That was one of the headlines after a record-breaking outbreak in central and western Kansas on this date in 1949. At least 40 tornadoes were reported in Kansas, according to National Weather Service archival information dug up for me by Dick Elder, meteorologist-in-charge at the Wichita office.
Eight tornadoes touched down along an 85-mile track in Gray, Ford, Hodgeman and Pawnee counties. One of those tornadoes hit Rozel, my hometown, and damaged 70 homes on the west side of town in western Pawnee County.
My parents had celebrated their first anniversary only a few days earlier, and were still settling into their farmstead less than three miles east of Rozel on K-156. Mom was pregnant with my oldest brother, who would be born less than two months later. When neighbors called to report the tornado bearing down on Rozel from the southwest, Dad loaded Mom and their hired hand into the car — and raced toward Rozel.
When he was recounting the story years later, he said he’d been told to drive toward a tornado. I guess the thinking was that by the time you reached where the tornado had been, it would have moved elsewhere. Strikes me as bad advice.
They could see the rope tornado as it struck a friend’s farm just southwest of town, ripping trees and outbuildings to shreds. About a mile east of Rozel, their car seemed to hit a wall of wind, Mom told me recently. The windshield wipers stood straight out from the windshield, and no matter how hard Dad pushed on the accelerator the car just wouldn’t move. It seemed like they were in a scene from some live-action cartoon, she said, but there was nothing comical about the conditions.
The winds suddenly “let go,” she said, and they made it to a service station on the east edge of town that had a storm cellar. I grew up hearing about the uncle of one my classmates – then just a boy – sticking his head up out of a ditch in Rozel to see what was happening and being conked in the head by flying debris. I’m still amazed that he lived.
Mom, Dad and the hired hand escaped injury, but they discovered tornado damage when they returned home – including cracks in the concrete foundation suggesting the house had been twisted.
The prevailing thought for decades was that the tornado that hit Rozel curled back to the south as it moved east and hit our farmstead. But given the number of tornadoes recorded in the outbreak, I now suspect it was a different tornado entirely that touched down east of Rozel and hit our farm while my parents and their hired hand were in the storm cellar at Rozel.
No matter which tornado it was, it left its mark on our house – and our family history.