IMAGES COURTESY OF GREG HAND'S PERSONAL COLLECTION
On the evening of April 3, 1974, your narrator interviewed a woman who found a perfectly new, pristinely crisp, twenty-dollar bill in her front yard. This random occurrence of good luck became newsworthy because her random benefit had floated down into her yard from a passing cloud that had recently spawned an F5 tornado.
At the time, I was not a reporter exactly but everyone that evening became either a reporter or a source. The memory of that day remains so fresh and clear it seems impossible that it transpired exactly fifty years ago.
In the fading afternoon, a heavy storm blew in as I drove a clunky Ford Econoline van from the Hopple Street Viaduct onto Westwood-Northern Boulevard. I was, at that time, a senior at the University of Cincinnati desperately yearning to graduate and move on to the next chapter in my life. To cover tuition, I worked as a printer for the Western Hills Publishing Company. Our offices were on Davis Avenue in Cheviot and our printing presses occupied a floor in the historic Crosley Building on Arlington Street in Camp Washington. My duties as the junior member of the printing crew involved shuttling copy and page flats from the editorial offices to the typesetting and composing staff.
As I climbed out of the valley toward the English Woods housing development, hail scattered across the road. Hailstones rattled on the van’s roof, then pounded, then stomped. It sounded like some gremlin with a baseball bat hammering on the roof as ice balls the size of oranges smashed into the asphalt all around. Tree branches cracked and split and thatched the roadway.
Somehow, I made it to Cheviot and pulled into the Press parking lot. It was full of people, just standing around. I got out and looked at the van. The roof looked like a moonscape, there were so many dents in it.
“Hey! Look at this,” I shouted. No one turned or said a word. And then I saw why.
Stretching from the horizon halfway to zenith was the tornado. It was impossible to comprehend the scale. More than two miles away, we heard no sound except endless sirens calling to one another from every direction. Where we stood transfixed it did not rain. There was no wind. There was only the tornado.
“Look at all that paper swirling around,” someone said.
“Those are garage doors,” another answered.
We watched as the horrendous vision scraped its way northward, the finger of God plowing a furrow along South Road out in Mack. We watched as it withered and lifted and twisted into nothingness against a pallid sky, waving it seemed in farewell at last as it vanished. We stared at each other, silent, unable to find any words.
Gradually, we realized that all the lights were out. There was no power in the offices. The publisher sent me around the corner to a hardware store to buy all the candles they had in stock. It was going to be a long night.
At this point, for the benefit of readers younger than I, it is necessary to explain a few details. The cash register at the hardware store was mechanical. It did not require electricity, much less Wi-Fi, to operate. The editorial offices were stocked with manual typewriters. The telephones were landlines, on a separate network, and functioned even when the power was out. Everyone had a battery-powered radio.
Anyone with the ability to write a coherent sentence became a reporter. I was sent out, still wearing my printshop uniform, in the divotted Econoline, to gather eye-witness reports. I found a small crowd at the Western Hills Country Club who had been herded into a downstairs bar while the sirens howled. They queued up for every available telephone to check in with their families. I found people in shock, wandering through piles of rubble that had been their homes, clutching any random possessions they recovered. I saw ambulances backed up in a line, waiting for utility poles and power lines to be moved. I saw people wrapped in blankets, standing in the middle of nothing left, sobbing on each other’s shoulders.
IMAGES COURTESY OF GREG HAND'S PERSONAL COLLECTION
There were people who swore they saw two funnel clouds and people who claimed there were four, twisting like snakes in the sky. There were people who confessed to being so transfixed by the surreal wonder of the twister that they stood paralyzed as it swooped down on their houses.
And, in the curious way the universe laughs at we mere humans, I found humor.
There was the guy who, in a dispute with his insurance company, was photographing damage to his roof when the warning sirens erupted. He saw the funnel approaching and dove into his basement. When he emerged, his roof was gone, and so was the rest of his house, but he bragged that he had the photos to press his prior claim.
I talked to one of the rescue workers who told me about a kid, maybe 15 or 16 years old, who approached him and begged him to hide a bottle of vodka. The kid didn’t want his mother to know he had the bottle hidden in his bedroom – the bedroom that was now nothing more than a debris field.
Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, Dr. Theodore Fujita drafted a questionnaire to be sent to almost every newspaper, every radio station, every television station in the country. Dr. Fujita asked a lot of questions about the duration and intensity of the 148 confirmed tornadoes reported that day. He and Allen Pearson of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center hoped to refine the tornado classification system they had created just three years previously. Someone at the Press filled out the questionnaire and sent it back.
A year later, having graduated from the university and transferred to the newsroom, I found a largish cardboard tube lying amid the usual pile of news releases and complaint letters that constituted our daily mail. On opening the tube – it was addressed to no one in particular – I found a map of the eastern United States titled “Superoutbreak Tornadoes of April 3-4, 1974.” Dr. Fujita, compiling all those questionnaires, had mapped and labeled every one of those 148 tornadoes.
In the center of the map, there was my tornado, the only tornado I have seen with my own eyes, officially designated as an F5 monster.
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