Has it really been 50 years since the Xenia tornado? It has been long enough now that I don’t automatically think about that day when I am back in my hometown. For a long time that wasn’t the case. It seemed like you could feel it, smell it and see it for years.
Earlier last month I was in town and stopped to look for a memorial they put up to honor the 32 victims of the tornado and the two National Guardsmen who lost their lives in the aftermath. It is not a big memorial, but maybe those left in Xenia don’t want a constant reminder of that day.
The storm blew up on April 3, 1974, at 4:40 p.m. so I guess it has been 50 years. I remember the panic in our house the weather can cause, having just gotten home from school. I was 15. We saw the funnel cloud and I can remember standing and pointing at it from the driveway on Columbus St. It was hypnotic watching it move across the sky.
Our whole family was home and we went quickly to the basement to ride it out. Like a freight train it sounded. Many people who have lived through a tornado will tell you that is exactly what it sounds like. They aren’t lying.
But the scene I remember most was looking up out of a basement window towards our neighbors front porch. They had a porch swing that was rocking back and forth with the wind. It kept moving faster and higher. The freight train sound got louder. At one point the swing was just pinned up against the ceiling of the porch like it was stuck in place. For several seconds it didn’t move.
As the sound faded away we came out from the basement expecting the worst. But we were really lucky. We had debris in the yard, tree limbs and trash…a few roof shingles. But the old house was still all there. No power of course, but we were lucky.
I am not sure how my dad found out, maybe it was just word of mouth. But news that the tornado had devastated downtown was spreading fast. My dad worked for the county engineer’s department so he felt he needed to go downtown to help. He took me with him.
We walked Columbus St., maybe a mile, to the downtown and it was a natural progression of damage. We had limbs and trash. A block away they had trees uprooted. Another block roofs were missing and vehicles were smashed.
Downtown was like a movie set. The courthouse square had a series of telephone booths at the corner of Detroit and Main Streets. Cars were on top of the booths like Godzilla had picked them up and just dropped them there.
Windows were smashed, power lines were all down but nobody seemed to be worried about them. People were running around franticly looking for loved ones. Some were bleeding and it was like a war movie where survivors rush in to save the wounded.
A mother of one of my friends rushed up to me asking if I had seen her son, Arch, but I hadn’t. I think she said he had been at track practice and she could’t find him. They lived just north of downtown in a hard hit area. She was crying and I felt helpless.
My dad and I made it a few blocks over to my school, the junior high, and then to the high school. The high school had mangled school buses dropped on it. I guess Godzilla had gotten there too.
Fifty years later some memories are fuzzy, but some are vivid. That trip downtown is crystal clear. Word started spreading around that another tornado was headed our way so we ran back home as it got dark.
The next day it was sunny and beautiful. We still didn’t have power and wouldn’t for days. Phones didn’t work but somehow I took off and hooked up with friends who lived on the other side of town. I still don’t know how I found them but we walked miles that day checking on who we could and trying to comprehend how a storm could do so much damage?
In the days that followed we would find out the tornado was an F5 and half a mile wide. Winds were 250 miles per hour. It derailed a train passing through downtown…a train! Besides the deaths, more than a thousand people were injured and half of the buildings in the city were destroyed or damaged.
School was out for several weeks before they started busing us over to nearby Beavercreek. It was like going to night school for the rest of the year. Beavercreek would have the buildings during the regular daytime hours and then we would get on buses and head over around 3 p.m. or so.
The rest of baseball season was cancelled which really bothered me because I was batting over .500 at the time. A bunch of friends had been practicing a 50’s dance routine at Kelly Knight’s house for a talent show in April. The show never happened which I think might have been the one good thing the tornado left us.
President Nixon would come to visit the city and see the damage. We watched his helicopter land on a playground while I sat up on the roof at Shawnee Elementary with friends. This was before he fell from grace, so it was a really big deal at the time.
Days turned into months and months into years. Xenia was always a mess at that time. It just seemed like debris was always part of the landscape. The fairgrounds turned into a donation center for clothing and furniture coming in from across the country.
They fixed up Warner Junior High and we went to school there for three years before the new high school was built. The high school had the building in the morning, getting out around noon. The junior high kids would come in after us and get out later in the afternoon. Half of our high school classes were in temporary trailers behind the school. After we graduated in 1977 they opened a beautiful new high school for my sister and others in the class of 1978.
It is hard to describe the bond that formed with the friends I graduated with. We have a reunion every five years and remain a very close group. The tornado changed all of us in some way or another. We always say we were the only class in Xenia that didn’t get to spend a day in their own high school.
I would go on to become a news photographer and have been on the ground and in the air at dozens of tornado sites since the one that hit Xenia. But I have never witnessed another funnel cloud in person since the one in 1974.
My hometown paper, the Xenia Gazette, would go on to win a Pulitzer for local reporting from the tornado and the aftermath. Most of the staff had damage or lost their homes, but they still published a paper the next day and every day after the storm. They had papers printed at a sister newspaper and left them in bundles on street corners for people to read.
The roof of the newspaper was gone. Reporter Rich Heiland wrote his column at 3 a.m. by candlelight in the second floor newsroom on a manual typewriter. He said water was dripping around him. When they won the Pulitzer the publisher used the money from the award to have commemorative plates made for each staff member.
Later, when I would go to my friend Barry’s house, I would see one of the Pulitzer plates on his mom’s mantel. Laversa Motes was one of the Gazette reporters and would be the person who inspired me to become a journalist.
Most of the memories I have in my life are documented in photographs that I have taken. But I wouldn’t pick up a camera for the first time until a year after the Xenia tornado. So I have no pictures from that tragic day.
Even without a camera or photos to remember the moment, the walk downtown with my dad will always be one of my best memories of him. He was killed in a work accident 13 years later. A memorial bench for him sits in front of the courthouse, close to the memorial for the tornado victims.
50 years. The more I say it the harder it is to believe it has been that long.
The memories though, they are still in focus.
A Small Town View... Mike Fender 