Tornado
Tales Mrs. B's
Tornado
Tales
Prelude
As a suburban Kansas City child, I enjoyed shopping centers, superhighways, fossil-hunting -- and tornadoes. From a young age I learned to watch the sky for a greenish color, to spot mammatus clouds, or to listen for the sirens. Taking cover was just part of life.
Severe weather also provided me with great entertainment value. I got the chance to (a) see adults run around like chickens without heads, and (b) try to sneak up the basement steps past my mother so I could see the sky (I rarely managed to do it). Even as a young girl, I loved science and found the whole tornado "thing" fascinating.
There were some great urban legends around at the time, too. For example, if you turned on your television to Ch. 13 (WIBW in Topeka) during a tornado warning and turned your contrast dial down so far that the screen was all black -- you could see streaks of white if a tornado was in your immediate area! That was cool, and I guess it never occurred to me to just look out the window instead. But -- to be fair -- I wasn't supposed to be near any windows during such times, or to be anywhere other than cooling my heels and bored out of my mind in our suburban split-level basement. I never got to try the Channel 13 trick either, because of my mother's ironclad determination not to see her youngest sucked up into the vortex of a tornadic monster.
The Civil Defense authorities back then (for this was long before the days of the Weather Channel) told people to open their windows a couple of inches so that the air pressure inside and outside their houses could "equalize". This was to keep your home from exploding, and we did it religiously every time the "TAKE COVER" screen came on TV.
This was later found to be false advice. They finally figured out that if a 300-mph, mile-wide tornado visited your neighborhood, you'd get smashed to chopsticks whether or not you'd opened your windows a crack.
The CD authorities (and our teachers too) also told us to get into the southwest corner of the basement during a tornado. It was thought that the shattered remains of your comfortable suburban home would fly over your heads and away from the southwest corner! My father even dragged a ratty old dining room table into the southwest corner of our basement to hide under. I considered this a sure-fire way of not ending up as Johnson County's first teenage girl to reach escape velocity.
Whoops, another tornado myth! It turned out that if you hid in the southwest corner of your basement, the tornado would drop the shattered remains of your comfortable suburban home right on top of you. Now the authorities advise folks to hide in the middle of the cellar -- perhaps under a ratty old dining room table, like I did.
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The Ruskin Heights Tornado
My earliest tornado memory involves a F-4 monster that destroyed Ruskin Heights, a community which lay on the outskirts of Kansas City. I was very small, but remember everything.
I had been placed under a card table (a card table!!!!) in the neighbor's cellar with three-year-old neighbor kid Stevie and my Snoopy-cat; we little kids were mad because the big kids had been put under an overturned doghouse, which was a heck of a lot better than a stupid card table. We figured that they would live while we would die when the tornado hit.
I also recall Stevie and me having a lengthy discussion about how good it would be if the tornado hit Mr. McGregor's house. Mr. McGregor, it seemed, yelled at my dog Champie for doing his business in his garden. It didn't occur to either of us that Mr. McGregor lived next door. Then again, we were both members of the under-six set and were up WAY past our respective bedtimes.
And so it was that we spent a night in the basement with some very anxious adults on the floor above. They would periodically stick their heads downstairs to inquire about our well-being. I'm sure they were beside themselves with worry, but we little ones suspected they were having a pretty good time up there. They were probably eating popcorn, drinking Cokes, and watching TV while Stevie and I sat under a card table awaiting death.
Every once in a while, the grownups would occasionally dash down the stairs after a "hook cloud" had been spotted on radar. Once, they actually tripped over Champie (an 80-pound collie) and fell down the entire flight in the process - a superb stunt that almost compensated for the card table.
As it turned out, our area only suffered hail and wind damage. But -- all humor aside -- others weren't so lucky. The Ruskin Heights Tornado destroyed people and things, including the community's schools.
I remembered hearing an unbelievably spooky story about it at the time. It was said that the tornado had left only one wall of the high school still standing. Where the sign on that sole remaining wall had once said "RUSKIN HEIGHTS HIGH SCHOOL AUDITORIUM", the tornado had torn off every letter except "RU IN" -- in that order.
Click here if you want to read eyewitness accounts of the Ruskin Heights tornado.