Storms

We have a snowstorm we’re dealing with here in the Northeast and it briefly reminded me of anticipating and covering another storm over forty years ago. Then it was a different kind of storm. It was a series of 47 tornados. 271 people killed in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa and many more injured.

I was working in Indiana as a television reporter and anchor. It was April 11^th, Palm Sunday 1965, a day an ill wind devastated several states. History records it as the “Palm Sunday Tornadoes.”

As it is with most small town television markets in those days, reporters responded to news events both by a call from the station as well as one from police dispatchers with whom you’ve develop a call relationship. When something happens they call you at home in the middle of the night and you can respond or not.

This night, the storm was immense and, of course, I responded.

I was, in those days, what they call a one-man band, I would take my car the scene, film the story, get information, do interviews, edit it back at the station and then report it on the air.

That night traveling around rural Indiana in the swath of the storm, I saw two by four boards driven straight through trees and other structures by the force of the wind. I saw a car fifteen feet up in the crotch of a large tree. I saw chickens de- feathered by the wind. This kind of storm has happened since and it will happen again. It is the nature of storms and the flat geography of the Midwest.

The storm we have or just had here in the East is now pretty much over. Heavy snow inconveniences just about everyone and it’s very cold, but its memory will not the same as a different type of storm I remember 49-years ago.