Dododreams

I just found out last weekend that when the infamous ‘57 tornado hit Fargo my father was not there.

I heard about this event my entire childhood, how everyone hid under the basement steps. I was several months from being born, yet the stories of a neighbor’s roof flying off and a piece of the tree in the backyard of the Fifth Street house coming in through the dining room window made tornadoes a weather boogyman. Is it true that a neighbor physically threw his wife down the basement steps as he saw a roof fly by? I’m not sure about that one but after hearing about the storm so much it is not surprising I hid under that old brown couch during the early parts of The Wizard of Oz as a child.

Anyway, what Dad told me was that he was over in Bismarck that day, bidding on a road project. The group he was with heard there was bad storming to the East and then heard that it had hit north Fargo, but the phone lines were down and no way to find out whether his pregnant wife and three young daughters were okay. He said he was tempted to get in the car and drive back but in those pre-interstate days knew that he wouldn’t arrive until well after midnight and thought it best to wait until the morning to make the trip.

Back at the house, Mom and her girls were huddled under the basement steps with a crib mattress over themselves, as the front of the stairs were open. I can’t imagine how scared she must have been, 5 months pregnant, with a 6 month old infant and 2 year and 4 year old children to protect and reassure. The worst part of the storm missed them… by about 6 houses. Half a block to the north was demolished. This last weekend we drove down the street, Dad identifying this house and that house as having been gone, and by the way, that was the one that lost its second story. That night back when, after the storm had blown through Gram and Grampa came up from the south side of town and took their daughter-in-law and grandchildren to their house. Dad called his parents the next day — phones were still out on the north side of town — and found out that all were safe.

Some families on the western edge of town were not so lucky. That was literally the other side of the tracks in those days — many houses had only recently been plumbed and few had basements. One family of seven children were waiting at home for the mother to arrive back from her job and refused to leave with their neighbors. It was their Mom’s birthday, you see? Six of the seven children died. Ouch.

The reason Dad and I were talking about this last weekend is that the local paper was doing a 50th year retrospective of the storm. It was fascinating to read, and horrifying, to be able to really get a factual grip on the storm monster that had scared me as a child. And all of this meandering post is prompted by this movie of another storm this last week in Manitoba. This is the closest I would like to be to another tornado, viewing it through my monitor.

“TornadoVideos.net storm chasers Reed Timmer and Dave Holder captured this huge, violent wedge tornado in southwest Manitoba on June 23, 2007.”

Info on the 1957 storm

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Personal, Movie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.