Chapter One: Ezekiel's Wheel Gone Berserk

The Kansas City Times
Tuesday, May 21, 1957



TORNADO KILLS 31, INJURES 200
Rescue Workers Probe for Other Victims
Property Damage Is Enormous as Twister Rips a Path Through Populous Suburbs in South Metropolitan Area. Martial Law Declared
Blair Calls Out National Guard Troops, and Many Other Rescue Forces Are Mobilized
Some Still Buried in Debris
The Funnel Strikes Hardest at Spring Hill, and Jumps to the Ruskin-Heights-Hickman Mills Area

At least 31 persons were reported killed, at least 200 persons were injured and many were made homeless by a tornado which struck the southern part of the metropolitan area shortly after 7 o'clock last night.

Damage was expected to run into many thousands of dollars as the tornado funnels cut a swath northeastward through Spring Hill, Martin City, Grandview, Ruskin Heights, Hickman Mills and part of Raytown.

Everywhere there were scenes of jumbled debris, death and chaos as rescue workers struggled in the darkness to rescue the injured and maintain some semblance of emergency aid.

The heaviest part of the damage appeared to be centered in the Ruskin Heights-Hickman Mills area ...

Monday, 20 May 1957
7:30 p.m.
Home of Garold and Lena, Leland, Vincent and Pet Rucker
11800 Lawndale Avenue
Hickman Mills, Missouri

The warnings had begun sometime after seven. We were gathered around the green-screened television in the living room of our three-year-old suburban tract house in Hickman Mills, a bedroom community of Kansas City, Missouri. Clouds had been building all afternoon, and it had been windy and sultry and the air felt heavy, but it hadn't rained yet.

About three blocks north, the Crest Drive-in Theatre had lost business to heavy rains that continued through the weekend, even with The Man With the Golden Arm, which starred Frank Sinatra, and Tall Riding.

This storm had developed hundreds of miles west of Hickman Mills, part of a pattern of dangerous weather that spring. In the first four months of 1957 the National Severe Storm Forecast Center in Kansas City tracked 300 twisters.

During May alone there were 324, the highest number recorded to date by the NSSFC for a one-month period. The first tornado of this system was sighted in eastern Colorado before noon. Other cells soon spread across Oklahoma, Nebraska and Kansas.

Funnel clouds weren't strangers to the area. In 1946, Martin City, another bedroom enclave five miles to the southwest, had been battered by a twister that wreaked havoc on barns and chicken houses before hitting Holmes Park, another small neighborhood a couple miles north near U.S. Highway 71 and Hillcrest Road.

That storm killed two people and turned a barn sideways on its foundation at nearby Benjamin's Stables without injuring any of the 26 horses inside.

Back in our living room, the television announcer repeated that people in the southeast Kansas City area were in danger of "tornadic activity." We had heard the alerts before, and, even though I had just turned 10, I knew we lived in what was called "Tornado Alley," the area where cyclones in the United States are most frequent each spring and summer.

Though we had never practiced it or ever used it, I had committed the mantra to memory: "Go to the basement, head for the southwest corner and cover your head."

Our house didn't have a basement.

We lived in a three-block subdivision dubbed Slaughter Highlands after the patriarch Slaughter family, which farmed this land before selling it for development when they got too old to keep it up.

The area was ground central in Kansas City for the cultural change taking place as a generation of Americans had children with almost joyous, reckless abandon after World War II. Our family of five was a model of conformity. We moved farther out of the city each time Garold and Lena had a baby.

In 1954, around the time my sister Pet was born, we moved to the southern perimeter of the city; the city limits were just a half block south at 119th Street. New houses and buildings were cropping up behind the old Harry Truman homestead about a half mile from here, and the Truman Corners Shopping Center was being considered across Blue Ridge Boulevard between us and the town of Grandview a short couple of miles south down U.S. 71.

The sprawling facility operated by Bendix Corp. that produced electronic, rubber, plastic and metal components for atomic weapons, part of the growing nuclear production industry that included Rocky Flats south of Boulder, was just a few miles north, and the sprouting suburban communities being built in the formerly rural area were aimed primarily at the growing Bendix employment numbers.

Our neighborhood was pretty empty in the early evening hours of May 20. It was the time of year when school activities were winding down. Many of the parents and families were at the Parent-Teachers Association meeting at Westridge School, where I was a fourth grader. Others were at graduation practice exercises.

Garold, my father, a World War II vet and frozen-foods salesman with a receding hairline much like the one Bruce Willis adopted for The Sixth Sense, didn't like going to the P.T.A. He wasn't a joiner. Lena had been active in church affairs and had been our den mother the year before when I was in the Cub Scouts -- but she wasn't at the meeting this time, either.

We all watched the intermittent warnings through The Cisco Kid and I Love Lucy, and we went to the front door and gathered in the yard. It wasn't quite dark yet.

The storm was picking up momentum. "Radar at the Kansas City Weather Bureau shows this storm to be very severe and moving northeastward in the general direction of Kansas City at about 50 miles an hour," the TV voice repeated through the static.

The warnings continued; another report indicated there was a tornado on the ground near Ottawa, Kansas, 20 miles south and west of us.

Lena told Vincent, almost seven, and me, just turned 10, to put on some clothes and shoes while she dressed Cordelia Pet, almost three. We went back outside to get a better look at the gathering fury from the front yard. It was humid, the air thick and heavy and oppressive.

A little before eight, things began to get very weird.

My attention was first diverted to the northwest, where a long, ominous, low cloud skirted beneath the overcast, moving very quickly past us, like it was running from something. I looked for a funnel but couldn't see anything. But it was different, a preliminary somewhere down on the card before the main event.

The light was dimming, squalls gusting up around us, and we looked over the top of the house to the southwest, the direction from whence most tornadoes come.

Garold was in front of me, scanning the horizon. Lena ordered us to put on our t-shirts. We did as we were told and came back outside.

Seconds later I first noticed The Sound.

I would describe it later as what thousands of jet planes like those we were seeing around nearby Richards-Gebauer Air Force Base would sound like if they revved up all their engines at once.

As I would find out four decades later, many other people described it in exactly the same terms and experienced the same sensations as I did that night.

The Sound took over my consciousness.

The Sound is coming from this swarming, hellish cloud, all green and yellow and bloated and gray and puffy and ugly. But here's the weird part: It didn't seem to be moving. This is the optical illusion of being in a tornado's path; when it's coming toward you, you don't notice how fast it is moving or even that it is moving. It appears stationary.

And it is mesmerizing, almost hypnotic. My mind is telling me that it is a long way off, and I imagined it was perhaps chewing up Martin City. But the churning winds were regurgitating the new houses on the western edge of our tiny subdivision just a couple of blocks away, spitting them back out as debris in disparate directions.

A Ruskin Heights resident told the Star : "It was an enormous, broad black cloud, and I could see it distinctly against a band of clear sky to the west. I could see it churning, and I saw debris flying. But I thought it was far out in the country, possibly five miles away."

And it's not some cute little funnel cloud from which you could flee; this churning mass seems to take up the entire southwestern sky, biblical in proportion, like Ezekiel's wheel gone berserk.

The photograph at the top of this page is the only known shot of the funnel. It was taken somewhere in eastern Kansas, but this is pretty much the funnel I remember seeing. (I've read that there is a silent videotape that exists of the storm or of its devastation, but I've not yet seen it.)

The photo was taken by Rev. Robert Alexander, and I first saw it on the cover of a book, In Its Path, written by Carolyn Brewer, a woman about my age who was in her basement a mile and a half east of us in Ruskin Heights awaiting her moment with destiny that night.

Brewer started the book as an attempt to tell the story of how all the people on her block, which was also directly in the path of the storm, rebuilt and moved back in and stayed. But before she finished it, forty years after it happened, she broadened it to include many people beyond her Ruskin Heights neighborhood.

In Its Path, from which I have borrowed liberally for much of the background in this account, gave me a wider context on what happened that night and reinforced my memories and this memoir. The funnel blasted through a baby boomer enclave, and for dozens of kids my age, it was a defining moment in their lives.

This was no ordinary tornado. Each year about 1000 twisters hit the ground in the United States, most in the months of April and May. 1957 was quite a year for twisters. In 1956, 83 people were killed in 504 tornadoes in the U.S. In 1957, the number rose to 193, with 87 in May alone, almost half of those in Hickman Mills and Ruskin Heights. In 1958, the total number of deaths was 67. The number of deaths in one year has only been exceeded twice since (1965 had 301; 1974 a grisly 366).

The death rate for the year forms a giant spike on tornado-death charts. Nasty storms killed 10 in Dallas, Texas, in April and 12 more in Fargo, North Dakota, exactly a month after the Kansas City storm.

The typical twister runs along the ground for a couple of miles, many for much less than that. The Ruskin Heights funnel had originated about two hours earlier near Williamsburg, in eastern Kansas, almost 70 miles from where we were standing, and had been on the ground ever since, careening through the countryside like some kind of raging, serial-killer Tyrannosaurus.

It wound its way at about 40 miles an hour through the rolling fields and rural areas of northwest Miami county, north of Spring Hill and south of Stanley in Johnson County in Kansas. Twelve people already lay dead or dying in its wake, with many more to come as it neared the Missouri border and bore down on Ruskin Heights.

According to the official Fujita Tornado Intensity Scale, a way of measuring tornados based upon damage caused, this one was rated an F-5 multi-vortex tornado, the most intense classification, considered to have winds churning somewhere between 261-318 miles an hour.

According to the official Fujita F-5 definition: "Strong frame houses (are) lifted off foundations and carried considerable distance to disintegrate, automobile-sized missiles fly through the air in excess of 100 meters, trees (are) debarked and steel reinforced concrete structures badly damaged." Fewer than five in 1,000 tornados make the F-5 classification. Only three tornadoes in 1957 were considered F-5. Before this one finally retreated back into the clouds between Knobtown and Blue Springs, Missouri, 10 miles farther east, it would chew up 900 homes, the Ruskin High School and Ruskin Heights Shopping Center and other businesses and churches. Forty-four people would die in its path, including more than 30 in our general vicinity.

Lena gathered Vincent and I and took Pet in her arms and headed across Lawndale Avenue to the Beckner's house, which had a basement. Lena got us to the front door, handed Pet over to Mrs. Beckner, whose husband was traveling but whose sister was visiting, told us to follow them into the basement and headed back across the street for Garold.

It is the last image I have of them, a freeze-frame: Garold standing in our yard looking at the funnel, Lena hurrying back across the lawn, after saving our lives, to save her husband, too, even as death began to blow down upon them.

Then, with the little bursts of wind gathering up around us and The Sound taking over my senses, Vincent and I ran through the living room and kitchen, into the garage and down into the basement.

As we hit the bottom of the steps, I followed the tornado mantra, and Vincent and I hauled ass to the southwest corner to await our fate. I could hear stuff upstairs being tossed around and windows breaking as we ran down the stairs and across the basement.

Then all hell broke loose. We huddled together in the corner while the wind screamed and cursed. The windows quickly blew out, and detritus immediately began blowing in a steady stream around us.

Vincent and I both remember that at one moment Pet eluded the grasp of Mrs. Beckner and walked miraculously right through the gathering flotsam before Mrs. Beckner grabbed her back away into their spot away from the debris.

Vincent also remembers a brick flying around in the basement in slow motion.

In films, funnels come down out of clouds like baby snakes wriggling out of an egg and reach for the ground like an elephant's trunk in search of peanuts. Almost cute.

On the ground, it's something else. Judging from the photos, it was wider than a football field is long, a dark and menacing maelstrom, blocking out everything, your sanity, your thoughts, your very being. Will it carry your off, or won't it?

The sound got even more intense until it seemed the floor above us was shaking and might blow away. (The pressure would cause many other floors to give way and fall through the basements that night.)

Then it was quiet for just a bit, before the sound of the wind became even more high-pitched, a bizarre Doppler effect as it bore down on us again.

Robert Jackson, general manager of Debacker Chevrolet, was watching the twister tear up our neighborhood just a couple of football fields away directly in the storm's path near Highway 71. He had found himself locked out of his car dealership at the edge of a field about two hundred yards east of us. He described his ordeal for the science journal Weatherwise.

"When the tornado was about 150 feet away, I saw it pick up several cars and throw them thirty to forty feet in the air, one of them sailing along with the wind around outside of the funnel.

"The tornado came on across the street and our building began to fly apart before my eyes. A house to my right lifted off its foundation in one piece, then disintegrated, and wood flew everywhere.

"I saw this terrible thing coming; it was very black just like mud. It had water, and mud and everything in it and it started slapping me on both sides and banging me behind this tree, and at one time my feet would be almost straight up in the air as I held onto a tree, and another time it would bang me right into the ground.

"Then the blackness disappeared, the wind decreased to a near calm, and it became light again. I thought the tornado had actually gone over, so I stood up and looked around. I felt that I was about to be picked up into the storm, but at the same time I felt 'heavy.' I realized I was looking up into the core of the tornado.

"I can't describe it, it was the most awesome thing. This column just mounted up to about 200 or 300 feet, then straightened out and went straight up. I couldn't see anything whirling at all. I don't know how long I was inside the tornado, but I quickly lay down again and grabbed hold of the roots.

"Then the back half hit me and it was black and smudgy again, dirt whipping through the air, automobiles hitting up and down. I remember that my shoes were about to come off my feet, and I kept working my feet because I didn't want to lose my shoes for some crazy reason.

"I watched the tornado hit the Ruskin water tower dead center, but the tower didn't fall. Then a second wind hit me. I could hardly stand up against it, but it lasted only a few seconds, then it was calm.

"I was filthy from head to foot; it took me three baths before I got the mud off me and small rocks out of my ears. I had a few cuts and scratches on me and the crystal of my watch was broken."

Like Jackson, I really don't know how long the funnel cloud was over us, but it seemed an eternity. When I read about Californians waking up in the dark in the middle of an earthquake that lasts 45 seconds, I think about the kind of time dislocation I felt then: There is no sense of time at all -- you are just scared shitless.

Then it was quiet, and you could hear the wind and noise moving off away east, tearing up the fields and trees and fences behind the Beckner's house and backyard toward Hickmand Mills Road and Debacker Chevrolet and Robert Jackson and the water tower and into Ruskin Heights, a large, new Levittown-styled subdivision, where it would kill more than 20 more people unfortunate enough to be in its path.

Dazed, we waited, huddled, stunned, for a while, before Mrs. Beckner called out, asking if everyone was all right. We shook off the debris, glass and mud and whatever, but amazingly none of us were injured or bleeding -- and they led us back up the stairs and through the garage. Where are Garold and Lena?

Looking across the street, our house seemed somewhat intact. It had walls, or seemed to, but the roof was gone and the front walls seemed to bulge. The front door was black. The corner wall of the front bedroom, where Vincent and I slept, had been stripped off, our twin beds sticking out into the yard.

To the north the houses were gone. Clothes, chairs, furniture, tables, building materials, games and toys littered the street. Cars had been tossed into backyards or out in the fields. Everything awry. Broken. Smashed. Shattered. Destroyed.

The Beckner's car had been shoved violently sideways, and we had to pick our way around the debris in the driveway and lawn to the street. What had just two minutes before been a serene suburban example of post-WWII America looked like a bombed-out city in Europe a decade earlier.

The house north of ours was half there, but most of the building material was pushed off into the northeast corner of the house. I couldn't see any of the houses north of us on either side of the street to the east -- they had been swept almost clean.

Somehow, miraculously, from somewhere, a car appeared on Lawndale Avenue in front of the house, and we all got inside. It was our neighbors at 11802, the Lavelles. They had hurried back from a spring concert at Symington School, after they watched the tornado pass.

The Beckner sisters, who had been in the basement with us and had taken Pet from Lena's arms not more than five minutes earlier, found Lena and Garold, one already dead and one nearly so. A decision was made to get us the hell out of there immediately. As we slowly took off, the car skirting the twisted wreckage of what had been our homes, Roberta was trying to keep us calm, but I already knew that something had gone terribly wrong.

Roadblocks kept the Lavelles from being able to reach a relative's home, and we were shuttled to Richards-Gebauer Air Force Base, where Vincent and I were placed in an empty room in a barracks. Having no idea what was going on, I lay in my shorts and t-shirt on the top bunk, waking fitfully to the whine of the jets and planes taxiing as images of puffy, funnel clouds and terror danced the crazy dance inside my head.

About three a.m. Ann Waymire, Aunt Nez's sister and a registered nurse, entered the barracks. Soon we were in a car heading back to Aunt Nez and Uncle Jack's house in Waldo. It was long after four before we tumbled into bed again.

Ann, who identified Lena and Garold's bodies at a makeshift morgue nearby, told me a couple of years later that they had been found just inside the front door of the Beckner house, just a few feet above where we had crouched in terror.

When we got up, Uncle Jack, his eyes reddened and bleary, told us what happened. All I could think of as I listened, was that we were orphans. Immediately, I hated the word and what it described.