In Udall, Kans. (pop. 610) everyone was pleased when shy Schoolteacher Aileen Holtje announced her engagement. One night last week the womenfolk were giving her a wedding shower. All day long Aileen worried about what clothes to wear because of the contrary weather, which changed from rain to sultry heat to dusty winds; eventually, she decided on a summery nylon print dress. As the party began, thunder rumbled in the southwest, and a woman said uneasily that tornado warnings were out— clear to Texas.
Out of the Sky. The worst storms on earth are tornadoes, and most tornadoes hit the U.S.: 5,204 in 35 years (1916-50), killing 7,961 people and causing $476 mil lion in damages. History's worst, the Tri-State tornado of 1925, killed 689 people in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. A single storm front can create several tornadoes, each whirling furiously for a few fearsome miles. Sometimes the roaring black vortex stays harmlessly in the sky; when it dips to earth, the impact can dig a crater.
Tornadoes advance at 40 m.p.h. or less, but their rotary winds gyrate at jet speeds, calculated in one case at 682 m.p.h. They have been recorded in every month of the year and every state of the union, but May gets the most (22%) and so does Kansas (618 in 35 years). Between the Rockies and the Appalachians, as nowhere else on earth, cold arctic and hot Gulf winds collide, coil and writhe.
Last week such tornado conditions prevailed in places across the U.S. from Amarillo, Texas, to Buffalo, N.Y. In three days, a record total of no tornadoes was reported in Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa. Many were harmless, but one knocked a giant B-36 bomber out of the sky near Sterling, Texas, killing the 15-man crew. The worst killer slammed into Blackwell, Okla. and smashed across the Kansas line to Udall, 25 miles south of Wichita.
Across the Wheat. Blackwell (pop. 10,000) felt uneasy beforehand. "You kind of kept wondering what it was you were worried or unhappy about," explained one resident. At 9:23 p.m. Pearl Joyce Peckham was standing on her front porch while a boy friend picked up hailstones rattling down from the dark sky. "The next thing I knew," she related, "he ran and grabbed me and said, 'My God, it's a tornado.' and there it was, right on top of us. It was dark, but this thing was much darker than the night. We ran into the house and got down on the floor and prayed." At the big $500,000 Hazel-Atlas Glass plant a night-shift worker heard "that awful roaring noise, and the building just kind of shuddered and went down."
The tornado, sixth and worst in Blackwell since 1912, destroyed and damaged 500 houses, hurt 493 people and killed 19, caused a $10 million loss. The whirlwind ripped surfaces off the highways, wrapped a big electric refrigerator around a tree stump, tossed a wrecked pickup truck onto the second floor of a ruined brick house. Sweeping north across the amber wheat, the deadly funnel killed one family's five children in Oxford, Kans. A farmer three miles south of Udall saw it coming: "It sounded like a bunch of jets and looked black as an oil slush pond. I didn't look long. I lit out for the cellar."