Tornado
June 8, 1966

Table of Contents (Click on a topic to jump to that topic. Click on back button to come back. Or just scroll down.)

How the City Watched
The Sirens Sounded
The Tornado's Path
Our Damage
That Night
The Next Day
Debris Removal
Staying with Clyde and Rosie
Photos from the Day After the Tornado
Photos from a Few Days Later
Photos of the Reconstruction of Our Home
Photos of the Neighborhood

How the City Watched

On the evening of June 8, 1966, our city was under a tornado watch. When this occurred, teams of three (fire, police, broadcasting) would go to designated locations around the edges of the city and literally watch for tornados. During this time period there was no such thing as doppler radar to allow remote monitoring of tornadic activity.

The Sirens Sounded

Just after dinner, the team located on a hill spotted an extremely large tornado southwest of the city. The hill was named after an Indian Chief. Indian folklore said that the mound would deflect any bad weather and keep the area safe. This tornado was heading northeast toward the city. The warning sirens were activated.

Sirens usually went off two or three times each summer. When that happened, the family (Clara, Kathy and Murphy) would open windows about an inch or so (to equalize interior and exterior pressure during a storm); gather up flashlights, a transistor radio, important papers, etc.; and go into our basement. The basement had two rooms, a hallway, and stairs that lead up to the first floor. The east room had our clothes washing machine. The west room had an old table, the furnace which heated the house, and clothes lines to allow clothes to be dried if the weather was bad. The hallway connected both rooms to the exterior exit into the back yard.

The Tornado's Path

As we monitored the radio, we heard tracking information about the tornado's location. This very large tornado went over the hill as if it weren't there, and headed northeast right across the city. To start with, it destroyed several apartment complexes and many homes. It damaged buildings at the VA hospital and a neurological hospital. It destroyed more homes. Each and every building on the local college campus (except the gymnasium) was destroyed. The tornado continued on and destroyed more homes in the College Hill and Central Park area.

I remember hearing the radio say that the tornado was spotted at 12th and Fillmore streets. My thoughts were that this was bad luck for our piano teacher. Her house was on the corner of 12th and Fillmore streets. In reality, the tornado swept across Fillmore street about a block and a half south of the radio report ... right through our home.

We huddled into the southwest corner of the west room in our basement. According to civil defense instructions, this was the safest location to be in. It worked for us.

As the tornado ripped apart our neighborhood and our home, we could hear lots swirling glass and debris overhead. The electricity went off. It got dark as the destruction occurred. It was over very quickly. We looked out our basement window. The sun came out and the sky was actually beautiful just after the tornado passed by.

The tornado continued northeast from our neighborhood. It destroyed many more homes, damaged the one of the government buildings, did a lot of damage downtown including gutting a ten-story office building, destroyed the municipal airport, and left town through a wheat field. All in all, it cut a half mile wide path of destruction southwest to northeast across the entire city. Seventeen people were killed.

Our Damage

We were safe and unhurt. We went up the stairs to the first floor. The destruction inside the house was unbelievable. Windows were broken out. Wall plaster was broken off. Furniture had been moved by the winds. Debris, from who knows where, was everywhere on the first floor. The closed-in porch was destroyed, gone, missing, blown away. It was the only room that we could not crack open the windows to equalize pressures during the storm. It had storm windows ... how funny.

I went upstairs to my room. It was almost untouched. One small bird statue broke when it fell off a shelf as the house shook. But nothing else at all was touched in my room. I could not get the door open to the attic storage room. This was due to a tree, which came in through a storm-damaged hole in the roof, blocking the door. Later we found that except for the hole and tree, the attic was undamaged in stark contrast to the massive damage on the first floor.

As we tried to get out of the house, we found that both the front and back porches had fallen down blocking the front and back doors. We got out of the house by climbing out one of the windows from Clara's room. We were helped out by Mike, the son of our Bishop, who was at a college party across the street.

The neighborhood destruction was awesome. Debris was piled up several feet high everywhere we looked. The John's house, next door to the north, was missing its entire roof. Our barn was just gone. I had just greased its door tracks (not a fun job) an hour before. We never did find the remains of our barn. Someone's garage was neatly folded on top of our car. There were very few trees left standing. I saw two-by-fours sticking into tree trunks. Cars were in the wrong places. I wish I had taken photos that evening to capture the magnitude of destruction, but we were all kind of in shock.

Mike and I went next door to John's house to look for survivors. Their back stairs were missing. We found someone else's' and pushed them up to the remains of their back porch to get in. Their basement doors were all blocked by debris and they were yelling for help to get out. We cleaned away the debris. They thought we were heroes.

There was only one injury in our neighborhood. Larry, across the street and two doors south, cut his leg a little as he climbed out of his house through a window.

That Night

We headed to the high school. According to the radio, it was supposed to be a shelter for those of us made homeless by the storm. Kathy remembered that Clara flagged down one of the many people in cars trying to get into the neighborhood to do some sightseeing and after Clara convinced them that they would take us to the high school, they gave us a ride. After getting there, we found that no one was there and it wasn't set up as a shelter.

So we went across the street from the high school to the Red Cross building. Clara sent Kathy to the home of her boss from work, Eunice. All of that night, Clara made sandwiches and coffee which the Red Cross distributed to the hundreds of civil defense and national guard personnel who were brought in to keep the damaged neighborhoods safe. Murphy rode with one of the Red Cross motor homes to the destruction areas to actually hand out the food and drink all night. Sometime after midnight, Murphy caught a ride back to the Red Cross office with a car that was showing Red Cross biggies the extent of the destruction all around town. Everything was dark and it looked bad. No street lights or electricity remained in the destruction areas. Most roads were blocked by debris. What a mess. But eventually Murphy got back to the Red Cross building.

We walked over to the Eunice's home, which wasn't damaged, to try to get a little sleep and get some breakfast. We stayed with that family the rest of that week.

The Next Day

When the sun came up, we walked over to our home. Our landlord, Mr. Pratt, met us there to see what we could do to prevent further weather damage by covering up the roof holes with tarp paper and broken windows with plywood.

One of the big problems was that we could not easily get in and out of the house because of the porch debris blocking the doors. There were national guard crews clearing the street debris with bulldozers. They could work up to the sidewalk, but not on the main part of people's yards (like where our front porch debris was). Clara found the officer in charge, made sure he got as much of our iced tea as he wanted (How about some sugar or lemon?), and the tons of debris were magically cleared away from blocking the door. And because somehow the porch debris ended up on the other side of the sidewalk, it was hauled away.

We started clearing paths through the debris across our yard so that we could get to the car. A gentleman came up to us and asked if we were working there because it was our house or were we getting paid. When we told him that we lived here, he said he was going to help us clear the paths. He got his tools, including a chain saw, and helped us all day. This kind man was a top-level manager at a state agency.

After the streets were cleared, the biggest problem was the sightseers. There were so many sightseers that the streets were clogged up with their cars such that workers and equipment had a hard time getting in and out of the neighborhood.

While we were resting for a moment on what was left of the front porch, Mrs. Miller, a friend from church, showed up with two bags of groceries. Clara almost burst into tears. Mrs. Miller knew that Kathy was scheduled to go to Church Camp during the next week. One big problem: all of her clothes were blown all over the house. She started gathering any clothing or fabric she could find within the destruction inside our house and took them to her house to wash them. It turned out that the tornado had impregnated debris within the clothing hems. This kind lady undid all of the hems before washing our clothes and then rehemmed the clothing before bringing the clothing back to us. Kathy made it to Camp on schedule.

Later during that day, Murphy accidentally stepped on a rusty nail. In order to get a tetanus shot, Murphy hitchhiked to the hospital, got the shot, and then hitchhiked back home.

Debris Removal

Over the long Fourth of July weekend, Mr. Pratt, his son, and I hauled out many, many truck loads of debris out of our yard. What a mess.

Staying with Clyde and Rosie

On Sunday, we moved in with Clyde and Rosie, who also attended the Cathedral, for six weeks while our house was repaired. They lived just south of the river. Kathy headed off to Camp while we moved into their home. These were really nice people.

Photos from the Day After the Tornado

These first two photos were taken by the insurance adjuster the day after the tornado. He used a Polaroid Land Camera. It was the first instant camera that I had ever seen.
 

Here was Murphy posing on what was left of the front porch. The national guard had just hauled away our front porch debris. Mr. Pratt had put a tarp on the hole in the roof. The rest of the roof looked really bad. Mr. Pratt nailed a piece of plywood over the living room window. You can see how the closed-in porch was blown out (no roof, windows gone, etc.).

 

Here Clara and Murphy posed on the front porch. The mail box (that Murphy made) was gone.

 

Photos from a Few Days Later
 

You can see that Mr. Pratt covered the roof with tar paper and put in window glass to keep out the weather. The dining room was sealed off from the closed-in porch with plywood.

 

The interior walls were made from the old plaster and slat construction. You can see the damage in the living room (left) and the dining room (right).

 

Here are close-up photos of the blown out room.

 

Photos of the Reconstruction of Our Home

Mr. Pratt and his son and their contractors did much work over several months to put our home back together. They deserve a wealth of thanks. They had to repair all walls, floors, woodwork, windows, appliances, etc. The following series of photos show the reconstruction of the front part of our home to replace the front porch and the blown-out room.
 

This is the way it looked a few days after the tornado.

 

The remains of front porch and the closed-in porch were removed.

 

New cement block footings were set into the ground. The exterior walls and roof of the new room were built.

 

The new front porch was built.

 

This was the gentleman who did most of the exterior reconstruction work. Here he was fixing the back porch steps later on in the year (notice the snow).

 

Photos of the Neighborhood
 

This was John's home next door to us on the north. They lost their entire roof. Later that year, this house was torn down to build an apartment building.

 

This photo of our back yard was taken just after we cleared a path to where the barn once was (we never found any of it). Clara had driven the car out to the street through a neighbor's yard because the alley was debris-covered. Notice the height of the debris. The picnic table (bottom left) was kind of squashed down. The houses back on Western street were roofless. The electric company had restored the power lines. The once-beautiful walnut trees looked like skeletons.

 

This composite of two photos shows the back yard after we removed the debris. Not a single barn or garage survived. The trees were trying to sprout new growth.

 

By late 1966, the houses on Western street had been removed to make way for a low income housing project. Over on Polk street a high-rise retirement home was being built.

 

Thanks to all of the kind people who helped us out during this tragedy. Thanks.

Last updated October 6, 2000, by Murphy and Kathy.