Fifty years is a long time. Sometimes it’s hard to remember details. Sometimes, as we age, dates drift further into the deep recesses of our memory and the details blur together. Things become indistinct. There are some things we can’t quite remember. There are some things we just can’t forget.
Friday, May 26th
I remember a very hot Friday in May. I had just competed my 9th grade year at Douglas MacArthur Junior High. Graduation was over, and I was free for the summer. I was looking forward to the Country Club pooI Opening. I spent that very, very hot and supremely humid Friday laying sod around a green at the Jonesboro Country Club. If you’ve never laid sod on a hot and humid spring day, then you can not appreciate just how dirty a job that is. There is no shade on that green. I called it Devil’s Island. We worked shirtless and sweated gallons. The dirt from the rolls of sod clung to us as if we had been powder coated with a brown paint. The only upside of the dirt, we thought, was that we didn’t sunburn as badly as we might have had we not been covered in dirt. We worked and sweated eight full hours in the hot sun. Each of us made twelve dollars for the eight hours on Devil’s Island. Gas was $0.32 a gallon and a case of Miller Pony’s was seven dollars. Life was good.
Saturday, May 27th
Saturday was just as hot as Friday. Saturday morning, I discovered that dirt wasn’t nearly as good a sun block as you would have thought. It was a painful morning. Little did I know, it would get worse.
We had pool that was about a year old. There were hedges planted behind the retaining wall at the far side of the pool. We were trying, with little success, to get a privacy hedge to grow behind the retaining wall. Dad had some good topsoil delivered and I spent Saturday using a shovel and a wheel barrow to move the dirt from the driveway to the place where the hedge was. This time, I didn’t have dirt coating to protect me from the blistering sun. Again I sweated buckets, and my sunburn got worse. I had to get all the dirt moved because storms were forecast for that night.
Saturday night mom and dad went to a retirement party for Bob Bradbury. Mr. Bradbury was retiring after years as Assistant Administrator for the Jonesboro School System. Mr. Bradbury was a kind man. In World War Two, he was in the Merchant marine. He served as a helmsman on a freighter dodging torpedoes from Nazi U-boats for two years. Bob and Jane were two of mom and dad’s best friends. The party was at their new home in a subdivision over on Highland, Indian Hills. The Goob, Sweet Pea and I stayed home and watched TV. Since dad wasn’t home we were free to choose something other than ‘All in the Family’. That was dad’s favorite show. About 9:00 or so, I went to my room to read before going to sleep. I was reading a book of Edgar Allen Poe short stories. There was a little lightening off in the distance, toward the south west.
About a half hour or so after midnight, the world changed.
I was awakened by our roof being torn from the house. I ran down the hall along with my sister and my brother. We took refuge in the basement as the storm continued. Once in the basement, we were safe from the storm. It passed just as quickly as it had arrived. The three of us were left in darkened basement with nothing except the sound of dripping water to punctuate our thoughts. We escaped the basement and emerged to a world of broken houses and fallen trees.
Across town at the retirement party, mom and dad had begun driving home when the storm found them. Dad had a 1972 Ford LTD. It was a brick of a car. They were in the car as the storm came through and it casually blew them into a ditch almost as if they were an after thought. We later found that debris from the storm punctured all four tires through the sidewalls. Just like with us, the storm left as quickly as it arrived.
In the darkness and silence following the storm, dad flagged down a policeman. Dad asked the policeman to get mom as close to Birdland as he could, and then dad set off walking to the Hospital. He knew there would be a lot of work to do at the hospital.. We would not see dad again for about a week.
The policeman got mom to the intersection of Caraway and Nettleton. Caraway Plaza, as well as everything else in the area, looked like a war zone. One of our neighbors, Charlie Keller, owned a Pasquallie’s. It was a pizza place on Caraway. Mom found Charlie, and together they climbed over wreckage and waded thigh deep water to make their way back to Birdland. Mom always said that she knew that Sweet Pea, the Goob and I were ok just as soon as she saw the big trees still standing in our front yard.
Sunday, May 28th
I don’t remember much about Sunday. It was cloudy and humid. We spent the day moving swimming trophies and other cherished possessions from the destroyed portion of he house into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. It was the only part of the house that still had walls and a roof. At some point, I found my way to Central Baptist Church and ate something. I planned to spend the night guarding the wreckage of the house, but Judge Clark sent two National Guard soldiers, armed with baseball bats, to our house to guard it for us. I was truly grateful.
Dad contacted a friend who owned the West Park Motel. He got us three hotel rooms. I remembered that years before, we occasionally went to the West Park Motel to swim in the pool. By 1973, the pool was filled in and paved over. There would be no swimming. We lived there for about three weeks until dad bought a house on Country Club Terrace for us to live in while our house in Birdland was rebuilt. It was late when I finally got to the motel and went to sleep. Our rooms were 206, 207 and 208. The Goob and I shared a room.
Monday, May 28th, Memorial Day
I don’t remember a thing about it. Nothing. Nada.
My next distinct memory of that period is about a week later. I found out that the tornado had lifted all the sod I laid on the green at the golf course. That still sticks out in my mind. Almost every school in town was destroyed. Nearly every shopping center was damaged, some absolutely destroyed. Neighborhoods were gutted. Three people had been killed. Hundreds of people were injured or left homeless, and the news that the tornado had pulled up all the sod I had put down on the hottest, sweatiest, dirtiest day of my life just took the wind out of my sails. I drove dad’s golf cart out to the green. With a town in ruins all around me and the sound of distant chainsaws grinding away the solitude of the empty golf course, the sight of the bare dirt around the green nearly brought me to tears.
I still don’t understand why that hit me so hard. Maybe it was just the realization that in a tornado, nothing is safe or maybe it was just the last straw. I don’t know.
All I can say for sure is that to this day, when storms are forecast I don’t sleep.
Some things you can’t forget.
Can’t forget? Screw it. Read my blogs.
Leave a Reply