“Two Blocks: a Tornado in Waco, Texas, 1953”

A thread of a tale told to me by my mother.

I don't know what tense to use for this tale -- I am honestly conflicted as to whether to write it in a journalistic style, or with quotation marks as a tale told in a living room,

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which is how I heard it.

On May 11th, 1953, at 4:36 pm, a tornado touched down in Waco, Texas. That is the driving force of the story, an event among many in American history. Any collection of people have a history that includes tragedies and unfortunate events, so

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there will be no shocking twists or novel accentuations; the only reason I am writing about this specific event is my family's personal involvement.

Waco, Texas, in 1953 a good-sized town of about 100,000 people, was incorporated in 1849. Originally spotted as a

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cultivated settlement of the Waco Indians, the rights to the town on the Brazos river in central Texas were negotiated, the Indians moved to what is now Fort Worth, Texas, and the ranchers and industry moved in. The original Dr. pepper manufacturing plant is in Waco

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(now the Dr. Pepper museum).

My maternal grandfather returned from World War 2 to go into business as a mortician. He married a nurse, my grandmother, before he went off to war as a medic. When he returned from Europe, my grandfather went to work for a Funeral Home in

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Waco; the first floor was used as a funeral parlor, offices, viewing rooms and embalming room, and the second and third floors my grandparents rented.

By 1953, all three of my grandparents' children had been born: Bob, age 10 in that year, my mother Susan, 5 years old,

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and my uncle Joe, who was 3. They were upstairs, in Bob's room, playing Chinese checkers, when Bob, the eldest, pointed out the rising winds outside.

The house and Funeral Home were built in a large, solid wood frame, heavily crafted and sturdily Texas weather-proof.

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The building was enormous, taking up an entire city block. The shadows or motion of the big old trees outside the second floor window must have been the stimulating trigger -- the windows were stout, and the house did not sway or creak in storms. As the playing children

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stood to examine the swiftly-mounting storm outside, they had a view from the window -- the entire room was filled with windows, allowing views in all directions -- down Austin Avenue, the road on which the house / business stood.

About half a mile down Austin Avenue, the

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blackest clouds my mother has ever seen, before or since, were ominously settling near the Brazos river, straight down Austin Avenue, in a clear line of sight with the wide-eyed children watching. The coal-black cloud funneled earthward, a dark finger reaching from the sky

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toward the ground, a genuine sign of something terrible and unusual. As the questing cloud touched down, vibrating and swirling clouds of dust and debris began to rise from the cyclone's base, an accompaniment of detritus that surrounded but did not obscure the tornado

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itself. From the first floor, the children heard the urgent shouts of my grandmother, demanding that they come down the stairs, to the first floor, away from the room full of relatively fragile glass. The children complied, and milled about the funeral parlor, waiting

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among the fretting adults.
They were not able to hear the approaching roar of the surprisingly linear tornado. The house was located at 11th street and Austin Avenue; I will now step laterally, away from the children huddle in a funeral parlor, to describe information

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gleaned after the fact. The funnel cloud traveled in a straight line, down Austin Avenue, from the Brazos River to 9th street, and then crossed the street to the other side of Austin Avenue, and went back toward the river before dissipating. Downtown Waco, specifically

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Austin Avenue and the shantytown on the river where the black population lived, were devastated. On that particular May day, a furniture store between 4th and 5th streets on Austin Avenue was having a clearance sale; the five-story building collapsed from the air pressure

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differential, imploding in a pancake style, floor to floor, straight down to the basement. 61 people were inside, at that time of the afternoon, and no one survived. More than half of the day's fatalities were incurred in that one building. About 15 - 20 minutes after

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the storm had passed, bringing with it saturating rains, the first body was brought into the Funeral Home. My mother recalls it thusly: "I was five, so I saw two men coming in, each carrying the end of a sheet; the sheet had blood on it, and there was a heavy lump in it,

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and I knew we were a Funeral Home, so ... I knew it wasn't good." As the men who worked in the Funeral Home began to venture out into the city, to help dig people out of the wreckage, somebody realized there were still three children in the parlor, watching with quiet

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but wide-eyed expressions at the increasing influx of bodies into the parlor. Some employee -- my mother cannot remember who -- took the three children to the home of my great-grandmother, who also lived in Waco, another mile into town, away from the river. They would be

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in my great-grandmother's care for two days: My grandmother went to the Med Surge ward at the hospital, to work straight through the next 48 hours, caring for some of the 597 people injured in the tornado's brief swath of destruction; my grandfather worked through the same

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time period, at first helping to dig out bodies, and then preparing many of the 114 men, women and children killed that afternoon of May 11 for burial.

It was 1953. As the storm approached, and my mother and her brothers went down the stairs, my grandfather and his

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employees were dressed in what was the norm for professionals, at the time, especially in a Funeral Home: dark blue suit, starched white shirts with French cuffs, gleaming cufflinks, and polished black leather shoes. When the men went to dig through the fresh rubble, and

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the skies had just opened up with torrential rains, as if the Earth was in mourning for the destruction, they merely put on rain coats over their garb, replete with fine hats (with plastic rain covers, slipped over the fedoras like shower caps for finery), and immersed

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themselves into the all-too personal horror. All of my life, I have heard that a tornado, close up, has the bone-rattling sonic characteristics of a freight train roaring nearby. The midnight-black shading, however, was a new detail for me, that somehow made the concept

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The tornado survived by my family was the worst in Texas history: 114 killed, 597 wounded; 196 businesses destroyed; 150 homes destroyed, 700 damaged. The tornado turned around two blocks away from erasing my entire family, on my mother's side. Two blocks.

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