Snyder didn’t hesitate. He quickly stood up and addressed the group.
“I think we should all move to the basement,” he said. “We can wait for the all clear or maybe continue the recital down there.’’
Snyder was in his 40s, of average build, with thinning, black hair and the fine, well-groomed hands of a musician. He wore thick-framed glasses, a white dress shirt and a narrow tie. He was a fair but demanding teacher and well known in Topeka. If you hadn’t practiced, he knew, and he’d let you know he knew. His sometimes abrupt manner could be intimidating to younger people. But like his wife, a willowy, soft-spoken woman, he cared deeply for his students. Both Snyder and his wife were gifted musicians.
Conventional wisdom in 1966 held that the southwest corner of any building was the safest spot to ride out a tornado. The notion seemed somewhat counterintuitive, given that most tornadoes approach from that direction. But the thinking was that if a building was hit, the wind would blow the debris up and away from the corner of impact and deposit it on the far side of the structure. Snyder and nearly everyone else who had spent any time in Kansas knew this, thanks to the Weather Bureau’s Richard Garrett and the preparedness mantra he’d so relentlessly drilled into the population.
Snyder led the way down to a classroom in the basement’s southwest corner. But as people filed in, Snyder played a quick scale on the classroom’s piano and realized that it was badly out of tune. This simply would not do. He apologized and led the group to a second classroom across the hall. Unfortunately, the piano there also was out of tune. Snyder then suggested that perhaps they could move chairs into his practice studio and continue the recital there. The studio was in the southeast corner of the basement and was smaller than the classrooms. But Snyder’s piano was serviceable and the surroundings were familiar to the student performers. Fathers and brothers made quick work of scooting enough wood-and-metal desk chairs into the room to accommodate the group. It was a tight fit, so some of the men and boys stood near the back.
The chapel’s basement was actually a half-basement, and above the waist-high foundation, tall windows extended nearly to the ceiling. The group settled in and only the steady drum of rain could be heard as Jean Tarnower stepped up to play the first notes of “Dorothy’s Dance.”
Chris Hutton was restless, marking time in the backseat of his dad’s Corvair. His father was behind the wheel, and Craig, his older brother, was in the passenger seat. The little compact was parked in front of Morgan Hall, Washburn’s administrative building, which was across the street from MacVicar Chapel. They’d come to fetch Craig’s car. Craig had been at Washburn earlier in the day to enroll in summer school. But his old ’55 had a bad battery and wouldn’t start when the time came to leave. So he’d caught a ride home, and after dinner, Bill and the boys had come back to retrieve the Chevy. Right now, though, it was raining so hard, you couldn’t see 10 feet. So they sat tight.
Bill Hutton was a piece of work. A lean, muscular man with light brown hair and green eyes, he ran Hutton Monuments with his brother, Clint. They’d taken over the business after the war from their father, a stonecutter who had started the gravestone company around the turn of the century. Clint had fought as an infantryman in the Pacific, Bill as an artilleryman in Europe. Bill nearly froze in the Battle of the Bulge and he’d fought his way across Germany. He never talked about the war but instead seemed to channel all his energy into work. He was relentless: chain-smoking Camels, drinking black coffee all day and seemingly doing the work of five men. If there was one clue that perhaps revealed the toll the war had taken, it was his language, for Bill just cussed all the time, with everyone, matter-of-factly and in ordinary conversation, as in, “Pass the goddamn mashed potatoes, please.” Or “What in the name of Christ are those kids doin’?” He was not a wicked man and there was seldom malice in his words. That’s just the way he’d talked during the war and that’s how he talked when he got home. Naturally, his wife was horrified, and eventually she was able to get Bill to clean it up a bit. But foul language or not, Bill Hutton was an uncommonly dedicated and loving father.
Chris, his youngest son, was an extrovert, a class cutup popular with the girls. He’d graduated from Seaman High School in North Topeka a week or so earlier. In high school, he lived for sports, rolling through the seasons from baseball to football to basketball to track. He was a big kid and a budding entrepreneur: He had opened a coin shop in high school and was making money buying and selling rare coins. He planned to attend Washburn in the fall. But as far as what he wanted to do with his life, he had no clue.
His older brother, on the other hand, knew exactly where he was going and what it would take to get there. The more studious of the two, Craig had just graduated from Baker University in Baldwin, Kansas, and intended to enroll in law school in the fall.
Driving in from North Topeka, the Huttons didn’t hear the sirens. In fact, they were unaware that a tornado watch had been issued earlier in the day. As far as they knew, this was just another Kansas thunderstorm. A good one, but it would soon pass.
And sure enough, the rain began to let up.
Leon Taylor, on campus for a law review class, was standing with a group of others outside Carnegie Hall. The bar exam was a couple of weeks away and Taylor, 27, was determined to nail it the first time. But the review session was quickly proving to be something of a bust. So when a student came in and said a tornado had been spotted southwest of town, Taylor and a few others slipped outside to take a look.
It was just sprinkling now. The clouds were beginning to break.
And he could see it.
Taylor watched as the tornado pushed in from the southwest, heading for Burnett’s Mound and then rising to climb the hill. From a distance of several miles, the broad, dark wedge seemed to move ponderously but relentlessly forward. He was mesmerized.
This is appalling. This cannot be real.
But it was, and very soon, the tornado had crossed the mound and was smashing the subdivisions north and east of the hill. At one point, something combustible — perhaps a propane or gasoline tank — ripped loose and was ignited in the twister. For a brief instant, a dazzling, orange fireball lit up the funnel’s gray-black core. Taylor heard a muffled explosion.
The tornado slipped down a steep, wooded bluff from the top of the 29th Street hill after wrecking the neighborhoods on the ridge northeast of Burnett’s Mound. Then it crossed the meandering Shunganunga Creek 400 yards east of the bridge where John Griebat had sought shelter with his family. From there, it moved into the vast, open park grounds south of veterans administration hospital.
A half mile ahead lay the Kansas Neurological Institute. KNI was home to more than 200 severely retarded children and young adults from across Kansas. Many of the patients, aged seven to 20, barely functioned at an infant level. They were warehoused — there was no other word for it — in dozens of barrack-like buildings lined up across the sprawling campus. The compound originally had been built as a temporary military hospital during the war but was later acquired by the state to house the infirm. None of the flimsy, wooden wards had basements.
Mary Torrence, an 18-year-old aide, scrambled with a co-worker when the sirens went off to move the 25 kids on her ward — all of them boys, all of them developmentally disabled, all of them blind — into the building’s central laundry room. This was institute policy. The aides were then supposed to drag mattresses in and cover the children. But Mary’s co-worker was pregnant, and Mary, just three days on the job, wasn’t big enough to move the mattresses alone. So the two women began yanking blankets, pillows and sheets off the laundry room shelves and piling them atop the frightened, bellowing boys.
It was all they could do.
Fortunately, the tornado had narrowed slightly by the time it crossed the Shunganunga Creek and was closer to one-third of a mile wide as it moved in toward KNI. Call it luck, fate or divine intervention, but the result was that the monster just winged the institution, wrecking
portions of the physical plant and several storage buildings on the compound’s southeast corner but missing entirely the wards and their vulnerable inhabitants therein.
The people living directly east of KNI were not so fortunate. Carol Martin — the 16-year-old who’d just gotten her driver’s license, the one who so loved the Beatles and who was heading for the choir contest in Hutchinson, Kansas, the next day — lived with her parents on Randolph Avenue. The Martins’ house was on the edge of a subdivision of small, basement-less homes that had gone up after the Korean War. Across the street to the west were the rolling fields of Big Shunga Park.
Carol had left at around 6:30 p.m. for singing group practice downtown. Her parents, Cleve and Hazel, were at home, and Cleve had a clear view of the tornado as it rumbled straight for them across open ground. He called to his wife. But Hazel was haunted by schizophrenia. She didn’t fully grasp what was happening and at first refused to get into the crawl space.
And then she demanded to know: “What on Earth is that train doing so close to our house?!”
Cleve pulled Hazel into the blackness and held her tightly as the roar grew louder. He braced for impact.
A friend of Carol’s, Patti McDiffett, lived one street over. After the sirens went off, the 15-year-old was glued to the TV with her mother, Norma, tracking the storm. Her father, Pat, went outside to watch the sky. But he came back in pretty quick. “I can hear it coming,” Mr. McDiffett said. The family debated for a moment, then decided to get into the crawl space. Patti grabbed Mitzi, her Chihuahua. Then the group went down through a trapdoor and crawled beneath the floor joists in the darkness across the dirt, to the home’s southwest corner. A vent on the west side of the foundation offered a parcel of light, and Mr. McDiffett was able to peer through the small opening to the west. He watched and waited. A few minutes passed. Then he said, “My God, I can see it. It’s coming.”
Patti started to scream. She and her parents embraced and pushed up hard against the foundation. The distant rumble grew steadily louder and then it was on them. It was thunderous. Patti’s ears and head were exploding as mud, sand and debris blasted across the shadowy cave.
Oh, God, we’re about to die!
Patti heard glass and wood shatter and crack and then huge ripping sounds as the house detached from the foundation and lifted off.
Nineteen-year-old Johnny Scheibe lived across the street with his mom and dad and little brother. He was a big, personable kid with brown hair: six feet four inches and 210 pounds. He had a learning disability but got through school and even set a school record for shot put at Boswell Junior High. He was good with his hands and loved to work with wood. For now, he was employed as a delivery driver for Westboro Cleaners.
This afternoon his mom and brother were at White Lakes Mall. Johnny was supposed to go out that night to shoot pool with a friend. But he’d called his buddy at the last minute to say he was too tired. He must have lain down to take a nap.
As it happened, John’s father, Glen — a city building inspector — was working part-time as a bartender at the nearby Gage Tavern. From outside the bar, he could see the tornado come over the mound, and he knew right away that it was heading for the family’s home. He went inside and frantically tried to call his son. But Johnny didn’t pick up. Evidently, he didn’t hear the phone.
Or the tornado, either, probably.
Until it was too late.
A few blocks to the north, 46-year-old Ruth Warfel, her husband, two daughters and a family friend had just finished dinner. The Warfels didn’t put much stock in tornado warnings. You had them all the time in Kansas and they never seemed to amount to much. So they’d ignored the sirens. But Ruth just happened to glance out the window as she was putting dirty dishes in the sink.
Hell was coming, just a block away. To Ruth, the tornado looked like a giant, black, tumbling ball, spewing cars and trees and buckets and chairs. She screamed but the roar was around them and then the windows came crashing in. The wind grabbed a dining room chair and flung it like a boomerang, striking Mr. Warfel hard in the back. Everyone dove under the table as the roof pulled off.
John Fernstrom was trying to concentrate on his banking test. But he couldn’t stay focused. Instead, he was straining to pick out an odd noise in the distance. It was a low, laboring mechanical sound, almost a grinding growl, seemingly far off. What in the world could that be? A truck? A turbine at the power plant? A plane flying too low? He couldn’t place it. But the noise grew steadily louder as the minutes slipped past. Then Fernstrom began to hear other sounds beneath the rumble: hard, violent, crunching noises, like wood breaking and snapping. Still distant, but closer now.
When John was a boy, his father had never been one to take tornadoes lightly. In fact, he’d been something of a fanatic about getting the family to the basement when severe weather threatened. But family members were considerably less concerned about the danger, and frequently they’d ignore his pleas to come to the cellar. Afterward, John’s father would fume. More than once, he’d say: “I know what’s going to happen! Someday the paper is going to have a big headline that reads: ‘Father Survives; Family Wiped Out!’”
Maybe it was his father’s vigilance smoldering in John’s memory. Or the awful beauty of the sky that evening. Or the cavalier decision to ignore the sirens. But all of a sudden, Fernstrom knew exactly what he was hearing.
He jumped up and yelled out across the quiet classroom.
“Something terrible is coming! We need to get out of here! We’ve got to get to the basement right now!”
There was no debate this time. It was as if people were waiting for someone, anyone to act. The students leapt from their desks as one, and 20 or so people raced for the hallway and bolted down the wide stairs two and three abreast, feet flying, catching the steps in swift, tumbling strides. There were screams and piercing shrieks. A couple of people were moving so fast when they reached the bottom that they lost their footing and flew headlong into the girls’ restroom. The scene might have been comical under different circumstances. But no one was laughing now.
Ward Summerville, a 27-year-old part-time librarian in the law library, briefly stepped outside after the sirens wailed and, with Leon Taylor and a handful of others, saw the tornado coming over the mound. He raced back inside and told his wife (who’d been keeping him company) to head for the basement. He made sure the library was cleared out and then headed upstairs. One classroom was still occupied, full of undergraduate students taking a test. Taylor burst into the room.
“There’s a tornado coming!” he said. “Everybody needs to get out of here!”
The instructor demurred.
“We have a test to finish here,” he said.
“There isn’t any time!” Summerville said. He turned and spoke directly to the students. “Get out of here right now! Go to the basement as fast as you can!”
The students complied.
Leon Taylor, the law review student who had been standing outside Carnegie Hall — the one who’d seen the explosion inside the twister — had continued watching with a half a dozen others as the tornado moved diagonally into the city. There was some conversation. The observers were convinced that the twister’s course would take it west of Washburn. It would miss them. Taylor was spellbound. He could see roofs and trees swirling in the funnel. The roar, punctuated by loud crashing bangs, moved ahead of the twister like an enormous wave. Soon Taylor noticed leaves and papers fluttering gently above him in a stirring wind. The outer bands of circulation were approaching.
And then, suddenly, there were cries and oaths. The tornado appeared to be turning.
Someone shouted, “It’s heading right for us!”
Still Taylor stood his ground, locked in rapt, frozen amazement. Now bigger pieces of debris were floating overhead and the swirling winds grew thicker and darker. He looked around but there was no one else. All others had fled. He turned and ran for the building as the sky seemed to collapse around him.
>
This is really stupid of me. I’ve probably gone and gotten myself killed.
The rumbling was growing more intense as John Fernstrom and some others in the basement of Carnegie Hall ran to a classroom in the building’s southwest corner and looked out. Thomas Women’s Gymnasium, one of the old stone giants, built in 1911, was just across the street. Fernstrom watched as the building’s massive, red tile roof lifted off — more or less intact — and wavered for a moment like a magic carpet before atomizing in the howling gale. A car flew past seconds later, tumbling and bouncing like an errant football.
There were guttural screams and the prickly, draining sensation of imminent death filled the room. People instinctively retreated toward the building’s interior hallway and went to the ground.
The rain had slowed to a light sprinkle as Bill Hutton and his sons — still unaware of the approaching tornado — prepared to get out of their car to jump-start Craig’s ’55 Chevy. But then they saw something odd to the southwest. Three hundred yards away, beyond the football stadium, an explosion ripped the single-story, wood-frame ROTC building literally off its foundation. Pieces of the building shot upward in an enormous plume of debris. The wooden structure was gone.
“Damn, the ROTC building just blew up!” Craig said. He was sitting in the passenger seat beside his father. He had the best view of it.
“Jesus Christ! It did!” Bill said. For a moment, all three thought that perhaps there’d been a gas explosion. But Craig quickly realized what they were seeing.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 16
