechanic on B-47s before being honorably discharged in early 1956. After the service, he’d hired on at the DuPont cellophane plant, and later he managed Poor Richard’s, a legendary late-night eatery downtown. But he’d been on weather watch many times since joining the department. He knew what to look for. And he saw it in the still area beyond the storm. To him, the funnel looked like an enormous, whitish-gray basket — broad at the bottom and wider at the top — slowly being lowered from the cloud above. He radioed dispatcher Marc Hood.
“Uh, this doesn’t look good,” he said.
Others were spotting the tornado now. Ed Rutherford lived three miles west and one mile north of Auburn. Rutherford was a news cameraman for WIBW-TV. He was a veteran hand, well liked and widely respected around town by newsmen and politicians alike for his professionalism and low-key manner. He’d been a reconnaissance cameraman in the Air Force and he was not one to get excited. In fact, according to his wife, he often grumbled that this weather warning business on television and radio was getting out of hand; it was a lot of foolishness, if you asked him, scaring people and exaggerating the danger the way they do.
So when the two-way radio at WIBW crackled, and Rutherford reported from his car that he’d just seen a tornado pass near his rural home and that the funnel was heading northeast toward the city, the station’s staff paid attention. Rutherford said the tornado was nearly transparent and looked like a “sand devil, only 100 times bigger.” A barn roof was swirling in the cloud, he said. Based on Rutherford’s report, WIBW 580 AM station manager Jerry Holley interrupted a broadcast of the Kansas City Athletics–Minnesota Twins baseball game just getting under way from the Twin Cities to warn residents of Topeka and rural Shawnee County of the approaching danger. A minute or two later, at 7:01 p.m., WIBW-TV broke into Lost in Space, and newsman Bill Kurtis stepped in front of the camera to calmly alert viewers of a tornado on the ground and heading for the city.
From up on the mound, it was still difficult to tell if the tornado was actually touching down or not, as the space between the base of the twister and the ground was indistinct and blurred. But there was no doubt that it was getting larger against a widening backdrop of whitish sky.
Hathaway radioed in. “Forty-five calling. South and west of the mound in that basket-shaped cloud, there is activity. Uh, there is a tail. I’ve seen it to be dropping down; unknown whether it is hitting the ground or not and then rescinding back up.”92
“How far southwest is it from the mound?” Hood asked.
“Ten, possibly 12, 15 miles.”
Hood, the dispatcher, picked up the phone to call the Weather Bureau. Just then, another line lit up. Not coincidentally, it was Eland at the bureau. Hood relayed Hathaway’s report. “Go ahead and sound the sirens,” Eland said in a level voice. “We can see it on radar.” It was 7:02 p.m.
Hood jumped up from the dispatcher’s desk, raced across the hall and quickly unscrewed the wing nuts that held a Plexiglas cover shielding the two siren buttons. Beside the top button was a green label: FOR USE ONLY IN CASE OF NUCLEAR ATTACK ON THE UNITED STATES. Beside the other button, the label read: FOR USE ONLY IN CASE OF TORNADO.93
Hood punched the lower button, and in an instant, the 19 Thunderbolt sirens standing like sentinels across the city growled to life. The sirens began low, with a hoarse, rumbling snarl, then steadily ascended in pitch until they reached their desolate, all-pervasive wail. The sirens’ rotation added an eerie Doppler effect to the sound, and the roar seemed to advance and retreat with each pass, as if to underscore the danger.
Meinholdt took a long last look at the twister. It was much closer now, clearly visible against the lighter sky to the west. How far away, he couldn’t say for sure. But it was definitely on the ground. It was time to go. He climbed into his Ranchero, radioed that he was leaving the mound, swung the little truck around and headed down the hill.
At the police station, the telephone was ringing off the hook. Dispatcher Marc Hood was being bombarded by sightings. He couldn’t tell if there were several tornadoes out there or just one big one that people were seeing from different angles.
“Forty-five, do you see the one at Dover Road and Auburn Road on the ground?”
“No. But this number one we’re talking about is still headed in a northeasterly direction, right toward Topeka,” Hathaway replied.
“Can you judge its speed?” Hood asked.
“Ah . . . It’s about half the distance it was when we first started talking about it, Marc. How long ago has that been?”
“About 10 minutes.”
Other officers and several Kansas State Troopers on weather watch weighed in from vantage points nearby.
107: “I’m by the south turnpike entrance, and I can see a funnel-type cloud off there. It is still probably five or eight miles southwest of the mound.”
43: “I’m about a mile or
so south on Wanamaker Road and it’s coming directly toward me. I couldn’t tell you how far it is — about five, six, seven miles.”
“You watching that real big one out there?” Hathaway asked.
107: “Yeah, I’d advise you to get off that mound.”
A moment later, Hathaway’s voice broke through static.
“Car 45 is getting off the mound, headquarters. This thing is coming in a little faster than, I think, ah, either one of us would anticipate right now.”94
The radio crackled in concert with a lightning flash.
Sue Goodin and her friends were just sitting down to dinner when the sirens sounded. A moment later, there was a knock on the door. It was a neighbor from downstairs. “Hey, there’s a tornado warning and we’ve got to get into the shelter. They said on TV that it’s heading for southwest Topeka. Everybody needs to get to the shelter right now!”
Goodin and her friends left the apartment and walked along the open balcony to the stairs at the end of the building. Fast, dark clouds that marked the vanguard of the storm were rolling in like thick columns of volcanic ash. The sky’s hue had changed from unnatural green-yellow to charcoal black. The sun wouldn’t set for a good hour, but cars moving on nearby Gage Boulevard already had their headlights on. The boom of thunder was nearly continuous, intermittently audible above the wail of the sirens. Lightning clawed the sky to the west. From every corner of the apartment complex, people were streaming toward the clubhouse shelter at the center of the Huntington’s courtyard. To Goodin, the scene was like a dark, unsettled dream: People were moving like ants in single file. No one spoke. No one hurried or panicked. It was as if everything in life except life itself suddenly had been stripped away and only one objective remained: to survive. The world was now a foreboding place of stillness and doom.
Nearby, 23-year-old Dan Hudkins watched the sky above Burnett’s Mound. Hudkins worked at the Huntington Park Texaco, the service station beside the little strip mall off Gage Boulevard, just north of the interstate. He was working that night with another man, Johnny House. They had cars up on racks, changing oil and doing brakes. Hudkins was a country boy. He grew up in the farming community of Silver Lake. He’d seen a lot of storms. But he’d never seen anything like this. How to describe it? Above the mound, the clouds looked like boiling, gray lava as they tumbled toward the Earth.
It was cold-sweat scary.
“Johnny, we need to get out of here!” Hudkins yelled from the front of the station. The men locked up. Hudkins thought for a moment about which vehicle to take. He had a ’46 Dodge pickup that he was restoring. The thing was, it had an old flat-head, six-cylinder motor. If water got onto the engine block, it tended to pool around the cylinder heads and the spark plug wires would short out. The old motors were notorious for that. “Let’s take the wrecker,” he said. They jumped into the red Chevy one-ton tow truck with Hudkins behind the wheel. He wound it up, jammed the gears and swung north onto Gage Boulevard.
Goodin’s apartment building, the Huntington, was the northernmost of the three buildings that made up the Embassy complex. Next to it was the Embassy building proper, and furthest south, toward the interstate, was the El Dorado. Behind the Huntington, there were parking lots, a short stretch of open ground and finally, a small creek. This nameless tributary of the Shunganunga flowed north and south. Beyond the creek, the homes of the new Prairie Vista subdivision ascended the long, low ridge. The homes were a little bigger than those in County Fair Estates, the subdivision closest to the mound. Most were split-levels and tri-levels and many had basements. Nearly every yard had been landscaped with fast-growing pin oaks. But the trees were still young and small.
Paul Marmet, the union meat cutter, and his wife, Peg, the physical education teacher who’d recently left her job at Topeka West High School, lived in Prairie Vista in a split-level ranch. The Marmets’ house was on the southwest corner of 30th Terrace and Atwood, at the base of the ridge, a couple of blocks south of 29th Street. Twenty-ninth was the main east–west drag that climbed the ridge from its intersection with Gage Boulevard.
For the Marmets, it had been a red-letter day of sorts. Almost 10 months earlier, they’d moved into the home on Atwood. They’d come from a furnished apartment and consequently had zero furniture, except for a hi-fi. But they’d chipped away and saved and looked for bargains, and eventually they were able to furnish the entire house, one room at a time. Wednesday was Paul’s day off, so they’d gone shopping in the afternoon. With the purchase of a single light fixture for the front hallway — one of those big, white, frosted globes that hung on a single cord from the ceiling — the house was officially done. The style was contemporary. The furniture was modern. The place looked beautiful.
Peg celebrated with another purchase: a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album called Going Places. The album featured the hit “Tijuana Taxi,” a brassy, camp instrumental that had been released in December. Peg loved the song, and she’d slapped the album on the turntable as soon as they got home, collapsing on the couch as Paul installed the new fixture. Then Peg went upstairs to get ready for a friend’s wedding shower. Peg had lived in Kansas for more than a decade, but she wasn’t one to give the weather a second thought. She was still a California girl at heart.
But Paul was a Kansan. A tornado had wrecked some outbuildings on the family farm north of Sabetha when he was a kid, and he’d seen more than one since then. So he never let his guard down if there was the potential for severe weather. He’d been following the situation since the tornado watch had been issued in late morning. He’d even stuck a flashlight and transistor radio in his pocket, just in case. When the sky began turning black, he flipped on the radio and heard that a tornado was heading for the mound.
“Peg, you need to get down here!” he shouted up the stairs. “There’s a tornado warning. The sirens are going off. Come on! Right now!”
Earlier, Jim Ward, the assistant U.S. attorney, his wife, Carolyn; one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Sally; and seven-year-old son, Greg, had climbed into the family’s ’62 Nash Ambassador to head for Greg’s Little League game. Jim brought along his Brownie Kodak 8-millimeter home movie camera to film some of the action. But with all the rain the night before, the game was scrubbed. So the family headed back to their home on Burnett Road in County Fair Estates. On the way, though, Jim decided to make a quick detour through Prairie Vista to check out the new homes going up along the southern end of the ridge. No doubt about it: The family needed a bigger place. The little house was cramped. But moving right now was more or less out of the question financially. Still, wouldn’t one of these big, new places be nice?
The Wards were near 33rd Street and Atwood, a couple of blocks south of the Marmets’, when the sirens sounded. Jim had a decision to make. His home was a half mile away as the crow flies, but probably a mile by road. And it didn’t have a basement. But these new split-levels all had basements, and one of them under construction was more or less finished, except for the installation of windows and doors. It would work. He wheeled his Nash into the open garage. Carolyn got out, gathered Sally, took Greg by the hand and headed for the basement. Jim was about to slam the car door when he noticed the movie camera lying on the backseat. He grabbed it.
Officer Hathaway reached Gage Boulevard at the base of the mound, turned left and in a moment pulled to the shoulder beneath the I-470 underpass. The supercell that had been loping toward the city finally pounced. The black clouds opened up and the rain came down in blinding, sideways sheets. Lightning bolts slammed the Earth like mortar rounds. Hathaway sat tight.
Further up Gage Boulevard, disc jockey Rick Douglass could hardly see the road through the deluge. Then hail began to pound the WREN-mobile. He turned on the roof emergency light and radioed that he was passing through a traffic jam at the intersection of 29th and Gage. He could see the 470 overpass just ahead. At the bridge, Douglass noticed the police car. There was a flash of recognition as he caught sight of the officer inside
. Hathaway? What was he doing here? Douglass had met Hathaway a few years earlier at the all-night Fluffy Fresh donut shop on California Avenue. Cops and newsmen liked to grab a cup of coffee there in the late-night hours. He’d talked with Hathaway quite a bit. He seemed like a good cop, from back East somewhere. Douglass subsequently had run into Hathaway a number of other times, usually at breaking news events: car wrecks or shootings or robbery scenes. Now here they both were in the middle of a tornado warning at the foot of Burnett’s Mound. Douglass thought about it. It was funny. Whenever there was trouble, Hathaway seemed to be there.
Fellow disc jockey Steve Southerland was manning the board at WREN and periodically patching Douglass through to provide listeners with live reports as he headed toward the mound. Douglass’s radio handle was 33. He turned right and radioed that he was climbing the mound. It was about 7:05 p.m.
Hathaway knew he had to act. He switched on the emergency lights, put on his light-blue riot helmet, pulled on his yellow rain slicker, grabbed some safety flares from the back of the car and stepped out onto Gage to begin flagging down southbound traffic. Cars pulled to a stop and Hathaway would run to the driver’s side. “There’s a tornado coming on the other side of the mound! You need to turn around or get under cover! You can’t go south. Go!”
Several miles to the west, Washburn geology professor Al Stallard stood outside his house and watched transfixed as the tornado moved diagonally away from him and in toward the city. He called to his wife and children in the basement. “Come look at this!” The tornado was enormous, perhaps 4,000 or 5,000 feet from the ground to the base of the clouds. It wasn’t shaped like a funnel — more like a barrel or giant wedge. Stallard figured it had to be at least a half mile wide at the base. From his perspective — with the dark thunderstorm in the background to the east — the twister wasn’t white but black, almost blue. He could see it churning and spitting like a great engine. Moving across open country, the tornado behaved as though equipped with some kind of advanced guidance system. Climbing over low hills, the vortex seemed to retract and telescope back into itself at the base, even as the upper portion remained stationary. Then, as it dropped into shallow valleys, the base would extend back down to maintain unbroken contact with the Earth. Clouds of debris periodically exploded upward as the tornado smashed and scattered the occasional home or barn in its path.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 11
