As for losing their home, two cars and most of their worldly possessions in the Greensburg tornado, Guy Shuck said, “We were just in shock for quite a while afterward. But I think maybe it was God’s way of telling us that we had too much stuff.”
If the ’66 tornado hadn’t killed Lisle Grauer, the proprietor of the Pla-Land bowling alley, the loss of his beloved bowling alley would have. That’s what his son, Ron, always believed.
“I had to go down there and take all the bowling balls home because a lot of them belonged to other people,” Ron said. “They weren’t all house balls. And, God, what a horrible mess it was. He would have collapsed just looking at the place.”
Ron said his father was “a hell of a good dad.” He recalled how Lisle had chartered a plane to fly him to Kansas City on the day Ron was scheduled to report to the Navy, and how his father was standing there at the gate on the day he was discharged; how his dad lent him money for a down payment on his first house and then sent him a note when Ron’s first child was born that read: “Paid in full!”
“He was a rough, tough, sentimental guy,” Ron said. “He was a real character.”
Denny Benge was the former marine and concrete finisher who watched the tornado devour the bus barn from the back door of the barbershop before diving for cover as the building came down around him. Afterward, he couldn’t find his car and jogged most of the way home.
A few months after the storm, Benge was finishing a concrete patio at a physician’s home when the sirens went off. He was covered with cement but didn’t think twice. He bolted straight through the wet concrete and went in the patio door, across the man’s white carpet and down to the basement.
“I guess it still had me a little spooked,” he said. “This man and his wife knew. They didn’t say anything. I apologized and tried to clean it up. But when you go through something like that, you pay attention to the sirens.”
Southwestern Bell was harshly criticized after the tornado for failing to warn company telephone operators about the approaching danger or allowing them to seek shelter. Pressure from the union helped force a policy change, and operator Laura Dalrymple was among those who took cover in the telephone building when the sirens next sounded in early August of ’66.
Tim Lyle watched the tornado churn across the city and then straight for him from the 10th floor of the Santa Fe office building. More than forty years later, the funnel still lived in his dreams.
“I wouldn’t call them nightmares as such,” he said. “But I have dreams of tornadoes, and I get a real apprehensive feeling and I wake up abruptly. I just feel fortunate that we came through it unscathed. It gave me an acute awareness of my mortality as far as nature is concerned. And when I hear the sirens go off today, I go to the basement. I don’t go out and look.”
Carol Martin (now Carol Yoho) was the girl in the Masonic singing group who returned home to find her house destroyed and who finally reunited with her father on the street at the end of that epic day. She had nightmares for a time after June 8. And even today, the tornado reaches out across the years.
“Whenever I really think about it, my heart races and I start breathing heavily,” she said. “It was traumatic, dramatic, dangerous, exciting, memorable. It was amazing and it was hard. But most of us survived it. If it taught me anything, it is that you don’t mess with Mother Nature!”
The woman pulled down Kansas Avenue by the tornado, Dorothy Decker, was hospitalized for a month after June 8. The doctors stitched her up and put her ankle in a cast. But they didn’t get all the shards out of her body. In the late 1960s, Dorothy began to develop sores on her legs and rear end. She’d go in for X-rays, but nothing would show up. In time, though, glass and splinters slowly began to work their way out of her skin. Some of the pieces of plate glass were huge: a quarter-inch thick, an inch wide, and two or three inches long, according to her son, Don Berry. Dorothy ended up with a mason jar full of shrapnel before the stuff stopped coming out. Her physician, Lester Saylor, evidently believed humor played a part in healing: He called Dorothy “Glass Ass” and “Peg Leg.”
Not surprisingly, she was terrified of tornadoes after June 8. The sirens went off later that summer, and Dorothy still couldn’t walk yet because of her broken ankle. So she bounced — no doubt, painfully — down the stairs on her rear end. Her daughter, Barbara, said Dorothy didn’t complain in the years that followed, despite the constant physical reminders of that day. She just kept going. But in 1976, Dorothy died unexpectedly in her sleep while visiting Barbara in Muncie, Indiana. She was just 56 years old.
Nine-year-old Jill Nauman (now Jill Poole) was the girl from Washington State whose summer driving vacation had ended abruptly under the 10th Street Bridge. She spent about a week in the nearby Santa Fe Hospital, receiving treatment for the nasty scalp wound she’d received as the tornado came over. The Santa Fe Hospital was set up for railroad employees and retirees, so it didn’t really have a pediatric department. But the staff improvised pajamas for Jill, and she made friends with the nurses and followed them on their rounds. She met a lot of the older patients and, all in all, it turned out to be a pretty neat experience for her.
Except for one night: On Sunday evening, four days after the tornado, heavy thunderstorms once again rolled through Topeka. The thunder crashed and vivid lightning ripped the sky most of the night. Jill was petrified. She wasn’t used to storms like this. It rained a lot in Washington State, but seldom with such ferocity. Plus, Jill was still badly shaken by her experience in the tornado. And her parents were not there. So one of the hospital employees, a man named Mario, came and sat with her and held her hand nearly the whole night through, until the storms moved on.
The Esquivel family also sought shelter under the 10th Street overpass. They’d fled there from the nearby dental building they’d been cleaning. The family made it home to find their house destroyed but Mrs. Esquivel and Steph unharmed. Fortunately, Ramon Esquivel Sr. had recently taken out additional homeowners insurance. The decision had been a real sore spot with his wife, Phyllis, in the weeks leading up to the tornado, according to son Ramon Jr. Phyllis didn’t think the family could afford it. They were “insurance poor,” she argued. But she didn’t complain afterward. The family rebuilt a bigger and better home and moved in just before Christmas.
A number of people — the Esquivels, Jill Nauman, Rick Douglass, Dave Hathaway and others — sought shelter beneath interstate highway overpasses on June 8. It seemed like the place to go at the time, and evidently it was, given the lack of available alternatives and the fact that none of them died.
But subsequent events have shown that those who survived under bridges on June 8 were extremely lucky. In fact, highway overpasses can be death traps in tornadoes. The National Weather Service conducted an in-depth study of overpass safety, or the lack thereof, after a particularly fierce tornado outbreak hit Oklahoma and southern Kansas on May 3, 1999. At least three people were killed by tornadoes after they’d sought shelter beneath interstate bridges. Others suffered horrific injuries, including compound fractures and shattered bones, missing fingers, missing ears, missing noses and impalement by debris.
The problems with seeking shelter beneath overpasses are threefold, according to the Weather Service study: 1) The flow of the already-fierce wind is constricted by the bridge and accelerated, thus increasing the likelihood that people will be sucked out, blown away or seriously injured by debris; 2) Seeking shelter at the top of the abutment puts individuals above ground level and at greater risk of being struck by flying debris; and 3) The underside of most highway bridges lack exposed I beams that can afford some degree of protection from the circular, swirling winds that attack first from one side and then from the other.
Today, the National Weather Service strongly advises against seeking cover under bridges and is working hard to dispel the widespread public notion that doing so is a good idea. The best option if caught on the highway, according to the National Weather Service, is to
attempt to determine which way the tornado is moving and, if time and distance permit, drive out of its path. Failing that, individuals should get out of their vehicles and seek shelter in the lowest spot possible.102
Francis Bordner was the Santa Fe electrician who survived the tornado by clinging to a toilet at the Vickers gas station in East Topeka. He recovered from the cuts and wounds he received during the tornado. But his sister, Catherine Schmidt, said he wasn’t the same afterward. Bordner’s hearing bothered him for a long time, evidently from the roar of the tornado or the pressure drop. And at the slightest risk of severe weather, the lifelong bachelor would immediately leave work and retreat to his basement. He set up a bedroom there, and he would stay in his lair until any threat, real or imagined, had passed.
“He didn’t talk about it much, but I think the experience really took a lot out of him emotionally,” his sister said.
Bordner died of cancer in 1980.
Olen Robbins, the wheel shop foreman who took cover in the old refinery building at the Santa Fe shops, lost his house and all his possessions in the tornado. Fortunately, he had good insurance and was able to rebuild. As was the case with his first house, Robbins built the new one himself. He came out whole in the end. But the tornado changed him. “One lesson I learned was how fast you can lose everything you’ve got, everything you’ve accumulated over a period of years. It’s gone like it was never there.” What made it worse, he said, was that even after everything had been ruined or destroyed, he still had a mess to clean up.
“I would have been better off if there was nothing left.”
Robbins said he still thinks about the tornado every month or so.
Norma Jackson, the woman who rode out the tornado on the floor under a mattress with her sleeping baby in her arms, said her son, Paul Frederick, never showed any ill effects from the experience. But events haunted Norma.
“You looked at life differently after that,” she said. “You were thankful to be alive. You heard about people who didn’t make it. You put your life back together. But there was still something missing — I mean, in the way it used to be versus what it had turned into. You just kept pushing. You had to continue. And I guess being young and growing up like I did on a farm, whatever was wrong, you just worked to get it fixed.”
The changes came fast and hard for “Chick” Taylor’s wife, Fern, and her mentally handicapped brother and sister, Everett and Stella, after Chick was killed in his home on B Street by a flying culvert. The timing of Chick’s death couldn’t have been worse, as if there can ever be such a thing as a good time to lose a spouse. On June 8, Chick was just two months shy of retirement. He’d been looking forward to collecting a full pension from Hill’s Packing Company in September. But the payout was not to be. Nor was there any life insurance. Consequently, Fern couldn’t afford to rebuild. So she moved in with her daughter, Katherine, and son-in-law, Wayne Boline Sr.
Stella, Fern’s sister, was shipped off to a home for the developmentally disabled in Silver Lake. Stella had suffered from a large goiter for most of her life, and on June 8, she’d been struck in the neck by debris. The injury complicated her condition and the doctors said the goiter would need to come out. They operated, but it was not a good outcome. Stella died just six months after the tornado.
Her brother, Everett — also developmentally disabled — likewise was injured in the tornado: hit hard, twice, in the forehead. The doctors said the blows would have killed any other man. But Everett was strong. He had a temper, too, and was hard to handle. So he was sent away. But he didn’t last long anywhere due to his violent ways. For the next quarter century, Everett was bounced from institution to institution across Kansas, before finally coming to rest in Goodland, out near the Colorado line. He died in the early 1990s.
Wanda Idlet (now Wanda Bulmer) was the girl whose mother refused her daughter’s plea to seek shelter as the tornado approached. Mrs. Idlet was certain Burnett’s Mound would protect the city. The family was not hurt, but their home was badly damaged and Mr. Idlet had let his homeowners insurance lapse. So they struggled coming back. One thing Wanda remembered was how the animals suffered from the tornado. Cats and dogs were lost, injured and killed. Baby birds were blown from their nests.
It was a hard time for all God’s creatures.
After June 8, Topekans were forced to acknowledge that the legend of Burnett’s Mound had been just that. The hill could not protect the city from tornadoes after all. Not by a long shot. Some pointed to the water tank erected on the side of the mound five years before. The reservoir had disturbed the sacred Potawatomi burial grounds, it was said. A terrible curse had been unleashed.
Whether you believed that or not, a person couldn’t help but wonder about why the tornado did what it did. It was just human nature. Was the destruction really about the reservoir and the Indians buried on the mound? Or was the water tank merely a symbol and the tornado actually payback for a much larger injustice, for the way Indians were treated generally in Kansas — dispossessed, dispersed, humiliated and ultimately, as a people, destroyed? Did the state’s collective karma come back on the capital city a hundred-plus years on? It was spooky how the tornado made for the mound from miles away, just like it was drawing a bead on the hill. And then, amazingly, the funnel had gone straight over the top of the water tank. But the reservoir was strong — built to hold back 20,000-plus tons of water — and it had been undamaged.
Even then, though, the tornado seemed to act with malice aforethought and vengeance in its heart. Chief Burnett’s creek, the Shunganunga, pointed like an ancient, crooked finger toward the heart of the city, and the tornado more or less followed the creek’s path. It shattered Washburn, the crown jewel of Topeka, and then took aim at the state capitol, the ultimate symbol of the white man’s power. It even hurled a small building at the capitol dome, as if to underscore its fury. Finally, the tornado made its grand exit, rolling down the airport runway and changing in color from black to white before starting to lift. And then, when it roped out, the funnel was over Tecumseh, a town named for the Shawnee leader who’d united the Potawatomis and the other Woodland tribes against the whites so many years before.
But if that was all just coincidence, if the tornado wasn’t an agent of Chief Burnett or the Great Spirit, then was it God who informed its actions? Did an angry God unleash the destruction to punish the city? Or was it a merciful God who protected so many from the pitiless wrath of Satan? Then again, maybe it was just physics: a tiny wisp of an updraft on a sultry afternoon — the precise mixture of vapor, heat and motion, a permutation and chain reaction that quickly mushroomed into a killer.
The answers, of course, could never be known. Not in this lifetime, anyway. And even if they were, it wouldn’t change anything. The tornado was what it was. It had come and it had gone. And all you could do, all Topeka could do, was pick up the pieces and move on.
Still, the terror of that day hung around. On Wednesday evening, June 7, 1967 — exactly 364 days and four minutes after the sirens sounded on Wednesday, June 8 — they went off again when a tornado once more was spotted growling in from the southwest. Pandemonium ensued. People scrambled for shelter. One woman was injured when she ran straight into a barbed-wire fence in a headlong dash for cover. Cars careened on the streets. Some people, irrationally, climbed on roofs to watch the tornado approach. Fortunately, the twister lifted before it reached the city and the danger passed.
But the whole thing was still pretty strange.
And so the days gathered in pools like water and collected into months and years. Time ran on. People coped. They rebuilt. They adjusted. They learned to forget. And the city recovered. Trees grew on Burnett’s Mound and eventually all but obscured the water tank. Development pressed in on its flanks. Washburn University came back stronger than ever. A damaged, 30-foot section of the capitol dome was re-clad in new copper, and the patch stood out for years like a great bandage against the green, oxidized dome. A construction boom
lasted for a while. Devastated portions of the city were rebuilt. Some homes, though, never did come back, especially in older, poorer parts of town. Even today, if you follow the damage path, a curious pattern of oddly vacant lots, newer ranch homes, incongruously placed apartments and much older frame houses can be discerned.
And the trees: It was amazing how many survived. For decades, you could always spot a tornado tree: They were twisted and deformed like something from a hideous dream, clawing and stabbing at the sky with shriveled, truncated or unnaturally crooked limbs. But living and growing just the same.
As for the people, it’s hard to say what the tornado did to the psyche of Topeka. But the collective trauma of the event, along with the hard work of recovery, probably colored beliefs and attitudes in the city for a generation, and not necessarily in a bad way. There were scars, of course. But the knowledge that, at any given time and for no apparent reason, nature can take you out — along with everything you own — has a galvanizing effect. It strips away that which is superficial and extraneous. It crushes pretention. It forces you into the here and now. And it instills a certain indifference to adversity and a gritty determination to overcome any obstacle, no matter what the days may hold.
Notes
1 Thomas P. Grazulis, The Tornado: Nature’s Ultimate Windstorm (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 119.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 32
