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

by Bonar Menninger

  “I still have tools in my garage that were given to me by the Salvation Army,” Noack said 40 years later. “I have no use for the Red Cross.”

  Noack’s sentiments were echoed by Lanny Ellis, the pawnshop owner in East Topeka. “The Salvation Army was giving out sandwiches and coffee and shelter and asking for nothing back. They were fabulous. But the Red Cross was down here charging for food. It left me with a real sour feeling. To this day, I do not give to the Red Cross. I give directly to the Topeka Salvation Army.”

  Inge Nicely, the wife of carpenter Glenn Nicely and among the first victims of the tornado, was taken by her sister-in-law to a Red Cross shelter several days after the storm. She went there to gather clothes and other necessities. Still reeling from the loss of her home, possessions and nearly her life, Inge found herself sitting across a desk from a Red Cross woman. According to Inge, the woman looked up and asked, in a condescending, almost accusatory tone, “And just what is it that you want?”

  Inge stammered and stood up.

  “You can stuff it!” she replied and turned and walked away.

  No doubt, many storm victims benefited from the efforts of the Red Cross and its volunteers. But the charity apparently made a bad situation worse for others.

  On June 16, a radio-television marathon fund-raiser featuring stars of the Grand Ole Opry was held at WIBW’s studios. The program was picked up by stations across Kansas and included 24 country-and-western singers. Ferlin Husky headlined the show. Husky had topped the charts in 1960 with the hit “Wings of a Dove.” Radio reception must have been exceptional that night; donations came in from as far away as Maryland and California. The telethon raised $54,000. Estimated in today’s dollars, the amount would equal about $358,000.

  The mighty, 90-foot-tall cottonwood tree on the statehouse grounds, which supposedly had sprouted from a construction stake when work started on the building back in 1866, lost half its branches in the tornado. But the battered old sentinel hung on and survived for years to come.

  And so the days rolled past, the cleanup continued and the impossibility that recovery posed in the tornado’s immediate aftermath began to recede like a mountain washing slowly to the sea. Washburn University epitomized the transformation under way. The university had been effectively destroyed in what was perhaps the single most devastating disaster ever to befall an American institution of higher learning. Losses totaled $8 million (an estimated $53 million in today’s dollars); 11 of 13 major buildings had been badly damaged or destroyed. When the school’s vice president for academic affairs, Arthur F. Engelbert, asserted the day after the tornado that the school would open in the fall and emerge stronger than ever, the words sounded like the desperate boasts of a delusional man. But progress was relentless. Soon after the storm, giant tarps were brought in to cover exposed buildings and protect undamaged books and other materials. Work crews from Washburn and the University of Kansas in nearby Lawrence, along with private contractors and student volunteers, salvaged much, and before long, heavy equipment operators were bulldozing the stately old ruins into the ground. The single exception was Carnegie Hall, the law building, which was restored.

  Plans for replacement structures soon emerged. Fortuitously, the university’s board of trustees had rewritten the university’s property insurance in early 1966 and switched from standard, depreciated coverage to a replacement cost policy. The change was made at the recommendation of the university’s treasurer, Richard Vogel, and would have profound implications for Washburn’s future. Instead of receiving a payout based on the aging structures’ assessed value or depreciated construction costs, Washburn could look forward to receiving enough money to build a brand-new, state-of-the-art campus.

  In the meantime, summer classes quickly were reconstituted at Topeka West High School and began the week after the storm. As summer wore on, 41 portable trailer-classrooms provided by the General Services Administration arrived and were anchored with concrete piers in open ground and parking lots. And just as Engelbert had predicted, the school opened its doors for classes on September 12. Washburn had a new nickname after that: Tornado Tech.

  In a roundabout way, the destruction at Washburn would produce one of the most significant public safety advancements to emerge from the Topeka tornado. Few stories were more publicized in the wake of June 8 than the harrowing tale of the near-tragedy at the MacVicar Chapel music recital. After the sirens sounded, 40 or so recital attendees had — as tornado safety doctrine directed — sought shelter in the southwestern corner of the basement. But because the piano in that room had been out of tune, Robert Snyder, the Washburn music professor, moved the group to a practice room at the other end of the building. This decision saved many lives, since the original, southwest corner room ended up buried beneath tons of stone and heavy timbers. Aside from triggering imponderable questions about the role of luck, fate or divine intervention in tornado survival, the event begged a more practical issue: Was it really true that the southwestern corner of the basement was the best place to ride out a tornado?

  One of those intrigued by this problem was a young assistant professor of meteorology at the University of Kansas. Joe Eagleman was 29 and a native of southern Missouri. He’d always been interested in tornadoes. So when he read about the MacVicar Chapel incident, it occurred to him that the destruction in Topeka might offer a unique opportunity to statistically assess whether the southwestern corner was in fact the best place to be during a tornado. The logic behind this long-standing convention was that debris from a tornado (which typically approached from the southwest) would blow up and away and therefore would be less likely to fall in on someone seeking shelter just behind and beneath the point of impact.

  Two weeks after the storm, Eagleman and two graduate students began a field assessment of homes across the city. The professor designed a worksheet that could be used to document the location of damage and debris within each house, regardless of design or construction. All told, 135 structures were surveyed and documented over three days.

  Eagleman returned to KU and began crunching the data. Immediately, he was struck by what the numbers revealed. According to the survey, the southwestern corner was definitely not the best place to be during a tornado. In fact, it actually was among the most dangerous locations in which to seek shelter. Only the southeastern corner was more vulnerable to falling debris. In contrast, the northeastern corner of the building, farthest from the tornado’s impact, statistically offered the highest level of safety.

  These conclusions flew in the face of long-standing Weather Bureau public safety recommendations. Consequently, when an article about the study appeared in the Topeka Daily Capital in early August, the reaction was fast and furious. Richard Garrett, meteorologist-in-charge of the Topeka Weather Bureau office, stormed into Eagleman’s office at the University of Kansas the very next morning to confront the young heretic.

  “He was very angry,” Eagleman later recalled. “He basically told me he’d been studying tornadoes all his life and that I didn’t know what I was talking about. But I had seen the data, and I’ve always been a stubborn person, and I believe in myself. So I listened, thanked him for stopping by and basically brushed him off.”

  Eagleman’s survey results were published in a scholarly journal, Monthly Weather Review, in March 1967. That same year, the National Weather Bureau’s tornado safety rules changed: The southwestern corner recommendation was abandoned and replaced instead with the general suggestion that individuals go to the basement and “seek shelter under a sturdy workbench or heavy table if possible.” Over time, the accepted guidance became that individuals go to the lowest, most interior portion of the home.

  Despite the fact that the agency clearly had taken Eagleman’s work to heart, his paper later drew a lengthy rebuttal from a meteorologist in the Kansas City Weather Bureau office, who attacked Eagleman’s data, methodology and conclusions. But Eagleman was able to duplicate the findings through five subsequent studies invo
lving hundreds of homes damaged by tornadoes in Texas, Florida, Kansas and Mississippi through the late ’60s and early ’70s.

  Years later, Eagleman lamented the fact that the Weather Bureau never credited or acknowledged, formally or otherwise, the significance of his work. Nor did Garrett apologize for his hotheaded reaction. In fact, Eagleman never heard from him again.

  “It would have been nice to have been recognized by the National Weather Service,” said Eagleman. “It was disappointing.” In the years after the Topeka study, Eagleman would continue to make pioneering contributions to tornado science. He developed one of the first realistic simulations of a tornado in a laboratory setting and came up with early, breakthrough, ultimately accurate theories regarding the role of double-vortex circulation in tornado formation. Interestingly, Eagleman later played a role in destroying yet another tenet of 1960s-era tornado safety dogma: Wind tunnel experiments showed that opening the windows of a home as a tornado approached had no effect whatsoever in equalizing the pressure and keeping a house from exploding. Just the opposite, in fact: Open windows made it easier for high winds to get inside a house and tear the structure apart.

  Eagleman’s findings about the risks associated with seeking shelter in the southwestern corner did raise one final, intriguing question: If that was indeed the most dangerous place to be, then how come more people in Topeka didn’t die, given that the location was where most of those with a basement would likely have gone? Eagleman acknowledged that this had always remained a mystery to him, although he theorized that given the sudden pressure drop inside the tornado, many walls tended to fall outward rather than inward.

  The remarkably low loss of life in the Topeka tornado would remain the subject of considerable scrutiny and approbation in the years ahead. For vulnerable communities in Kansas and elsewhere, the lesson was clear. The Coffeyville Journal in southeast Kansas noted that 15 years of preparedness work in Topeka had preceded the devastating tornado: “Cities such as Coffeyville, which have not stressed tornado safety in recent years and have no adequate warning systems, therefore should pay heed. We should start at once putting our house in order. Let us not find ourselves saying after a disaster hits, ‘If we had only . . . ’”

  Echoed the Parsons Sun, “The city of Parsons well might investigate the possibility of a genuine storm warning system. Air raid sirens may be available through the federal civil defense program. Their installation and maintenance would not be costly, and certainly can constitute prudent insurance against grievous disaster.”

  A year after the storm, the Disaster Research Center at Ohio State University in Columbus published a lengthy research report examining the nature and impact of warning systems in place in Topeka on June 8. Author Robert Stallings described Topeka’s comprehensive tornado defenses and the extensive coordination that existed between public agencies, the media, civilian volunteers and the community at large:

  It is clear that an elaborate tornado disaster subculture has emerged in response to [high tornado risk]. A complex organization and technology, along with corresponding attitudes and values, is present among the residents and organizations of the city. There is not only an elaborate pattern for sensitizing the community to a particular kind of danger but equally as important, there is widespread knowledge about the appropriate course of action to follow when certain cues are presented.101

  Stallings went on to note that while many other communities in the country were subjected to the same level of tornado risk as Topeka, the response in the city had been of “a different order.” The high survival rate, he said, had much to do with the advanced warnings. But just as important, if not more so, was the fact that “Topeka is psychologically and socially prepared for tornadoes whereas other localities are not.”

  The pivotal role played by the U.S. Weather Bureau’s Richard Garrett in fostering that mind-set was formally recognized in 1967 when Garrett received the Bureau’s Exceptional Service Award. The citation noted his “unusual awareness of and sensitivity to the public needs in the severe weather warning realm, as well as his imaginative leadership and response to these, which led to his developing, implementing and maintaining such an effective tornado warning system that resulted in the saving of many lives when an extremely destructive tornado struck Topeka.”

  Mary Patricia Fleenor, Garrett’s daughter, said her father seldom talked about the tornado or his work in the years after June 8, 1966. But she was certain he was proud of all that had been accomplished and was particularly proud of the resolute performance turned in by Weather Bureau staff on that fateful day. Garrett retired in 1971 and died at age 97 in 2003. His wife of 65 years, Margaret, passed away three years later.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Beneath the Shadow of June 8th

  The pervasive sense of shock and unreality that dominated the tornado’s aftermath gradually abated in the first frenetic, then grinding pace of cleanup, recovery and reconstruction. In fits and starts, for individuals and the city as a whole, a new reality emerged. It was much like the old one, only different.

  Carpenter Glenn Nicely and his family moved in with Glenn’s sister in Scranton, Kansas, 25 miles south of Topeka. Despite his many cuts, bruises and puncture wounds (not to mention burns from the ruptured hot water heater), Glenn was back at work the following week. The horses that were lifted across Auburn Road in the tornado were rounded up and all were unhurt. Mitzi, the Nicelys’ Chihuahua–toy terrier mix, surfaced a few days after the storm. She’d been in the family’s trailer with Tommy the cat when the tornado hit. The trailer vanished; only its chassis remained afterward. Yet somehow Mitzi survived with a broken leg and a chunk missing from her tongue. A couple of days after the dog reappeared, a friend of the Nicelys said she thought she’d spotted a cat near the ruins of the family home. So Inge drove over, got out and called Tommy’s name. And, sure enough, the big Siamese bolted at a dead run across the grass and launched himself into Inge’s arms. He was unhurt.

  Two years after the storm, Glenn had a strange encounter concerning the tornado. He was building a gas station in Valley Falls, a small town 45 miles northeast of Topeka. As it happened, he and a co-worker stopped in for a beer at a local tavern one day after work. But when the sky turned dark and menacing, Glenn figured they’d better go.

  “I’m not going to get caught in another tornado up here,” he said.

  A local man asked Glenn if he’d been in the Topeka tornado. Glenn replied that he had, and the stranger asked him his name. When Glenn told him, the man said, “Well, I think I have something that belongs to you. I don’t know what it is, but it’s got your name on it.” Turns out the guy had found Glenn and Inge’s German marriage certificate in the middle of a field, impaled on a weed stalk, the day after the tornado.

  What are the odds of that?

  Glenn and Inge eventually built a nice ranch home on Glenn’s parents’ property, and after making do in a small trailer for two and a half years, they moved into it in January 1970. Glenn built the home on a poured, reinforced concrete basement, and the Nicelys set up a bedroom below ground for nights when severe weather threatened. And to this day, Inge said, Glenn will sit up and watch the Doppler radar on TV, all night if necessary, until he’s sure the danger has passed.

  He was never going to let a tornado take him by surprise again.

  Disc jockey Rick Douglass remained in the hospital for about a week after June 8. He became something of a celebrity due to the warning he’d broadcast as he raced down the mound. A picture of him — grinning and lying in his hospital bed, smoking a cigarette — made the front page of the Kansas City Star. At one point, Douglass was being interviewed by a TV reporter when he felt a sharp pain in the back of his head. A nurse came in and probed around in his bushy, wiry hair. Then she said, “You’re not going to believe this,” and pulled out the jagged base section of a soda pop bottle that had lodged above his right ear.

  The WREN-mobile, the storm-chasing Chevy II wagon that had vani
shed in the storm and consequently had caused Douglass so much angst, turned up a week after the tornado in the ruins of the nearby Huntington Apartments. The car was mauled and every window shattered. But the keys were still in the ignition and Douglass hung onto them as a reminder of that day. His wallet was found, too.

  The photograph taken of a mud-and-straw-caked Douglass being helped into Stormont-Vail Hospital became one of the more memorable images to emerge from the Topeka tornado. It ran in Life magazine and elsewhere nationwide. For a long time after, wise guys would approach Douglass in White Lakes Mall or elsewhere in town, and their line was always the same: “Boy, you sure look better than the last time I saw you!” A lot of people wanted his autograph.

  Douglass said he never saw himself as a hero; he was just doing his job. Psychiatrists evaluated him later that summer and suggested to WREN management that Douglass should do no more storm spotting from the field. Evidently they were concerned that, given all he’d been through, he might flip out and drive straight into the next tornado he encountered.

  Douglass stayed at WREN until 1971 and then took a job in Kansas City before moving to the Phoenix area in 1979. He got out of radio in the mid-1980s and today is an account manager with an advertising firm in Phoenix.

  Along with the flying ’59 Pontiac Bonneville he saw as he lay on the I-470 entrance ramp, one of Douglass’s most potent memories of the tornado was the smell that literally permeated his skin for many months after the storm.

  “It’s a unique, very strong, pungent smell,” he said. “Very earthly, like mud after a rain, but there was this other top note to it — it could have been the blood from the dead ponies at the pony farm — that just made you draw back and burned your stomach. We drove past Washburn a few weeks after the storm and it was the same smell. I got sick to my stomach.”