Let me start off by saying tornadoes aren’t funny. When they come too close, they can kill people and livestock, destroy homes and wreck livelihoods.
However, most of us do survive tornado scares thanks to the efforts of those who warn and protect us, and the memories of the near misses make for excellent stories whenever days of yore take over the discussion. Central to these stories are mad dashes for underground shelter and bursts of clouded decision-making when the calm veneers of our elders could be blown off. Often this revealed quirky characters unable or unwilling to play it cool.
So much of my early childhood was shaped by tornado threats, mostly in the months of May and June when the skies above the southeastern Texas Panhandle are most likely to stir up trouble. Like Londoners in the Blitz, there would be stretches of days when we cheated death in underground bunkers that could be found in almost every neighborhood back home.
Panhandle folks in my childhood were well informed about the killer Glazier-Higgins tornado of 1947, the big one in Amarillo in ’49 and, within my lifespan, the Lubbock tornado of ’70. Wellington, where I lived, had been mostly spared at that point, but everyone had a sense that all our sinnin’ was just cause for us to be next. These possibilities were loudly discussed by the grownups during those angst-ridden spring evenings in the dark shadows of convulsing supercells.
Almost every cellar I remember visiting was furnished with rusty bed frames situated against damp walls teeming with arachnid life. No need for electric lights because you’d lose power at the first clap of thunder. Leftover kerosene lamps from the ’30s were repurposed for lighting, and in the glow of those flickering flames, I could scan the grownups’ faces to gauge how terrified I needed to be.
The cellar at our rental on Amarillo Street was used primarily for cowering, and maybe storing Christmas lights or bags of fertilizer. So it wasn’t pleasant, or kept up. It was the perfect setting for an over-the-top drama one afternoon in 1972. It started with the crack of Mr. Sikes’ screen door across the street as he bolted to his West Texas Utilities work truck yelling “get to the cellar” at the top of his lungs. My dad was on the road that day, but Mom—who now disputes all of this—ran outside where my brother and I were playing and led her frightened bear cubs on a panicked, screaming sprint to the cellar. We were conditioned for this kind of fear.
Down under, Mom lit a candle and sat it on a broken wicker laundry hamper. In the chiaroscuro lighting of my memory, I see her kneeling at the base of that hamper, supplicating like a Medieval saint as my brother and I huddled in fear. Meanwhile, my sister, who had been left at a matinee showing of Blacula at the Ritz Theater, was ringing our phone off the hook in hopes of rescue. Of course, we couldn’t hear it down in the cellar, especially after the cellar’s sheet iron door began shuddering. Finally the door grew quiet and sunlight streamed through its pinholes. We ventured into the light of day to find our way of life was still intact. It wasn’t a tornado after all, just a classic Panhandle hailstorm. Shortly, my dad rolled in, likely claiming he had survived two or three tornadoes in his pickup. My sister was eventually plucked from the Ritz where management made her huddle under a chair, likely protected by a decades-built layer of chewed-up Hot Tamales and dried pickle juice.
All this because Mr. Sikes basically freaked. We didn’t have weather apps in my formative years, so we freaked, too. We did have Roy McCoy and the other gallant weathermen on the Amarillo TV stations, and the terror of that screeching emergency signal interrupting the evening news is embedded in my now-aged amygdala. Roy McCoy would patch in the Weather Service guy over a phone line that sounded like it was strung through an asteroid belt. “The National Weather Service (kkcchhh) in Amarillo (kkcchhh) has issued a tornado warning for residents in (kkcchhh) the following locations in the southeastern Texas Panhandle …” Inevitably, just after a final burst of static, we’d hear “Wellington,” and fight and flight would unite in brilliant display.
In the post-World War II decade, the voice of the weather service was H.C. Winburn, and that’s the radio voice my dad and his friend, Blackie Johnson, heard so often growing up in Hedley that they could imitate Winburn’s dire intonations quite well. At some point in the early ’50s, Dad and Blackie cooked up a scheme to get out of school early. They snuck over to Biffle’s Laundry and called the school superintendent from a pay phone. Dad claimed Blackie did the talking, with Dad possibly providing the staticky sound effects. “This is H.C. Winburn with the National Weather Service in Amarillo (kkcchhh). There’s a bad cloud headed straight for Hedley and I’d advise you to (kkcchhh) let school out immediately.”
Within minutes, school buses were lined up out front hauling screaming kids home to their unsuspecting parents. Having pulled it off, Dad and Blackie exited the laundry just as the superintendent was scanning the horizon for the promised twister. All he saw were his two nemeses playing hooky. He knew he’d been had and met the tricksters in the street, dusting their britches all the way back to the schoolhouse with his board of education.
The Winburn Affair was soon forgotten, and nobody counted on me re-telling that story 70-plus years later. But as they’d say back home, it’s too good to keep.
As we step headlong into another round of weather weirdness this spring, may we maintain that irrational fear of nature’s destructive bent but continue to laugh at ourselves when the all-clear sounds. And may all school officials remember to trust their weather apps over anonymous warning calls from Biffle’s Laundry.
