TORNADO MEMORIES IN INDIANA
A number of years ago, perhaps about 1970, Margaret and I wanted to see a high school production of Li’l Abner because I was planning to produce that show at Charlottesville High School in the old gym with a small stage at one end. I had taught one year at Lapel (IN) High School in 1968 and had produced Brigadoon with former student (Carthage) Jeannine Terhune and the band director, Mr. McKamey. Jeannine had a college friend in northern Indiana who was directing shows (musicals) in beautiful productions there. We were later to see Hello, Dolly! there a few years later, and I borrowed set ideas from that show that I used and embellished for many years.
Jeannine made arrangements for us to stay overnight in someone’s home in that town, and they had a few recent tornado stories to tell us. This one made a big impression on us. This couple lived in a split-level home with their three small children—the youngest a toddler who slept in his own upstairs bedroom in a crib. When they heard the noise of the tornado subside as they had dived into a downstairs bathroom, they rushed to find the children, noticing as they stumbled up the damaged stairway that the roof of the upper level was gone. They first ran into the baby’s room and saw that the crib was empty. Desperate and weeping, they ran for the other bedroom, where they found the three boys sound asleep in one bed where the baby was wedged in the middle of the older boys. The baby had gotten out of his crib only once before, and they had punished him to emphasize that he must not do that. I also believe that they said they had found their refrigerator in a nearby golf course.
At Eastern Hancock, we had several close calls in “tornado alley”. The worst close call hit several homes along highway 40 very near the old school. In a sixth-grade classroom, where the window were behind the teacher’s desk with students facing those windows and seeing the tornado clearly. One boy calmly asked, “Uh, Mrs. Kroencke, look at that funnel cloud out there,” and thus began the tornado drill they had rehearsed. One of the homes visible through those windows belonged to Margaret’s teacher’s aide, whose son was in her second-grade class. Two smaller children, one not yet walking, were at home with an uncle, who, when he couldn’t locate the baby, grabbed the older child and pulled her into a closet as the tornado whipped away the eastern kitchen wall, dumping bricks onto the oak pedestal table in the center of the room. When the sitter lifter the bricks away, the baby sat safely under that table, not too concerned. As there was no school the next day, a Friday on which the planned speech-class play did not take place, I went to that home to help with clean-up.
At the new high school just up a country road during that tornado, students were caught unprepared and unimpressed. In my classroom, a student dashed in from the hall after returning a welder he had used for a speech in my class. “Hey, man, it’s really neat.” And with a sweep of his arms, “Come on!” And although I had the class seated on the floor with books protecting their heads as we had been taught (other classes had gone to restroom areas), a few ran out into the hall as the tornado lifted off the ground just outside, lifted across the nearby Interstate 70 to touch down at a grade school where children had been called back from their buses and taken to the basement as they had done in a drill just the day before. We had flunked the tornado test, and they had passed. No one was injured.
In an early speech assignment, we would place the student desks in a circle for story sharing. Each student was to have thought of something to share that would last three minutes. Some would be short, and whenever someone’s sharing made them think of more, they could add time. In this effort, there were several favorite topics that sometimes emerged—snakes, mice, accidents, and yes, tornadoes.
One girl told of being with her family in a car that was lifted by the tornado and dropped at a filling station where it rested against the gas pumps but was still driveable. The cautiously pulled back and set off down the road toward home, but had been rerouted several times because there were power lines across the road and various officials had been posted to make sure no one was electrocuted. She said the children had been told to lie on the floor in the back seat and their parents had lain on top of them to protect them.
These stories pale in contrast with events across the United States this past week.
