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

by Bonar Menninger

  Panic bordering on hysteria began to rise inside him as the gravity of the moment sunk in. What could he do? What could he say? So powerful was the tangle of emotions that swept over him that he thought for a moment he might burst into tears. But he caught himself. His responsibility was great. What he said next could mean life or death for hundreds, if not thousands of people, including his own wife and child. He understood that. So should he shout? Should he swear? This all was happening in a matter of seconds. He had to act now; there was no time to waste. So he conveyed the information about the apartments’ destruction and the tornado’s apparent path.

  And then he just blurted it out: “For God’s sake, take cover!”

  The words, in and of themselves, were relatively mild, considering what was going through Kurtis’s mind at the moment. But in the era before broadcasters became “personalities,’’ before happy chatter choked the six o’clock news, back when anchors were newsmen who never showed emotion, the warning had a galvanizing effect. With those five words, Kurtis had crossed a line between the objective and the personal. His delivery was rock-steady, serious and precise. Pure Walter Cronkite. Yet in its effect, he might as well have been reaching through the TV and grabbing viewers by the lapels. People heard him. Anyone who was inclined to doubt how serious the situation had become could doubt no longer. Those who weren’t yet under cover got there fast. And those who were hunkered down a little lower.

  Ron Olson was listening. Olson lived in a tri-level on 30th Street, at the top of the ridge that paralleled Gage, just up the hill from the Marmets’ house. Olson was a bookish 30-year-old who’d just completed his master’s thesis in education. He was a social studies teacher at Jardine Junior High School and had started teaching summer school that Monday at Topeka High School. His wife, Linda, was a phys ed teacher. She was good friends with Peg Marmet. The couple had a six-week-old baby girl named Tawnia.

  They had company that day. Linda’s cousin from California was in town with her two children. It was their first trip to Kansas. They’d come up from Burlington, 30 miles south, with Linda’s Aunt Ruth and Ron’s mother, India Olson. The whole group, eight people in all, had gone out to dinner in two cars. It began to pour on the drive home and hadn’t yet let up when they pulled into the driveway. So everyone but Olson stayed in the cars to avoid getting soaked. Olson didn’t hear the sirens. But he was worried about the weather and went inside to turn on the television. He caught Kurtis’s first warning about a tornado heading for the city, so he ran back out and told everyone they needed to get inside. The rain had stopped.

  The group sought cover in the den on the lowest of the home’s three levels. The room essentially was a partial basement. The cousin from California got under a big walnut table with her children. The rest of the women and the baby got behind a divan. In those days, conventional wisdom held that opening windows would equalize the air pressure if a tornado was approaching. Theoretically, this would help keep the house from exploding. So Olson dashed through the house, pushing up windows. Then he went back outside. He could see the tornado coming toward the mound from the southwest and he watched it climb over the ridge a little over a mile away. The funnel was so large that Olson initially had a hard time distinguishing it as a tornado. It looked like a giant stepping off the mound. He quickly snapped a couple of photographs and ran back to the basement. The TV was still on. A few moments later, he heard Kurtis’s warning, “For God’s sake, take cover!” He got down behind the divan with the women and pulled a blanket over the top.

  The power failed. The sounds from that point were distinct and progressive. First came a high-frequency whine that rose in pitch, like a jet aircraft starting its takeoff roll. Then Olson heard houses being crushed on the lower slope of the ridge. The noise reminded him of the crunching and snapping that he’d heard as a child when he’d smash the little wooden baskets that strawberries were sold in. It sounded just like that. Then pieces of debris started thudding against the side of the house. First a few, then more, then many more until the barrage became unrelenting. Amid the din, a few very large, boulder-size pieces of debris slammed into the house, and the building shuddered from the blows. Finally, the windows shattered and crashed. And then the tornado was upon them, a deafening growl that to Olson sounded mechanical, like a wood chipper. The group felt weightless, hanging onto the blanket, swimming in air over the floor. It was surreal and slow, like a dream. Everyone had their eyes shut tightly. Then it got quiet and Olson said, “Everyone wait here. I’ll go upstairs.”

  He crawled out and went up a small flight of stairs to the first floor and saw blue sky where the house used to be.

  A block away, at the crest of the hill on 29th Street, John and Grace Steuri braced for the worst. The Steuris lived on the second story of a fourplex. They were in their mid-20s, just two years married. John sold mainframes for IBM. Grace taught fourth grade. With school out for the summer, Grace had worked hard all day cleaning and getting the apartment organized. She’d also cooked a fine meatloaf and made a big cherry pie for dessert. At about six o’clock, John ran to a nearby grocery store for milk. He was struck by the yellowish tint of the sky and the stillness of the evening.

  “It’s really strange out,” he remarked when he got back. “Not a bird is singing. Everything is just dead still.”

  The couple was enjoying dinner when the sirens went off. John flipped on the TV. Then he ran outside, under the porch, and looked toward the mound and kept watching until the rain let up. He saw the tornado climbing the hill.

  “It’s coming! Go to the basement!”

  Grace ran next door to help their elderly neighbors down the stairs. John stayed outside, still watching the mound. The others went to the apartment below. Another older couple lived there and they let everyone in. The building was set into the hill. The first-floor apartment had a pantry closet. Although not a basement per se, the room was largely underground. The group piled in. A few minutes passed and Grace began to worry. Where was John? Why didn’t he come down?

  Like Jim Ward, John Steuri couldn’t take his eyes off the twister. The size was breathtaking, not just the height of it but also the width. Its sides and top were gray and the base was coal black. It seemed to move ponderously and convulse like a great snake as it came down the mound. Then John watched the bricks cascading upward from the Embassy Apartments, and he could hear the roar. He ran for the first-floor apartment.

  In the heat of the moment, the old, frail woman who lived there somehow had managed, by herself, to muscle a mattress into the pantry. Everyone ducked beneath it and pulled it down. In her mind, Grace was praying the tornado would veer off and perhaps they wouldn’t take a direct hit. She was very worried that the apartment building would come down on top of them. Then came the machine gun–like volley of debris striking the building. The roar engulfed them. Grace felt a stabbing pain in her ears. Timbers twisted and glass shattered. And all the stored energy of materials, time and human labor that went into constructing the building was released in seconds.

  Disc jockey Rick Douglass was spinning like a top on his backside. When the wind finally let him go, he was lying in the muddy gravel and sand on the 470 westbound entrance ramp, a good 100 yards from the overpass. His leg was bleeding badly. He looked back toward the bridge and saw bodies somersaulting and tumbling down the embankment. To the northeast, the tornado was moving away in a dirty, hazy cloud of debris. Then he looked up and saw a maroon-and-white ’59 Pontiac Bonneville — a long, heavy piece of Detroit steel — floating 100 feet up in the air, drifting toward the Embassy Apartments.

  Its doors and trunk flapped like the wings of a gull.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Blasted Plain

  Clarence Irish looked up from the basement of the demolished frame house at White’s Pony Farm and saw nothing but blue sky. One of the Shetlands stood at the edge of the foundation and stared down at him with sad, brown eyes. The pony’s intestines were exposed. Irish climbed out and
could see dead and struggling animals stacked up two and three deep on the road. He started digging through the wreckage for his rifle.

  On the other side of the mound, a Kansas State Trooper helped Rick Douglass to his feet. The officer wore a Smokey the Bear hat, and a silver badge hung from his belt. But he must have been off duty, because he had on brightly colored Bermuda shorts and a Stanley Kowalski T-shirt. It was a bizarre sight to the dazed and battered Douglass.

  “You’d better get back under the bridge in case it comes back,” the trooper said.

  Douglass was soaked and filthy and his arms were cut and scraped. A big chunk of flesh was missing from his left leg near the knee. The wound continued to bleed. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The truth was, Douglass didn’t really look human anymore. Nearly all of his head was encased in a thick layer of mud, sprayed on like gooey paint by the 200-mile-an-hour-plus winds. Bits of grass, twigs, gravel and sand were embedded in the mud and skin. A sliver of wood four inches long had pierced his upper lip and dangled casually like a cigarette.

  He looked like a beast from hell.

  Dorothy McKinney saw him. She was among the first to arrive at the underpass after the tornado moved off. The 53-year-old realtor had been showing homes to a couple from out of town. They’d found themselves in the tornado’s crosshairs at the intersection of 29th and Gage. The would-be home buyer, a Mr. Ralph Anderson, was behind the wheel. The car nearly stalled for want of oxygen, just as the Lollars’ had. But Anderson was able to keep it running and they raced off to the east. Then they double-backed to the interstate and pulled off at the Gage ramp. Anderson parked and ran with McKinney down the hill. They could see bodies under the bridge.

  Everyone’s dead, McKinney thought. People were scattered in curious, rigid, unnatural positions. But as McKinney got closer, she could see movement. Some were heaving, taking deep, gasping breaths, like they’d been trapped underwater. Others were green in the face and coughing and spitting. One by one, they struggled to recover.

  Officer Hathaway was among them. He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. Then he walked out from under the bridge, stared off to the north and slowly shook his head.

  “Shit,” he said quietly.

  A ragged, brown carpet of ruin stretched nearly as far as the eye could see. Jumbled wreckage blanketed virtually the entire County Fair Estates subdivision. More than 60 homes were leveled or badly damaged west of Gage. The wide, dirt-colored band of devastation stretched across where the Embassy Apartments had been and climbed the ridge to the northeast. In the Prairie Vista subdivision, in excess of 100 homes and at least a half a dozen fourplexes and duplexes were destroyed.

  Above, the sky was the purest shade of blue. Not a particle of dust hung in the air. The silence was so intense that it seemed like the entire world, even time itself, had suddenly stopped. Only one sound emerged from the shattered landscape: the ominous hiss of natural gas as it escaped shorn gas lines in dozens of homes. The air reeked of mud, gas and wet garbage. Hathaway’s patrol wagon was still parked under the bridge. He turned and walked back to it. The hood was off and the front end smashed. But the radio worked.

  “Car 45 calling . . .”

  “Go ahead, 45 . . .”

  There was a long pause. Hathaway was panting, still trying to catch his breath.

  “This place is leveled out here,’’ he said. His voice was hollow and spent. “These houses are gone, Marc. Gone.”

  “10-4, 45. Help is on the way.”

  Virginia Tuttle, the highway patrolman’s wife, picked herself up and slowly walked back to the underpass. Her face was cherry red and abraded, as if she’d been sandblasted. Her ribs and abdomen ached. Her husband, Harold, lay nearby. He, too, had been sucked out from under the bridge. But he hadn’t traveled nearly so far as his wife.

  “I think my back is broken,” he said. A piece of lumber had hit him hard. The grandchildren fared better. Dena’s ankle was slightly injured and little Adam had a cut on the head. Then Virginia heard yapping near the bridge. It was little Gypsy, bouncing in the car. The Ford was smashed. A telephone pole evidently had shot straight through the passenger compartment, judging by the symmetry and size of the holes in the front and rear windows. But the dog was fine.

  Rick Douglass asked an older man who’d sought shelter under the bridge if he’d seen the flying Bonneville.

  “We saw a lot of things flying,” the old man said. “We saw you flying.” They had a good laugh and then Douglass was wandering, looking for the WREN-mobile. He couldn’t find it. It wasn’t where he left it on the shoulder just south of the underpass. It wasn’t anywhere. He lay down in the grass and waited for help.

  They’ll fire me if I lost that car.

  Officer Hathaway heard voices coming from the ruins of County Fair Estates. He walked toward them. Time had stretched way out, like a curious dream. Most of the houses on Twilight Drive, the street closest to the interstate, were scraped to the foundation. In the distance, Hathaway could see movement as people began to emerge from the wreckage. There were shouts.

  “Are you okay? Is there anyone in there?”

  He saw a figure sitting alone amid the ruins. He moved closer and could see that it was a woman. She was muddy and bleeding and her clothes were in tatters. He approached and asked if she was all right. She looked up but didn’t say a word. Then Hathaway heard crying: forlorn, unbearable sobs. The sounds seemed to come from under a pile of shattered lumber. He started yanking boards and two-by-fours out of the way and a human shape gradually emerged. It was a little boy, probably a first- or second-grader. Black, dirty blood covered his entire head and body. He had a deep gash above his left eye and a purple, gaping wound in his side. One leg was badly mangled. The bone glistened like wet china through shredded flesh and blood.

  “That’s my boy,” the woman said softly.

  Now a man in a dark suit and tie was there, and he and Hathaway found a piece of plywood and laid it close and ever so gently lifted the broken boy onto it. The little fellow never screamed or yelled. He just sobbed quietly. A station wagon stopped on Gage and someone pushed the backseat down, and Hathaway and the man in the suit carefully carried the plywood and its cargo out from the wreckage and eased it into the car. Then they helped the boy’s mother crawl in so she could lay by her son and cradle his head in her muddy arms. The car drove off, and Hathaway heard someone say, “You’re hurt. You’re bleeding from the head.” He felt his knees buckle. A couple of men grabbed his elbows as he started to go down.

  Hathaway was unconscious when they loaded him into a camper shell for the trip to the hospital. They put Harold Tuttle on a piece of plywood and stuck him in a station wagon. But whoever found the board that served as a stretcher forgot to check it for nails, and Harold’s back was perforated on the long and painful ride into town.

  An off-duty nurse pulled up in a black sedan and offered to take some of the wounded to the hospital. Virginia Tuttle and the kids climbed in the front. Dorothy McKinney assured Virginia that she’d take care of her dog, Gypsy, until the Tuttles were back on their feet. Rick Douglass was about to get into the car, but when he saw the interior — red and immaculate — he told the woman he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to get the car dirty. She told him not to worry, but Douglass demurred, and they went back and forth that way for a moment. Then Douglass felt a boot in his backside and he tumbled in. It was the state trooper in the Bermuda shorts.

  Tom Noack, the electrician, started up the stairs and a wave of pure joy washed over him when he reached the top. The house was still there.

  “Connie! We’ve got a house yet!” he yelled down.

  The home’s front windows were blown in and glass littered the carpet. A two-by-four was sticking down through the living room ceiling like a spear. But the place was intact. Noack stepped over the shattered glass and out the front door. The neighborhood he’d lived in for six years, the one he’d helped build, was no more. Looking toward the mound, he could see the
interstate for the first time. All the houses that had obscured his view before were gone. Noack’s house sat on a cul-de-sac at the top of a small rise. Everything below it — all the way east to Gage and beyond — was leveled or nearly so. He could see the wreckage of the Embassy Apartments and his eyes followed the raw, dirty path that undulated up the distant ridge.

  Noack smelled gas and ran to the garage to grab some wrenches. He yelled to Connie and then, with a neighbor boy, Mark Luksa, started at a trot down the ruined block, moving rapidly from meter to meter, shutting down the main gas valve to each home. There were muffled yells coming from the wreckage of a house on the corner. Several people were moving Sheetrock and framing, and Noack and Mark pitched in until they reached a young man who was maybe 14 years old. He’d sought shelter in a bathtub when the tornado approached and he was there still, safe, without a scratch. No one else had been home. It had been a heads-up, lifesaving move by the kid to get into the tub.

  Noack kept moving east. Cars were stopping now along the shoulder of I-470 above the neighborhood.