The Tornado of 1963

[smoke665]

April 29th, 1963 I'd just gotten home from school, and was changing clothes to do my chores. It was a clear sunny day, hot for April, there was a slight breeze with some dark clouds building in the west, but no rain or storms. As I got ready to go outside I noticed the clouds seemed to be rolling and tumbling, and there was an oppressive stillness. That's when I saw the funnel cloud approaching less than a mile from our house, from my vantage point it appeared to be headed straight for us. I ran inside got my grandmother into our basement safe room and waited for what seemed eternity, but nothing happened. When we came out to look, we could tell that it wasn't headed toward us, but running parallel with us. I'll never forget standing on our front porch, we had a ringside seat to the carnage. You could see it engulf a tree and seconds later stuff would fly out the top. When it was almost out of view from our vantage point it hit something big and suddenly there was a huge cloud of things flying out the top. Found out later, that it hit the local shoe factory warehouse, the cloud we saw were thousands and thousands of shoes raining down. It scattered shoes for a good mile, afterward, people flocked in from everywhere with buckets, bags, cotton sacks, anything they could grab, picking up shoes. They soon discovered they were all mismatched unfortunately, so they congregated in the local park, dumped their collections on the ground and sorted through for matches. Surprisingly by the time they were done there was less than a pickup load of mismatched shoes. Just about everyone at school was wearing new shoes for weeks after. Fortunately the warehouse was the only building damaged, and there were no injuries, thanks to the freight train that just happened to be coming through, he was blowing his horn like crazy. I found this old negative of all that was left of the warehouse, in a box from my parents, it was pretty bad, so the scan is what it is. I didn't worry with much editing, because I think it sort of adds to scene.

 

[slat]

Where was this?

 

[smoke665]

Where was this?

Missouri bootheel, a little town called Advance.

 

[slat]

I know where that is. Even been there a few times. This unfortunate event happened a little before I come along.

 

[smoke665]

Interesting side note. The women, foreground right are standing on the remains of large packing tables. The same tables employees were advised to shelter under in the event of a tornado.