Like a Fast Freight

The air lay heavy and oppressive over the flat, treeless prairies of the Texas Panhandle. It was getting on toward supper time. In the little town of White Deer (pop. 500), Stockman H. W. Holmes stood in his front yard, uneasy in the muggy closeness. Suddenly, in the lowering clouds to the west, he saw a black, towering funnel, wavering, twisting, clutching at the earth. There was a deep-toned rumble "like a fast freight train." Said Holmes: "It hit an oncoming freight train just outside of town, and they tell me that 19 cars and two cabooses went off the rails. I didn't see that because the debris was filling the air as far as I could see."

A house lifted into the air, "hung there, and shook like a fish net being dipped out of water." Then the funnel lifted, and roared off to the northeast. White Deer had been lucky; only three were injured.

The twister swept on. Up ahead, at Glazier (pop. 125), the sky turned black. Big, 240-lb. C. S. Wright closed up his filling station and with his friend Art Beebe, headed for home. In the basement of his two-story masonry house, the two men braced themselves against the door.

With a roar, the tornado hit. It blew the house down, yanked Beebe out of the basement, 30 feet in the air, and carried him 200 yards due east. Wright was borne 40 feet aloft with "a lot of timber" which battered and scratched him. He landed some 300 yards away in a wild plum thicket. After the storm had passed, bewildered cattle stood bellowing, boards and sticks driven into their sides. Only the concrete jail remained intact. In the town's crumpled ruins, Wright and Beebe and other survivors found 16 dead and dying.

Hail & Prayers. The funnel moved on, gathering about it an awesome shroud of torrential rain and hail. In Higgins, 15 miles away, only three brick buildings survived undamaged. Flames licked the wreckage. Of the town's 1,250 inhabitants, 45 were dead.

In the trim cattle-and-wheat center of Woodward, Okla. (pop. 5,500), Clyde Grim, 57, a mechanic, and his wife had finished supper. At 8:42 p.m., the wind blew the kitchen door open. "It blew us outside on the ground," Grim said. "There were cars in the air, some blowing straight up. People were screaming. It was awful. There was a hissing and a popping sound, and through it all I could hear my wife praying."

The town's power went dead. In the uncertain light of car headlights and flashlights, in the drenching rain, in the flickering light of the fires which broke out, Woodward's citizens tore at the debris of their shattered homes, looking for wives, children, husbands. One-third of the town had been destroyed. Three thousand were homeless. Mrs. Grim and 90 others were dead.

The twister roared on, destroying 35 houses in Whitehorse, Okla. Then it split up into smaller storms that skittered off into Kansas. From White Deer to Whitehorse it had cut a swath 1 1/2 miles wide (the widest* tornado in U.S. history), and marked its trail with 155 counted dead.

*But far from the worst. It was not nearly as lethal as the 1925 twister that killed 689 people in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

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