In April 1965, I was 10 and nearing the end of fifth grade. We lived on the south side of Marion, Ind., but would soon be moving to Lansing, Mich., where my dad had just started a new job. That year, Palm Sunday fell on April 11 and my dad left early that morning to drive to Lansing leaving my mom, my 8-year-old sister and me at our home.
It was a normal spring day with typical April weather in the Midwest. But after dinner, a storm blew in as we sat down to watch Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” on our black-and-white TV.
The storm quickly went from bad to worse. Then the power went out, and we realized this was no ordinary thunderstorm.
Most of the sky was a swirling black mess, but there were patches that looked green. Baseball-sized hail and torrential rain hammered our house, and the roar of the wind was deafening. With nowhere else to hide, Mom grabbed my sister and me and we hunkered down in the family Oldsmobile in the garage. When Mom flipped on the car’s radio, we got our first inkling of what was happening. We had just experienced a tornado.
The storm passed almost as quickly as it developed. When all seemed clear, we ventured outside to check for damage. We were lucky. Our house and the homes of all our immediate neighbors were OK. But, a quarter-mile away, it was a very different story. We just didn’t know the extent of the damage yet.
There was still no power the next day and school was canceled due to storm damage. My buddies and I were pretty much free-range kids, so we went to work checking things out.
The damage was apparent as soon as we left our little neighborhood. Some homes looked like they had exploded into a million pieces that were scattered all over. A trailer park was completely flattened except for one trailer that was picked up, moved a quarter-mile and plunked down unharmed in the middle of a street. A barn with horses was flattened and one of the dead horses was 15 feet up in the broken limbs of a tree. The few trees still standing didn’t have leaves anymore. An entire shopping center was gone except for the parking lot and the concrete foundations. The only traffic on the roads were police and rescue teams. It was quiet.
It was a week before we had electricity, but we had (cold) water and our telephone worked so Mom was able to call Dad to let him know we were all OK. He planned to come back the next weekend.
April can be cold in Indiana. Without a furnace, and with outdoor temperatures in the upper 20s at night, we piled the blankets on our beds and relied on our camp stove and lantern. Although we were campers, the stove and lantern were normally Dad’s responsibilities. In Dad’s absence, Mom stepped up. I remember flames shooting about a foot up out of the top of the lantern, there in our kitchen, the first time mom tried to light it. She quickly got it under control and we were all masters at lighting the stove and lantern by the end of the week.
From a kid’s perspective, it was an adventure. But the seriousness of the situation made an impression on me, as did the way everyone seemed to come together to help total strangers in need.
Dad came home the next weekend and we were finally able to drive around to see some of the damage a little farther from our house.
Years later, I would learn that 47 tornados hit six states that Palm Sunday, including the 10 that hit Indiana, killing 137 and injuring more than 1,200. It was the most damaging storm system in the state’s history. The funnel cloud that passed a quarter-mile north of our house was classified an EF-4, meaning there were winds of 166 to 200 mph. In 1965, there was no emergency broadcast system to announce tornado warnings.
Whenever I see news coverage of tornados today, I’m taken back to the things I saw that week.
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