Nothing
Up My Sleeve
Jon
Gallagher
Weather
or Not…. (part 3)
My
mother was scared silly of storms.
I’m not sure where this fear came from, if she’d ever been involved in a
tornado or if it was just one of those things. As a pre teen, I can remember her pacing the house whenever
severe weather was forecast, and should anyone – me, my dad, my brother or
sister – make any kind of noise during a weather warning on the radio, the
punishment was a slow, painful death.
Well,
maybe not that extreme, but no one ever had the guts to find out for sure.
I
guess that means that I should have grown up being petrified of storms too, but
somehow, I missed that gene.
Instead, I’m the guy who makes sure my family is safe, then head out
with the camcorder in hopes of filming a funnel cloud on the ground.
Although
I’m not scared of storms, I respect them.
I’ve seen what they can do and I hope that I’m never in a tornado.
Abingdon
story…..
I
got a little bit of a scare in 1975 when I thought for sure I was a goner.
I
had just gotten my very first car.
It was a 1969 Volkswagen Fastback and I was anxious to show it off. It was a little bitty thing, but big
enough to hold my girlfriend and her two sisters. Somehow, I managed to convince her folks that at 18, I could
be trusted to drive all three girls, aged 16, 14, and probably 12, all the way
to a movie in Galesburg. This
wasn’t easy.
We
went to Carroll’s Cinema on North Henderson Street where the movie Earthquake
was playing. Charlton Heston led
an all-star cast, but that didn’t matter.
The movie was being shown in “sensurround,” a new technique that
catapulted you right into the movie.
What
it was was some really big speakers put at the rear of the theater. Whenever the earthquake would hit in
the movie, these speakers would kick in bombarding the audience with enough
bass to loosen fillings. It’s sort
of like some of the cars that teenagers drive today. The speakers cut loose with enough sound that it was
supposed to feel like you were in an earthquake.
Cool.
The
weather that night was pretty grim.
It’d been hot all day and by the time we got to the movie, it had
started to rain. The clouds in the
west threatened to douse us with torrential rain.
A
few minutes into the movie, we heard sirens going off outside the theater. At first, everyone in the theater
thought it was part of the movie.
Then, a few customers started getting up and wandering off towards the
concession stand, trying to find out what was going on. I was one of them.
The
manager stood there behind the counter, telling us all that he didn’t know what
was going on. Those were, in fact,
civil defense sirens that we were hearing and the weather outside was getting
nasty. He’d tried to tune in a
weather forecast, but the radio was broadcasting a ballgame and he didn’t have
any information for us.
The
sirens stopped wailing while he was reassuring us everything was okay.
I
returned to my seat, told my girlfriend and her siblings that everything was
fine.
A
half hour later, the sirens went off again. We repeated the trek to the concession stand. Again, the manager had no new
information, but he promised to make a phone call or two. We all went back to enjoy the movie.
When
the sirens went off for a third time, no one was paying a lot of attention to what
was happening on the screen. This
time when we went out to the concession stand, the sirens didn’t stop
wailing. The manager had managed
to get some information.
Evidently, a funnel cloud had been spotted somewhere in the area and
they were watching it. They had
set off the civil defense sirens as a precaution.
Once
again, I returned to my seat. Only
this time, just as I stepped back into the theater, an earthquake hit the
screen.
This
means that the really big speakers that were now about six inches behind me,
went off.
My
knees turned to liquid.
Or
maybe I just peed my pants. I
can’t remember.
I
just know that when the earthquake hit in the movie, I thought that a tornado
had just ripped into the theater.
I managed to grab my girlfriend and her sisters and we headed for the
car.
I
got to see just how well the car handled in the rain and how fast it could go
(I could have peddled a bicycle faster).
No
tornado hit that night, at least in Galesburg. Later, we would learn that a tornado had done quite a bit of
damage at some relatives of my girlfriend down by Fairview.
And
we found out that quite a bit of the city of Canton was missing because of the
F-4 that had ripped through there.
**********
I
was in Peoria for some reason, but I can’t remember what. I needed to stop by and see my
insurance agent on the way home.
His office is in Toulon.
That’s not exactly on the way home, but gas was cheap (at least it
hadn’t hit a buck and a half a gallon yet), so I got off the interstate at Exit
71 and headed up Route 78 to pay him a visit.
It
was around noon. I remember this
because I was trying to tune in Paul Harvey’s noon broadcast. I wasn’t close enough to Galesburg to
pick up WAIK well enough, there was too much static to listen to it on WGN, so
I was trying to pull in WKEI out of Kewanee.
The
closer I got to Toulon, the darker it got. Clouds had been banking up in the west since I left Peoria,
but it really didn’t seem out of the ordinary. By the time I turned off of Route 78 onto Route 17 heading
into Toulon, I was getting concerned.
It was like I’d walked from one room into another.
The
second room was not very friendly.
The
wind had picked up considerably and my little car, a Sunburst if I recall
correctly, was being pushed all over the road. It was as dark as it got after the sun went down. The closer I got to Toulon, the weirder
things got.
I
don’t know how else to describe what happened next other than to say that the
air turned green. Air, of course,
can’t turn colors, unless you’re in Los Angeles. Air just outside of Toulon wasn’t supposed to be tinted
green. But it was. I swear.
Just
as I hit the city limits, several things happened. First, the torrential rains started pounding my little car
faster than my windshield wipers could work. Then came some hail.
And more wind.
And
I noticed that the fire sirens in Toulon were going off. I was just at the edge of town, but
they were clearly audible.
The
other thing that was clearly audible was the sound of a freight train. The only problem with this is that
Toulon doesn’t have any train tracks that are in use. There hasn’t been a train go through Toulon in the past
twenty years.
I
knew what was happening. Just in
case I didn’t, the radio made it crystal clear. WKEI was broadcasting a tornado warning, effectively
immediately for Toulon. A funnel
cloud had been sighted west of town and was headed east with Toulon directly in
its path.
No
kidding.
I
pulled off to the side of the road and decided to abandon the car in favor of
the deep ditch was just off to my right.
I opened my car door, got hit with a wall of marble sized hailstones,
and elected to stay in the car. I
slammed the door shut, made sure my seatbelt was fastened, and gripped the
steering wheel, waiting to be sent tumbling across somebody’s lawn.
Two
minutes later, it was over. I was
still alive and it was only then that I took time to be scared.
I
made my way into town, pulled a U-Turn on Main Street and parked in front of my
insurance agent’s office. By now,
the sun was shining and birds were singing in the trees that surrounded the
Courthouse across the street.
I
walked into the insurance agent’s office and the receptionist bounded up to the
counter to greet me. “Guess what!”
she said breathlessly. “A tornado
just went through. It didn’t touch
down, but we all saw it.”
Yeah. So did I.
**********
It
was Mother’s Day weekend in 1995.
Q93, WGBQ-FM, had hired me to help out with a “Live Remote,” which is a
broadcast from another location. A
Galesburg car club was having a Saturday night get together in the parking lot
of the Eagle’s Food Store on North Henderson Street, and from time to time, Q93
was going to interrupt their regular broadcasts and cut to me. I would do a short report from the car
show, then send it back to the studio for more music.
The
whole idea was to get people who might be listening to stop by the car show.
But
not too many people show up for outdoor car shows when rain is falling
horizontally rather than vertically.
This was more of a monsoon than it was a car show.
The
show was cancelled and I headed back to the station with the Q93 van. By the time I got there, Mike
McCullough, the owner, was watching the station’s radar. We had some storms in the area. There was some heavy rain, and some
callers were reporting some pretty heavy wind.
I
headed home, but not before Mike asked me to drive around a little and see what
kind of wind damage had been done.
I had a car phone so I could report back to him.
There
were some scattered limbs down around town, but nothing spectacular. Still, it wasn’t a good night to just
be driving around indiscriminately, so my report included the advisory to just
stay inside.
As
I hit the city limits of Knoxville, I noticed there was a little more damage
than there had been in Galesburg.
I called back to report this and Mike asked me how close I was to County
Road 20. I knew the county pretty
well, and knew that was the road that ran between Abingdon and Maquon. He suggested I head out that way.
I
drove south out of Knoxville on County Road 8. When I got to a stop sign about eight miles away, I’d be at
County Road 20. Not once did I
hear a single warning broadcast over the radio.
I
sure hope someone had been broadcasting a warning. I turned east on County Road 20 and was not prepared for
what I found.
A
house on the south side of the road had been reduced to a pile of
toothpicks. Half a mile away in a
field was the remains of a motor home that had been rolled out there, end over
end or side over side, where it now rested in a crumpled heap. I stopped to see if anyone needed help,
but was assured that someone was on their way.
I
asked when this had happened and the older man I was talking to said it had
been less than ten minute ago.
Fifteen tops.
I
kept driving east towards Maquon.
There was more destruction along the way, a path that was unmistakably
cut by a powerful tornado. A lump
started forming in the pit of my stomach.
My brother and his family lives in Maquon along with a lot of other
relatives.
The
twister, an F-2 on the Fujita scale, had missed Maquon, but tracked north of
town. I continued to follow the
path, and the knot in my stomach returned. I could see from a distance that my grandparents’ farm was
directly in the path of the storm.
Both
of my grandparents had been gone for several years. My brother still owned the house that they’d lived in,
although it’d been empty for many years.
I didn’t doubt that given the shape it was in, it couldn’t possibly have
survived a storm of this magnitude.
There was also a two story barn on the property, which was in relatively
good condition.
As
I turned down the gravel road that leads to the farm, I could see the house was
still standing. Somehow that pile
of rotting lumber had withstood the tornado. The barn had not fared so well. It was now one story high, and looked dangerously close to
collapsing completely.
I
called back to the station once again and reported that I thought that a
tornado had just ripped through the southern part of the county. Mike didn’t put me on the air which is
just as well. I’m still not sure
if people in the path of the storm had any advance warning.
When
all was said and done, the twister had caused 1.6 million dollars worth of
damage. A newly planted orchard in
the Hermon area had been completely destroyed. Eighteen homes had either been destroyed or damaged and
countless vehicles had been twisted into scrap metal.