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  While still in high school, my casual attitude toward tornadoes changed dramatically in 1957. My parents and I were driving to a two-week workshop in Fargo, North Dakota. My dad was determined to arrive that night since our housing was already paid for and we were nearing our destination. However, it was raining. Mother was watching the storm clouds ahead of us from the front seat beside him when she suddenly became agitated. 

“Buel, I see a tornado ahead of us in that cloud. We’ve got to stop and spend the night. Now!” 

My parents and I grew up in Tornado Alley, which—during the 1900s—referred to the broad swath in the central United States centering around Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, where the terrain is ideal for forming supercells that can birth tornadoes. More tornadoes strike the United States than any other country, with the majority occurring in Tornado Alley. Not only does this active region shift seasonally, but in recent years, the designation has expanded north and especially southeast to include more states than the original Tornado Alley, where I grew up.

Since smartphones and the internet were not yet invented in the 1940s and 1950s of my childhood, our only storm warnings came from the radio or, occasionally, a wailing siren in town. Car radios were unreliable during stormy weather, so we relied on visual cues when traveling, just as we often did at home. Tornado shelters were common in Texas and Oklahoma. However, some had a safe room in their house or basement. The underground storm cellar, like the one pictured at my husband’s boyhood home in Texas, is less prevalent in other regions of the country, like the densely populated Southeast, where the tornadoes are increasing in number.

    As a child, I was more nonchalant about thunderstorms than my mother; I thought she showed signs of having been traumatized by them. I remember living in a small Osage Oil Camp in Oklahoma, where several houses encircled the community storm cellar. Whenever a severe storm approached, Mother insisted we go to the storm cellar we shared with neighbors, even through the rain. My dad would grab some pillows and a blanket for our comfort in the neighborhood shelter. As a preschooler, I didn’t like being awakened to go and often grumbled, “If I’m going to die, let it happen in my bed instead of in a ‘fraid-e-hole’ in the ground.” Mother didn’t appreciate my attitude, and I didn’t enjoy being dragged out of bed.

My first close encounter with a tornado happened when I was about 10. I don’t remember any rain; it was just a loud roar like a train. My dad and I bolted for the front door to see what was happening while Mother screamed for us to get away from the door. Daddy opened the door just as the tip of the air-born tornado funnel knocked over the large tree from across the street. The tree crashed into our yard, and the top branches landed directly in front of us. I immediately realized Mother was correct: opening the door was not smart.

Fascinated by everything related to weather, my dad always wanted to see what happened when a tornado struck nearby since we only had radio reports and had to wait a week for photos in our local paper. Since tornadoes can generate the strongest winds known on earth, sometimes exceeding 300 mph, they can hurl objects at astonishing speeds. When I accompanied him, we sometimes witnessed bizarre sights that had resulted from the force of that wind, like straw embedded in a telephone pole or a piece of lumber thrust through a tree trunk. Occasionally, with surgical precision, one house is destroyed while the others around it remain untouched. Once, a baby was picked up in one spot and deposited, wet and muddy—but unharmed—some distance away.

On our June 20 trip in the summer of 1957, when Mother shouted that she had seen a tornado in the clouds ahead of us, I was concerned but not overly so. Yes, it was raining, and the sky looked threatening and sinister, but I figured she was merely frightened by the storm. 

My dad slowed down after Mother’s outcry, but there was nowhere to pull off and no towns between us and our destination, Fargo. The farther he drove, the more hysterical she became.

She finally shouted, “Stop! Just stop the car and let us out!”

“But it’s pouring rain, Hallie!”

“I don’t care! You’re not driving us into that tornado!”

“Phyllis, have you seen a tornado?”

“Only dark swirling clouds and rain, Daddy.”

When he saw a tiny, single-pump gas station beside the road, my dad pulled in to see if we could park there until the storm passed. However, the owner was also concerned about the storm and invited us to spend the night in his house. He suggested we drive into town early in the morning, so we stayed with the kind stranger.

The next morning, our host announced, “It’s good you stopped. The radio just announced several tornadoes were in the area and on the ground for four hours last night. A large one decimated part of Fargo.”

 Fortunately, many individuals were alerted and got out of the path, so only ten people died, although others died later from their injuries. The low death rate is stunning, considering over 1300 homes were destroyed.

While I was growing up, the lead time for evacuating or seeking shelter was often only a few minutes after someone spotted a funnel, unless you had a mother like mine who ensured we were already underground in a storm cellar during a bad thunderstorm. I’m not complaining. My mother’s fear of tornadoes kept us safe when those five tornadoes dropped from the sky around Fargo and traveled for 52 miles. 

Several days later, my dad and I got permission to visit the tornado-damaged area. He stopped the car and we stood at the edge of the devastated 100 city blocks nearly wiped off the map by a slow-moving F5 tornado. I struggled to comprehend the magnitude of what I saw. One suggested the tornado possessed the energy equivalent of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. All I know is words cannot describe the shock and visceral response of seeing, as far as I could see, homes pulverized, foundations swept clean, and a sprinkling of shredded trees.

After a lengthy silence, my dad, choked with emotion, quietly whispered, “Well, Honey, we have your mother and the good Lord to thank that we did not drive into this as it was happening.” 

Feeling newfound awe at the power and destruction a tornado could inflict, I silently nodded in agreement. Amidst the shock and sorrow I experienced, overwhelming gratitude surged within me for my mother, who had sounded her alarm, and for God, who had provided an unexpected shelter for us to stay safe from the tornadoes. 

“Lord, thank you for your protection that night and for Mother’s insistent warning. It was life-saving.”

“She watches over the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; Her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many daughters have done well, But you excel them all.’” Proverbs 31:27-29 (NKJV)