Memories of The East Grand Rapids Tornado 50 Years Ago

Memories of The East Grand Rapids Tornado 50 Years Ago

Douglas B. Olds (photos and text, all rights reserved)

April 2017

           Date      Magnitude          Start Lat/Log           End Lat/Log               Length       Width    

   1967-04-21          3              42°54'N / 85°46'W    42°57'N / 85°30'W    13.60 mi      400yds 

Fatalities              Injuries                Property Damage            Crop Damage     Affected County

            0              32                             25.0M                                     0                      Kent

--http://www.usa.com/east-grand-rapids-mi-natural-disasters-extremes.htm

Friday, April 21, 1967.  It had been an unusually hot and humid day, and I had stripped down to my t-shirt on the walk home from 2nd grade at Breton Downs Elementary. I stopped and played in the 2x4 and plywood skeletons of houses under construction on the newly cut Whitfield Road--blond architectural bones under a hazy blue sky. One was upon construction moved into by Brian McNamara's family. By dinner time it was stormy, and at 7pm my two younger brothers and I were in our pajamas, sitting on our parents’ bed in an upstairs bedroom (where the only TV was) waiting for the black and white serial “Marshal Dillon” to come on channel 13.  Despite the storm outside, the TV picture was unusually clear for channel 13.

We were eating bowls of ice cream for dessert as the show started. Five minutes in, the storm intensified and I looked out the window to see a wildly bouncing set of branches on the trees outside.  The surroundings had a hue of backlit pea green emanating from the sky. I went back to the show, then the house shuddered by a wall of wind, concussed by the tornado.  I’ll never forget that concussion of air.  Windows started breaking around us, and I hustled my younger brothers to the top of the stairs.  Mike, the four year old, sat down on the upper step and began to cry, so I took his ice cream bowl he had been clutching and set it aside.  

At the bottom of the steps, my 71 year old grandmother from Philadelphia was trying to close the heavy front door that had flown open. She guided us into front hall closet, but I said, “No, Nana, we have to go to the basement.”  I looked through the now flung open door and saw the rage and phosphorescent green hue and now the sound was a high whine like a freight train. 

[Picture: our garage after tornado struck:]

In the basement, our ears popped because of the change in air pressure which made the evening grow silent.  It was dark now, no more the green electric dusk.  We sat in the dark silence for some time until our parents called down to us from above. They had been out at Kent Country Club and rushed home after the police on the phone told them that our street, Tenway Drive, was one of the worst hit streets in East Grand Rapids.

After a bit, my dad and I went outside.  He told me we had to be careful of “looters.” What those people were and what activity they might engage was unknown to me, but I remember that word added to my feeling of being under siege by the environment.

Our half of the street was dark and quiet—no electricity—but we were drawn to bright lights at the bottom of the street where huge fire trucks had set up bright reflectors and shone them onto the damaged houses at the foot of Tenway, on Oxford.  At that corner, I found wrapped in a fireman’s blanket Mrs. Hyla Jacobsen, a kindly older woman--the wife of Arnold who was not in sight.  Her house was unrecognizable, almost completely destroyed. She had survived the collapse of her ceiling by hiding under a heavy dining table.  I went up to her with an 8-year old's directness: “Hi, Mrs. Jacobsen! Did you see it?”


[Hyla and Arnold Jacobsen's house after tornado struck:]

“I did. It was the most beautiful thing you ever seen. Silver and black flakes and all the colors blending in and out…gold, and the sound like music”  Just then, a fireman hustled her away by telling me she was in shock.

“What’s ‘in shock’, Dad?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders.

Kitty-corner to Mrs. Jacobsen’s house was Mara Matthews.’ Her house had no roof.  Her mother had been giving her and her sister a bath when the tornado hit, and the mother had been hit with a flying bathroom door. She was one of the 32 injuries of this magnitude 3 tornado, which theoretically packed a windspeed of 158-206 mph. Thankfully no one was killed.

My family’s detached garage was obliterated by the tornado and my house's siding was partially ripped off so that it appeared like a molted reptile. All this part of the $25 million (equivalent to current $185M) of damage from the tornado. Other sections of East Grand Rapids were also hit.  The tornado had hopped to our street from the southwest and took out our garage, then hopped a bit more to the end of the street, where it knocked a half-dozen houses about. On its hop, it sucked a couple of intervening houses off their foundations, so that you could look into their basements from the front yard. After doing its work at the end of Tenway Drive, it touched down about 8 blocks east to just east of Breton Downs Elementary and did more damage in that portion of town.

Overall, the tornado was one of a warm front that spawned tornadoes beginning at lunch time in Missouri, passing through Illinois and Indiana.  The F3 EGR tornado was part of of a very deep shortwave trough, and it traveled from southwest of Grandville 13-1/2 miles to Ada before giving out. As it "struck the south side of Grand Rapids, 65 buildings were destroyed, and 60 others were badly damaged. 375 buildings sustained minor damage. A church and a K-Mart store were completely destroyed." (Ibid).

The legacy of that day for me was a gradually-abating fear of thunderstorms, as they been the harbinger to the tornado.  By the time I was in college at the University of Michigan, I was chasing my fears by chasing tornado sightings and going up to the top of parking garages to scan the skyline.

I was close to another tornado once, in 1980, when one flew over the pier head in Holland, Michigan, just 300 yards from where I was staying in a cottage in Macatawa Park. It gave that same green hue to the air.

The other take away of that date for me is this: when Channel 13 announces a tornado warning, don’t just dumbly sit there eating ice cream as the windows shatter about you. Take cover in your basement!


[Picture:  our garage]

[Picture 5: Oxford Drive damage]

On the Ignorant and Monstrous Mob

Douglas B. Olds

3 April 2017

People impressed by the ersatz leadership staged on "The Apprentice" or taken in by the fraud that was Trump University might not have the intellectual tools to consistently or even occasionally discern what is fake. The complex of Trump and his political mob is marked by ongoing deceit and monstrous proposals of reactionary moral vendettas: 

• The poor deserve less, while the rich more.  
• The climate is not changing, so let’s revive coal and cancel environmental regulations.  
• The aged and sick can be put on the curb. 
• Progressives aren’t Christians, so let’s show them what these guns we true Christians, "Second Amendment people," wear are all about.  
• Immigrants are terrorists who want to substitute their tribal sharia for the Founding Fathers’ religious nation.  
• Resisters are paid foreign agents and can be ignored--or beaten.

And on it goes.

These are the propaganda that foreign hackers and domestic moral cretins are exploiting to tear this country apart. And at the top of this money-fueled pyramid of deceit and fakery is the Ignoramus in Chief, entrusted with nuclear weapons.

George Orwell in The Prevention of Literature sums up the instability of an age that chooses manipulable emotion over factual truth:

 "Totalitarianism does not offer so much as an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become tolerant or intellectually stable."

And Chris Hedges writes:

"The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater...The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power."

Climate change denial, indeed censoring, is a venue where the self-indulgent and -loathing id conspires to take over our conscience in a conspiracy of lies and propaganda.  These deniers make absurd arguments that liberals who hate economic opportunity and the Chinese are behind climate science. They adopt folk tales of a new earth: that we can trash this one because God can miraculously create the pristine healthily anew with just a word.  Maybe, but folktales do not substitute for the deliberations of science and compassionate conscience. The righteous care more about flooding among the peoples of the Indian Ocean than about Chevron’s balance sheet.

“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”

These techniques and propaganda of the id-driven mob degrades and drowns out the communal and private voice of God that expresses God’s will for justice and communal harmony. They drown out truth.

The Electoral College did not perform its Constitutional function to repudiate an aberrant election of a true danger to civilization and the republic. Not just the man, but his mob fomented by damaged personalities and a decadent elite. It is a mob not only unable to discern fact, it is mob that does not even care if it can or cannot.  Facts, to the slovenly and the brutal--the uncivilized--become manipulable matters solely concerned with control, not genuine deliberation.  

It is a clear conscience based on honesty upon which we must depend to resist the supremacy of the individual and collective id. A conscience guided by the Holy Spirit and the Word is required—a conscience purged of the id’s structures that hate self and hate others. Too often other-directed hatred masks a self-hatred.  To those who do not cleanse their conscience of hate, but instead give full vent to hatred, I say with Bob Coote, “shame on you, God does not speak to or through you. For God’s primary law is Love your neighbor as yourself. Your hatred is a lie.”

Listen to your conscience, listen for God’s voice cloistered from the gibberish of the depraved mob and the electronic world. Listen to the call of God to take a stand for God’s world and justice.

Albert Camus speaks optimistically of inwardness against a dialectically opposed social id:

 In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.

In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.

In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.

I realized, through it all, that…

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back."


It is the individual and collective id of a greedy and fearful mob that foments the culture of nonsense and injustice around us. Our resistance to it enables righteousness, and righteousness can help us create springtime neighborhoods of shalom--where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure. 




[For another, more theoretical, take on this subject, see my "The Politics and Ecclesiology of Nonsense" from October of 2013.]