REPORTER RECOUNTS HIS 'TORNADO STORIES'
By LEROY SIGMAN
Daily Journal Staff Writer
Park Hills, St. Francois Co. MO
April 3, 2006

Most longtime residents of this region have their own "tornado stories" they can tell from personal experience, many of them related to the 1957 twister that tore a swath through Desloge and claimed nine lives.

It was a warm, spring afternoon and I had stopped by to see Ben Zoellner after getting out of school. As we stood in his backyard on Fifth Street in Flat River chatting at about 3:30 p.m., he looked up at a bank of dark clouds that were moving in from the west.

Pointing out the boiling, rolling action on the edge of the clouds, Zoellner said with authority, "Get you butt home right now, Leroy. This is going to be a bad one. Get in the basement and stay there."

When Ben spoke with such authority, you did not stop to debate it. I jumped in my car and headed over Federal Hill toward my Coffman Street home. As I topped the hill where Williams Texaco Station was located, I was awe struck by the sight of the dark clouds rolling obviously toward Desloge but at that time they were nothing more than storm clouds and there was no sign of a twister.

As soon as I pulled the car into the garage, I went into the house and practically dragged my mother to the basement. She was reluctant, but still followed the advice once she heard what Ben had told me.

Once I had Mom safe in the basement, I, like the dummy I was, walked back to our front yard. From that vantage point, though Desloge was blocked from view by the National Chat Dump, I could still see the funnel as it passed through Desloge. There was debris going in every direction in the sky and then, as the twister moved through and out of Cantwell, it became more visible as it had passed from behind the chat dump.

Oddly enough, while there was some slight wind at our house, it was not at all violent but there was an eerie atmosphere. I had seen this before, about 10 years ago when a tornado passed near Bonne Terre. While it was not dark, there was almost a glow. Then, suddenly it got very dark as the clouds pushed over Flat River and with them came a torrential downpour.

Hearing about the tornado, Dad came home from work early and we all loaded into the car and headed for Desloge. We were concerned because we had relatives who lived there at the time. The home of my Uncle Leary Keel on the far north end of North School Street was well out of the path of the twister. Aunt Myrtle Heck had lived on Cantwell Lane, what is now known as East Chestnut Street, but had moved to Florida a few years earlier.

While several homes in the area of her former house were destroyed or heavily damaged and the nearby Desloge High School and Cantwell Elementary School were destroyed, the former Heck residence stood unscathed.

Like many others, I spent the next week - day and night - in Desloge. I spent the nights either patrolling with Ben Zoellner, who was head of the local Civil Defense Police, or manning a checkpoint as all outsiders were banned from the storm-ravaged area. During the days, I joined in the cleanup work that went on for weeks.

Some very touching firsthand accounts of the Desloge tornado and other twisters that have hit the area can be found on the St. Francois County genealogy Web page on the Internet. It can be found at //stfrancois.mogenweb.org/.

Though I watched the twister pass through Desloge on May 21, 1957, that was not the closest I have been to one. It was in 1968 south of the Bootheel community of Qulin that I lived through a twister.

It had been a blustery spring day in the Bootheel with intermittent thunderstorms. It was nearly twilight when I got home and was preparing supper when another storm rolled in. There was some hail and heavy rain but it suddenly got quiet and went from twilight to pitch dark in about 60 seconds.

The walls of the four-room frame house began to huff and puff. I went from room to room and started to open windows - remembering the old-timers' advice that this is what you were supposed to do - but had second thoughts when I realized how hard it was raining.

By the time I got back to the living room and looked out a window, I could not even see a huge oak tree that was barely 20 feet away. The house cracked and popped and the power went out. It seemed like this went on forever, but it was actually only about a minute or two and then it subsided into more heavy rain and hail, but the wind had virtually stopped blowing.

When the storm had passed the sun had already set and it was dark. The clouds blocked any stars and there was no moonlight at all. I had been anxious and even somewhat frightened. As a kid, I had a fear of the wind for some reason. It was probably because of all the tornado stories that I had heard while growing up.

With the storm passed, and at that point I just figured it was an intense thunderstorm, I decided to walk about a quarter mile down the road to the local country store. The power was still out but I knew the woman would still be there since she lived in quarters at the back of the store. I chatted about the storm with her and others who had gathered there, then walked back to the house. It was too dark to see anything off the road.

The next morning as I got up to go to work, I decided to go out behind the house and see if anything had been damaged. That is when I found out how bad the storm had really been.

A barn that had stood about 25 yards from my house was gone. There was nothing there but an open space. The pump house that pulled water from a well about 30 feet from the house was also gone and pump just sitting there - still pumping away.

The huge oak tree in front of the house was still there, but it had been stripped of every leaf that had already come out in the warmth of the early spring. I looked down the road and saw that several other barns were also missing, though every house appeared undamaged.

As I drove into Poplar Bluff to work, I listened to radio news accounts of the storm. Several homes about a mile from mine had been damaged or destroyed. There were no deaths, but several injuries reported. The path of the tornado had been traced right along the road on which I lived at the time.

That was nearly four decades ago, but I still vividly remember how the walls of that house huffed and puffed. And, yes, it did sound like a freight train.... a very BIG freight train.

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