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

by Bonar Menninger

  Topeka mayor Chuck Wright was a broad-shouldered former marine, gruff and plainspoken. The morning paper on June 8 had carried a front-page story about Wright’s ongoing battle to boost his salary and those of Topeka’s four city commissioners. Wright had taken exception to an article that appeared the day before, about a survey suggesting that Topeka already had the highest-paid city officials in the state.

  “I have not seen a copy of that report,’’ Wright had thundered. “I hadn’t seen anything until I saw the story this morning and blew my breakfast all over the wall.” Wright claimed the article was part of a conspiracy to undermine the mayoral-commission form of government in favor of a city manager–style leadership.

  But the controversy was ancient history by the end of this day. Wright arrived at the Shawnee County Civil Defense headquarters downtown not long after the tornado lifted and quickly took command. Reports of sporadic looting prompted Wright to issue a public warning through patched radio links to local TV and radio: Looters would be shot on sight. He made sure police received the order and underscored that this was to be no bluff.

  With telephones down across the city, Wright also instructed Police Chief Dana Hummer to station patrol cars at each of the city’s four hospitals to maintain communication, allocate health care volunteers and monitor casualty reports. Rescue teams would work though the night. Then volunteers would start walking the damage path at dawn to conduct a more systematic search for the living and the dead.

  The prospect of hundreds, or even thousands, killed and injured did not seem far-fetched in the immediate aftermath of the tornado. About a dozen people already had been pronounced dead on arrival at the city’s two public hospitals, Stormont-Vail and St. Francis, and given the breadth of the destruction, the likelihood that the number would grow exponentially seemed a given.

  At Stormont-Vail, Henry Blake, one of the hospital’s surgeons, was taking charge of the disaster response. He was well suited for the task. He had a forceful, commanding personality and had served as a battlefield surgeon during World War II. Fortuitously, the hospital had conducted an extensive disaster drill in the spring of ’66 — a simulated airliner crash — and the experience proved invaluable when the real thing arrived. Still, conditions remained chaotic amid the crush of wounded. People were yelling for help, crying, speaking incoherently. The heat was oppressive. The light was dim. Yet the hospital coped, as did St. Francis Hospital, several blocks away. And help was coming. Topeka was home to one of the nation’s top psychiatric hospitals and teaching facilities, the Menninger Foundation, and a number of the foundation’s doctors showed up at both hospitals to lend a hand. Most hadn’t done any clinical work since medical school, and their skills at stitching up wounds were rusty at best. But they nevertheless played an important role.

  Among those receiving care at Stormont-Vail was Rick Douglass, the WREN disc jockey who’d raced down Burnett’s Mound with the tornado on his tail, only to be caught in the twister at the base of the hill. Painstakingly, straight through the evening, nurses and physicians picked, plucked and washed mud, wood, glass and straw from his skin. They put him in a bathtub to soak and even used a household cleaner, Mr. Clean, to scrub off some of the wind-sprayed mud.

  Officer David Hathaway, who had likewise been injured at the I-470 underpass, drifted in and out of consciousness as the night wore on. The extent of his head injury remained uncertain. The badly hurt boy Hathaway had pulled from the rubble near Burnett’s Mound, Craig Beymer, was fighting for life. After physicians amputated what remained of his right leg and dressed his many other wounds, Craig was sedated and admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit. Nurse Nadine Gilbert sat with him all night long, like a guardian angel. His condition was grave.

  Bill Hutton and his two teenaged sons, Craig and Chris — who’d been caught in the open on the Washburn campus — were treated and released. All had been badly mauled. Craig, hit in the back with a brick, ended up with more than 100 stitches for a variety of cuts and scrapes; Chris had 40 or 50 and Bill needed 20 stitches to close a long wound in his scalp. But they were going to be okay. The Washburn student who’d taken them to the hospital in his burgundy GTO waited patiently, and when the Huttons were released from the hospital, the young man offered to give them a ride home. But Bill instead asked for a lift back to the Washburn campus. He had to find out what had happened to his Corvair. He loved that little car.

  It was late when they arrived at Washburn and police and National Guardsmen had cordoned off the area. The Huttons nonetheless were allowed to pass, and they eventually found the car 50 feet from where they’d left it. The Corvair was upside down; the glass was out and the roof smashed down.

  “Were you guys in that?” one incredulous guardsman asked.

  Hutton assured him they had not been. He studied the car for a moment and then turned to several of the soldiers standing nearby. “Any chance you guys could give us a hand righting this thing?” he asked.

  Half a dozen men lifted and leaned, then flipped the car back on its tires and it landed with a bounce. Bill managed to pry open the driver’s-side door, swept the glass from the seat, then squeezed himself in and turned the ignition. The motor fired.

  He grinned. “Let’s get the hell out of here, boys!” Chris and Craig climbed into the now-shrunken passenger compartment, and Bill swung out onto 17th Street, heading for North Topeka. It was a windy ride with the windshield gone and the men had to lean awkwardly to accommodate the partially crushed roof. When they arrived at the family home, Mrs. Hutton, the boys’ significant others and friends poured into the driveway. Father and sons were still mud-caked and blood-soaked. At the hospital, the only areas the nurses had cleaned were immediately around where the men had been stitched. The result was a creepy kind of Frankenstein effect. Their hair still stood straight up from the mud and wind. They presented quite a sight as they slowly extracted themselves from the battered Corvair.

  “We thought you were dead!” Mrs. Hutton exclaimed.

  “Well, we damn near were,’’ Bill replied.

  It was some reunion.

  There were a lot of those that night. Earlier in the evening, 16-year-old Carol Martin had driven downtown to attend the concert rehearsal with Job’s Daughters, her singing group, in preparation for the trip to Hutchinson, Kansas, the next day. The choir had taken cover in the basement of the fortress-like Masonic Temple as the tornado approached. The twister passed very near the building. But the walls and floors were so thick that Carol barely heard it, and except for some broken windows, the damage was minimal. She and her companions emerged, of course, to find devastation all around. But Carol was relieved to see that her beloved, blue-and-white 1960 Dodge Dart had made it through largely unscathed. In fact, it was one of the few cars not totaled on the lot.

  A friend, Patty Sellen, lived near Burnett’s Mound, and reports were coming in of major damage in that part of town. So Carol offered to give Patty a ride home. They headed southwest but, like so many others, the friends quickly found their path blocked by debris. Eventually, they managed to make it to the Washburn campus. Carol was staggered by the destruction and immediately began to worry about her parents and her home just southwest of campus. She was able to drive a little farther but found the neighborhood cordoned off five blocks from her house.

  So Carol got out and started down Randolph Street at a fast walk. The damage became steadily worse as she moved south with her friend. It was dusk now and power lines were down everywhere. A car somehow had slipped past the police line; the girls suddenly heard it roaring up behind them and barely had time to jump out of the way. A shaken Carol recognized the driver. It was a neighbor, no doubt frantic to see if his house still stood. Walking on, she spotted her friend, Patti McDiffett, standing on the corner with a group of others.

  “Patti, how’s your house?”

  “What house?” Patti replied icily. “It’s gone!”

  Carol quickened her step and finally reached her bloc
k. Nothing was as before. She couldn’t even tell which house had been hers. She had to count from the corner to get the right lot. The roof and the southern and eastern walls were gone. And all the grass in the yard had been uprooted, yanked clean away. Only mud remained.

  Carol was starting up the driveway, calling for her parents, when she heard a familiar voice speak sharply from the gloom: “Don’t come any closer!”

  It was her mother, Hazel, standing in the shadows by the garage.

  “Why not?” Carol asked.

  “Power lines are down! We’re not to move. You’re not to come closer and I’m not to move!”

  Carol didn’t see her father.

  “Where’s Dad?” she asked.

  “He was worried, so he went downtown to find you. He’s on foot.”

  Carol’s friend, Patty Sellen, was by now extremely concerned about her own family and she wanted to go. So the girls started back for the main drag where Carol had parked. Just as they reached 21st Street, a car pulled up and Carol saw a man get out. It was her father. He turned and saw her and they ran together and hugged for a long, long time. Forty years later, Carol still ranked the moment as the most dramatic of her life.

  Cleve Martin evidently had made it down to the Masonic Temple on foot, jogging most of the three miles. After learning that his daughter was safe and had already left, he was able to catch a ride back to the neighborhood.

  Carol and her father gave Patty a ride home. Thankfully, the girl’s house still stood and her family was unhurt. On the drive back, Carol turned to her father and asked, in deadly earnest, “Dad, what are we going to do?”

  Mr. Martin let out a deep sigh. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I really don’t know . . .”

  Carol could always count on her father for answers. He was a practical, capable man and no stranger to hardship. He’d had an aircraft carrier sunk out from under him during the war. Now, with the family’s house destroyed, their belongings scattered to the wind and a chilly night settling in, he didn’t know what to do. This came as quite a shock to the 16-year-old. She worshipped her dad. In that moment, the enormity of all that had taken place hit home.

  Father and daughter drove on and spoke no more.

  Denny Benge survived the destruction of the barbershop on Kansas Avenue and legged it home after his ’64 Chevy Super Sport was destroyed. He lived in southwest Topeka, not far from the mound. So he got out the family wagon, a ’56 Nomad, and made numerous runs carrying wounded to the hospital with barber Terry Steele. In the course of the evening, the two were searching for survivors in a ruined apartment building near 29th Street when they came across two martinis sitting untouched on a coffee table. The cocktails still had olives in them and contained not a speck of dust or debris. It had been quite a day. The men knocked the drinks back.

  John Fernstrom, the banker who’d survived the tornado in the basement of the Washburn law building after hearing the twister grinding closer as he took a test, grappled through the night with the sounds and images of the day. He was gloomy and restless. He tried to eat but could not, tried to sleep but got up and paced. He’d lie down, and then walk. He couldn’t sit still. Over and over, Fernstrom kept replaying events in his mind. He ran through the images in super-slow motion, as if by reducing the speed, he could get his arms around what had occurred. Something extraordinary had unfolded. He’d been part of it. But his brain was playing catch-up, struggling to process the incomprehensible.

  Elon Torrence was a veteran reporter who’d manned the local Associated Press bureau for 19 years. He was working late when the tornado passed very near his office in the Daily Capital newspaper building east of downtown, breaking windows and slicing power and phone lines. Torrence quickly sensed the scope of the disaster and guessed that if there was one place in town that would have working telephones, it would be the Southwestern Bell building. So he’d walked there and, sure enough, he was right. Company personnel provided him with an office and a working phone. The windows were blown out and the air grew chilly as night fell, but Torrence stayed at his station straight through until dawn and all the next day, gathering information and passing it along to the AP bureau in Kansas City, getting word of the calamity out to the nation and the world.

  Maude Bishop Elementary School was just beyond the damage path, on the ridge northeast of Burnett’s Mound. The school was pressed into service as a community shelter soon after the tornado passed. Just after dark, a couple of men who collectively constituted the entire public works department of tiny Bern, Kansas, a farming hamlet 80 miles north of Topeka, arrived and hooked up a big generator they’d hauled down from the country. The school’s lights, warm and reassuring, blinked on.

  In the gymnasium, a little blond girl, maybe five, sat alone on a mud-covered blanket. She was gripping a dirty doll. No one knew who she was or where she’d come from. Other refugees streamed in, mud-caked and dazed. A middle-aged couple sat in silence on an Army cot with a single suitcase beside them. Another woman was led in, sobbing over and over, “It’s all gone, it’s all gone.”

  A few blocks away, Ron Olson watched the stars come out. The junior high school teacher had lost his house as the tornado crested the ridge. Afterward, he’d sent his family to safety in Burlington, Kansas, 60 miles south. He was keeping an eye on the place through the night. Olson sat with his neighbors from across the street, the Michaelises. Their house was damaged but not destroyed and the little group made the best of it. They got out lawn chairs, fired up the grill and cooked steaks from the freezer before the meat could spoil.

  Sleep was not an option for Olson; too much had transpired. So he watched the stars and watched the house and listened to the distant sirens as night drifted past. Around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., Olson noticed flashlights moving amid the gaping, shattered rooms of his home across the street. He quickly woke his friend, Walt, and, gripping the pistol in his coat pocket, dashed over. Inside, two young men were standing in the darkness. Both carried gunnysacks.

  “What do you think you’re doing here?” Olson demanded.

  “We’re looking for survivors . . ., ” one of the men replied.

  “No, you’re not. You’re looting. I have a pistol in my pocket and if you don’t leave immediately, I’ll shoot you both dead. Believe me, I’m just out of my mind enough to do it.”

  The men didn’t hesitate. They ran.

  Eighteen-year-old Dan Woodward felt every bump on the hard bench in the back of a National Guard deuce and a half as he rolled north out of Ottawa, Kansas, in a five-truck convoy with 100 or so other guardsmen from the 169th Infantry. Woodward worked as a mechanic at the Ottawa Ford dealership. Until around 8:00 p.m., it had been just another Wednesday. But then the call came in to muster at the armory. Details were sketchy. Topeka was hit hard by a tornado; the unit would probably be gone five days.

  The guardsmen reached the city around 11:00 p.m. and the men quickly deployed to patrol for looting in damaged neighborhoods near downtown. Woodward and another soldier found themselves walking alone amid darkened, ruined blocks. They had M-1 rifles with their bayonets fixed. A couple of hours into it, a man suddenly appeared in the darkness. The soldiers shouted for him to halt.

  Woodward’s flashlight caught the man’s face. He was young, in his late 20s maybe. His clothes were disheveled. His skin was ashen and his eyes were fixed and strangely translucent, almost like you could see straight through him. Like his soul was gone.

  “What’s your business down here, mister?”

  “I did live here,” the man said. He gestured halfheartedly to one of the leveled houses nearby. His voice was a monotone.

  “What are you doing out?” Woodward asked. “Don’t you know there’s a curfew?”

  “I’m trying to find my family. I can’t find them. I’ve been looking all over. I’m afraid they’re all dead. I can’t find them anywhere . . .” His words trailed off. Woodward didn’t have a radio. No way to get help.

  There wasn’t much he or h
is companion could do. So they let the man pass. And as quick as he came, the stranger slipped back into the night.

  The hours rolled on, the stars winked out and darkness gradually released its claim on the city. A stirring breeze seemed to kindle the embers of dawn, and in time the entire eastern sky was ablaze in a riot of orange and yellow. Then the red ball itself appeared, bloody and shimmering, lifting incandescently from the ground to the east.

  Here was the new day. It would bring many changes.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Living and the Dead

  Mayor Chuck Wright climbed aboard a National Guard helicopter at 6:00 a.m. Thursday and took off to survey the damage. From above, it appeared as if a giant lawnmower had made a ragged pass from one corner of Topeka to the other. The scope of the devastation was breathtaking, and before the chopper set down, the former marine was shedding tears of grief for his ravaged city.

  But not for long. There was nothing for it except to get to work. So that’s what people did. Relatives arrived from out of town or across the city to help families pick through the rubble and salvage what they could. Hundreds of volunteers poured in: Three hundred Mennonites from central Kansas, Boy Scouts, strangers unaffected by the storm, even people driving through the city on vacation stopped to lend a hand. Topeka bowed its neck and began the task of setting things right again.

  Through it all, a strange mix of anguish and joy seemed to hang like a haze over the city. The death toll had reached 13 before bodies stopped arriving at the hospital morgues. More than 240 volunteers spread out at first light to look for additional casualties. But only one more body was found, an elderly woman in East Topeka.