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
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:]
[Picture: our garage after tornado struck:]
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:]
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).
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: our garage]
[Picture 5: Oxford Drive damage]
Also, there were reports of collapsed houses with the dinner tables still perfectly set, and boats that landed yards away in a neighbor's backyard.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine and I were at the Shamrock Bar whose former site is occupied by Bridgewater Towers. When I started the car, the radio came on announcing the tornado and horrendous damage it had caused. I immediately drove to EGR to check on my dear friends, Hyla and Arnold Jacobsen The police stopped me on Breton Road next to Lakeside School; I gave them enough information of my intentioins and they let me through. I turned on Englewood. Debris was everywhere and I parked a block away and walked to the house. The center wall remained and the rest of the house was gone. The Jacobsens were not there. I located them later at the home of her brother and was relieved to find them unscathed. The big problem was Arnold's record collection in the basement. He had approximately 200,000 78 RPM records in shelves everwhere all sorted carefully by song title, artist, comploser, and label. Over the next few days, many volunteers came to help move the collection to a warehouse on Grandville Avenue. All of the boxes were marked as to contents and the collection came out in order. Arnold later set up shop in the warehouse to continue his collecting. The family ended up on Eastwood where the collection stayed until Arnold's death in the late 90's. Hyla died in the late 70's and six months later I invited Arnold to dinner. My mother was there and Arnold invited her to the Symphony the next weekend. Within a month the couple were living together and did so for 17 years. The record collection finally ended up at Stanford University's Institute of Recorded Sound whose goal is to have the entire history of sound available and free to everyone via the Internet. It's an important asset to anyone doing historic research. The songs tell what was happening around them from WW1 through the Depression and through WW2 into the late 40's when vinyl long play 33RPM reconds became the vogue. Arnold created a big part of the work at Stanford. It was amazing that the records had lasted at all with war efforts to collect old records and recycle them into instruments of war. They survived an enormous tornado and were moved four times including a trip to Palo Alto on a moving truck. Further, around that time the Olds family bought a house at 222 ElCentro which my parents built and we occupied for many years. I thought this information was appropriate as the tornado sotry postscript.
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